The industry needs to scale up pockets of good practice on training into a coherent strategy for bringing 16-24-year-olds into the industry, the CIOB’s Michael Brown urged this week at the launch of the CIOB-backed report, No More Lost Generations.
Referring to the report’s suggestions of a high-level industry summit, a revitalised CITB apprenticeship strategy and more efforts to influence careers advice, Brown said: “The report sets out a number of recommendations, but above all it needs imaginative leadership from right across the industry. We cannot continue to work in the way we have in the past.
“As clients, contractors, consultants, professional bodies or not-for-profits, right across the supply chain… we need to recognise that the existing position, the way we have done things in the past, has not worked.”
The report is the outcome of an inquiry set up by Nick Raynsford MP and Lord Richard Best into the glaring gap between the numbers entering construction via apprenticeships and the growing need for skilled workers – to meet rising demand and rebalance the industry’s age profile.
It also sets the shocking decline in apprenticeship starts – down 33% between 2010/11 and 2012/13 to just 13,700 – against the 920,000 16-24-year-olds Not in Education, Employment or Training.
Writing in the report’s foreword, Nick Raynsford MP said: “The five parliamentarians who conducted this inquiry all share the same conviction that it is simply unacceptable to allow this pattern to be repeated. We cannot tolerate continuing mass unemployment among young people in Britain, when there is such scope for increasing training, apprenticeships and employment.”
“As clients, contractors, consultants, professional bodies or not-for-profits, right across the supply chain… we need to recognise that the existing position, the way we have done things in the past, has not worked.”
Michael Brown
At Wednesday night’s launch event, CITB deputy chair Judy Lowe and other senior industry figures, including Peter Jacobs PCIOB and CIOB chief executive Chris Blythe, backed the idea of a Construction Training Summit, modelled on the industry-government Health and Safety Summit of 2001.
Lowe said that it was time to create a “burning platform” – a sense of immediate danger and impending crisis – to galvanise the industry into action, while Blythe suggested that the summit should held in the first half of 2014.
The report, written by Construction Manager’s associate editor Denise Chevin, highlights a number of well-known but hard-to-breach barriers to boosting the number of construction apprenticeships, including employer’s confusion over the grants and support available; relatively low wages starting at just £2.68 an hour; a drop-out rate of more than 30%; and inefficiencies and “postcode lotteries” in contractually driven apprenticeships.
But, as Judy Lowe highlighted, one problem the industry does not have is lack of interest among young people, with 300,000 visiting its online apprenticeship portal bconstructive.com last year.
In addition, there are thought to be at least 50,000 young people studying construction-related courses at FE colleges – but their courses frequently do not lead to CSCS cards, jobs or apprenticeships. Figures from the Skills Funding Agency indicate there were 56,603 enrolled on full-time courses in 2009/10. The courses on offer typically cover traditional trades, ignoring the industry’s changing skills needs.
CITB’s head of education and research, Nick Gooderson, told CM: “I see it on a daily basis – a college will have a workshop full of bricklayers and carpenters, and out of a group of 20, five might be fully-employed apprentices, and the rest are full-time students. So both groups study the same thing, but only the apprentice get the work-based evidence [towards NVQs] and the full-timers end up leaving [the industry] as their qualifications aren’t recognised by employers.”
Gooderson said that the CITB was currently trying to encourage employers to give FE students work experience, and to develop a quick “conversion” qualification to allow them to achieve NVQs.
Other issues highlighted by the report include:
- The industry employs fewer young people, relative to its size, than does the UK economy as a whole. Only about 10% of those employed in construction are aged between 19 and 24.
- Construction has an ageing workforce, with 450,000 expected to retire over the next 10 years.
- The CIOB believes that the industry should be capable of employing at least 75,000 to 100,000 of the one million 16- to 24-year-olds currently unemployed.
- 78% of construction apprentices are at NVQ Level 2, around three times as many as Level 3 – which is seen as the gold standard in apprenticeships.
The report also quotes a 2013 survey of 300 contractors by the CITB which showed that two-fifths were struggling to recruit workers with the right skills, and one in 20 firms said they were at risk of collapsing due to the lack of talent joining the industry. Nearly one in five contractors said that a skills gap had hampered their growth. The survey also revealed that two-thirds of contractors thought there should be more incentives to help them employ young people.
