If you’re into diggers, the JCB world headquarters must look a bit like paradise. The factory sits in the rolling green hills of the Staffordshire countryside, bordered by three lakes and its own golf course. As you drive there you pass a giant spider-like sculpture made entirely out of digger claws, and inside the building, stuffed with bright-yellow tractors, there is a JCB museum featuring the first cab to have an in-built kettle. At the end of the tour you can buy JCB scented candles, JCB cut-glass crystal and JCB jumpers from the JCB gift shop.
The most interesting thing JCB stamps its name on, though, is actually round the corner in the tiny village of Rocester. There, in a converted red-brick cotton mill, the JCB Academy for 13- to 18-year-olds is providing a remarkable alternative to Britain’s university–obsessed education system. The school, founded in 2010, is instead focused on developing ‘engineers and business leaders of the future’.
This is the most oversubscribed school in Staffordshire, with three applicants for every place
When I visited last year, the mill was a dense warren of banging metals, welding sparks and heavy machinery. As the school principal showed me round, we stopped to speak to several students. One, Phoebe Williams, stepped out of a welding booth while lifting her visor, and told us that as part of her engineering technician apprenticeship she has been spending one day a week working at the nearby Alton Towers theme park. She will join its engineering department full-time when her apprenticeship finishes.
Another student, Lewis Cuffe, was pulled out of class to speak to us. He said that he had been doing work experience in the business department of JCB after trying out several other departments in the company. The school’s new head girl, Kaitlyn Young, said that she wants to work in healthcare tech and had arranged her own work experience with Siemens. When I was at school, it felt as if I and most students had no idea what we were doing with our lives. Here, all the students appear to have a plan – and even better, a job or apprenticeship already in the making.
This is part of school policy: the academy’s goal is to make sure every student has something lined up before they leave. And while a significant number of school-leavers still go down the traditional university route, a huge part of the academy’s focus is setting up students with degree apprenticeships, regular apprenticeships or jobs in industry. In 2022, around 40 per cent of the school’s Year 13 leavers ended up on the apprenticeship pathway, compared with around 6 per cent of 18-year-olds nationwide.
To give them practical experiences, students are set challenges every year by the likes of BP, Shell, Toyota and the National Grid, which then send representatives to judge the winning entries and presentations. For the Toyota challenge, Year 11 students were asked to build a remote-controlled car from scratch and race it round a track. JCB asked Year 10s to design a crate-lifting attachment for the forklifts in the factory next door, before presenting their project to six directors in the JCB auditorium. National Grid had them tramping through fields to get permission from a pig farmer to build a new electricity pylon. Often the winning groups end up being awarded work experience or mentoring schemes.
The aim of the challenges – along with placements to put on their CVs, interviewing prep and other soft skills – is to get the students used to the world of work. This seems to be paying off. When you visit a high school you expect to get teenagers mumbling at their shoes. Here, all the students I speak to are strikingly professional and articulate.
To better reflect the eight-hour working day, the academy is open for longer hours than most schools. Students get buses in from towns across the Midlands, travelling up to an hour to arrive at the school gates by around 8.15 a.m., with many staying on late to complete projects. You might think this would put teenagers off from applying – but this is the most oversubscribed school in Staffordshire, with three applicants for every place (the academy then selects from a mix of academic abilities).
You can see why students want to study here, given that it is harder to get a top engineering apprenticeship at the likes of Rolls-Royce than a place at Oxbridge. The academy benefits from a welcome feedback loop here. Many of its alumni who have won placements on engineering apprenticeships have made it to senior positions in their companies. Around 500 former students now work at JCB, Rolls-Royce, Toyota, Bentley, Jaguar Land Rover and National Grid, and many keep in touch with their old school.
The school also has a board of trustees made up of executives from JCB and other local large engineering firms, who continually make sure the curriculum is based on what hirers are looking for, rather than on teaching to an exam specification. The challenges, for example, are now more digitally based, so might include building an Arduino robot. The board is keen to develop links with smaller businesses in the area to increase the number of available apprenticeships, as long as the quality can be guaranteed.
The benefits for companies are obvious. By engaging with the school, they are able to pick the best and brightest for their apprenticeships. And by offering advice and training along the way they can ensure their new recruits have the skills they need before their first day of work. You might assume JCB would get first dibs, but senior executives say they have to compete with other companies to hire academy-leavers.
At a time when the UK education system has been too fixated on universities as the be all and end all, it’s refreshing to visit a place where quality apprenticeships aren’t seen as second-best. It’s pointed out to me several times on the tour that while university students will graduate with a huge pile of debt and often no job lined up, those on apprenticeships will have real experience and be in well-paid roles by the time they are 21. Those on degree apprenticeships – which combine working and part-time study – arguably have the best of both worlds, with a degree at the end but no student fees.
This isn’t to say that the traditional university route won’t be a good thing for many students. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that more and more young people are going to university only to make sure they aren’t out-qualified by graduates when they enter the job market. You start to wonder if the state should really be setting so many on the path to university – lumping young people with decades of payments towards their student loan – if they end up in jobs they never really needed a degree for in the first place.
So could the JCB Academy model be adopted nationally as an option for young people who don’t need to go down the degree route? After my tour of the school, I headed over to the JCB headquarters to speak to Lord Bamford, chairman of JCB and the founder of the academy. He’s convinced that schools similar to his could be rolled out across the country, with academies being ‘more attuned’ to the needs of businesses than other schools. It’s clear to him that the Blairite model of university education is not working for everyone, and that schools focusing on apprenticeships and degree apprenticeships could be a way of making sure that masses of young people don’t end up with a pile of unnecessary debt.
I suggest that the West Midlands is uniquely well placed for an apprenticeships-focused school, in that there are several large engineering and manufacturing firms in the area. Could the success of JCB – which relies on input from local businesses – be replicated elsewhere so successfully? Lord Bamford points out that other schools in the same mould wouldn’t necessarily have to be focused on engineering. Instead, they could focus on industries which are established in a particular area, whether that’s tech, manufacturing or even hospitality. The main thing is making sure that businesses are involved from the moment a school is founded.
It is remarkable, however, at a time when the government is scrambling around to find an apprenticeships policy (between visiting the school and writing this article, it’s announced that T-levels, a technical qualification introduced by the Tories only three years ago, are set to be scrapped) is how little interest in the academy the government is showing. When the school was founded, Lord Bamford says, it was without much encouragement from government bodies. At least some of that seems to be down to the fact that the school wasn’t a fashionable cause. ‘We’re slightly different in that we are not in the middle of a city,’ he says. ‘We’re not dealing with a downtrodden school. It was a new academy. But also, we were taking young people who possibly hadn’t really met their potential where they were, and they were mainly boys to begin with.’
Even now, there’s been no sustained interest from government in replicating the school’s success elsewhere, perhaps because ‘we don’t fit the Department for Education model… I think they blow hot and cold on what we’ve done’.
This is a shame. It’s always a challenge to find education policies that work. But here is a school that has form in getting young people into exactly the kind of manufacturing and engineering enterprises the country needs more than ever. The academy points out that Britain currently has a shortfall of around 59,000 engineers every year. They are plugging the gap in Staffordshire – the government should take notice.
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