Apprenticeships

I agree with jen that this is a useful promise. Even if a young person is not "academic" - and remember a GCSE is only a level one or two qualification - we should be aiming for them to come out with the next level, plus training and experience from the course/apprenticeship that they do.

A very useful promise- I am just very cynical about whether they can keep it.

I thought the Labour party promise included to pay for the apprenticeships.

"The policy will involve creating an additional 80,000 places a year by 2020, with half coming from reversing the trend away from young people doing the training courses, and t he remainder part of the party's jobs guarantee policy - paid for by the banker's bonus tax and restricting pensions tax relief for people earning more than £150,000."

All I can say is that starting with Vince Cable(spelling?) they are all over here in Germany seeing how the Germans do it. What they never mention back in the UK are the qualifications required by the person who is teaching the apprentice.
Here they have all had to do a very hard course in tuition and guidance and big firms like BMW have many of these professional teachers.

To be able to take on an apprentice, according to the centuries old law, person has to be a 'Meister'. To become a Master, an apprentice has to work three years as an apprentice and 3 years as a journeyman and then study a further 2 years to become Meister and then he can take on apprentices, but he does not have to teach them but he supervises the teachers. This is in the engineering professions.
For office work and retail they have training systems but still very tightly regulated, and there should be high quality teaching personal.