James Kirkup James Kirkup

State schools and the rise of posh apprenticeships

(Photo: iStock)

Recently, a friend forwarded me a letter he’d received from his children’s school, an independent secondary in London, to mark National Apprenticeships Week. The letter set out to parents everything the school was doing to provide children with information, options and contacts to explore apprenticeships, either in combination with or as an alternative to a university degree.

The school isn’t household-name famous, but it’s still prestigious, exclusive and, yes, expensive: a year’s fees cost something close to the national average full-time salary. My guess would be that the vast majority of the parents who can cover such fees are themselves university graduates: a degree tends to be a minimum requirement for the jobs (mainly in financial services) that allow you to opt for private education in the capital.

And the school for which those degree-holding parents are paying tens of thousands of pounds a year to educate their kids is quite enthusiastically working to help give those kids options that include not going to university. Those parents seem very happy about this too: the friend who shared that letter wasn’t aggrieved but pleased. I’ve heard similar tales from elsewhere in the independent school sector, of parents positively urging their little darlings to consider apprenticeships – and demanding schools help with that.

This isn’t a wholly new story: tales of the (upper) middle-class conquest of apprenticeships have been doing the rounds in education circles for a few years, sometimes prompting a bit of soul-searching. After all, if the sharp-elbowed set capture all the good apprenticeships (the ones at famous engineering and professional services firms, for instance), then what becomes of the striving poor kids who might otherwise have benefited from those schemes?

To which my answer is generally: this is a good problem to have. If higher-grade apprenticeships are so good that that the smart, posh folk want them, that means they’re really working.

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