Every week it seems that we’re taking a hard long look at the youth of today and berating their education. They have ‘the wrong skills for the workplace’, or so goes the line being spun by the Telegraph this week. The ever popular plea is for the enshrinement of vocational courses in the curriculum, despite a trend even further away from such action. The figures to back this up include the fact that just 16 percent of businesses believe that young people have the ‘right practical skills for work’. Frankly, it’s more prejudice than genuinely astute observation.

There can be no doubt that skilled labour is grossly undervalued in Western society. When I was (relatively recently) in secondary education, ‘vocational’ training was what you gave a child who wasn’t turning up to school. This is despite coming from a family with a father who had his name on his own compliment slips. Learning a vocation wasn’t something to be proud of. It was a last ditch attempt at straightening out truants and other troubled kids. This perception is frankly insulting, but that’s exactly how vocational training was and is being used. In reality, young people would have an awful lot to gain by being skilled and self employed. Instead of waiting for the next handout, they could be getting their postcard printing sorted out. Doing this, they’d probably end up dodging years of unfulfilling office work.

But then, the duty of the nation’s schools has never been to offer vocational training that fully equips people for the workplace. My father didn’t learn carpentry in wood work class, though yes, it certainly helped that such basic vocational classes occupied a more privileged position. My father was a student in the traditional sense until only quite a young age. It was a specific business which taught him the skills he built his life upon. But nowadays, apprenticeships are rarer and rare. You’d almost think that Businesses simply hate young people. At a jobs fair, they’ll be barely there, neglecting poster printing if they’ve even bothered to come at all. More and more it seems that Businesses are just utterly oblivious about how to recruit people? There’s definitely room for the blame to be shared.

Tags: employment, politics, uk, youth unemployment