Harlow leading the way with Engineering Apprenticeships

Our friend, Robert Halfon, the newly-elected Member of Parliament for Harlow, has drawn our attention to an article in today’s Guardian about Essex County Council’s Engineering Apprenticeship Scheme, where Harlow College is one of the providing institutions, along with Colchester Institute and the Basildon campus of the South Essex College.   Here is the link to the article.

Rob is a great champion of apprenticeships, giving much attention to schemes in the Harlow area.

This is another example of the innovation which has marked Essex County Council in recent years.   Noting that, (under the last Labour Government’s scheme), employers can recoup only training costs and not salaries of new unskilled recruits, and only for those aged 16-18, Essex decided to do something itself to help the situation.  It has decided to pay the salaries of 140 new engineering apprentices itself.

Its reasoning is that there is a huge gap in the provision of technical skills, and that research has shown that engineering training costs more than any other sector, and it takes longer to see a financial return from training someone.  By setting itself up as a training agency, the County Council is undertaking the project with over £600,000 of matched funding from the European Social Fund.

The Council found that most apprenticeships in Essex were in things like hairdressing and motor mechanics.   This scheme, concentrating on engineering, could lead to a real career path into higher paid employment.   Already local companies are seeing the attraction of the project, and are signing up more apprentices, including companies that have never had them before.

As the Guardian says,  “This isn’t just about training for young people, however, it’s also about saving an industry whose ageing workforce means that if skills aren’t passed on, a whole sector’s expertise could be lost.”

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