Subsidised Apprenticeship

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22195, 11 September 1937, Page 14

Subsidised Apprenticeship

The full details of the Government's scheme for encouraging the training of youths in skilled trades, announced yesterday by the Hon. P. C. Webb, will not remove the unfavourable impression created by earlier outlines. The scheme is an attempt to solve two problems: first, that of ensuring a more adequate supply of skilled labour and, second, that of bringing into employment those youths who, owing to the economic depression, have passed the normal age of apprenticeship without acquiring any sort of industrial training. In that it amounts to little more than a subsidy on wages it is, of course, merely a palliative and not a permanent solution of either problem. It must therefore be hoped that the Government will not rest content with what is beingdone, but proceed immediately to a thorough inquiry into the apprenticeship system generally and the possibilities of giving more adequate industrial training in the schools. There is obviously something fundamentally amiss with an apprenticeship system which leaves a shortage of apprentices at a time when there is also a shortage of skilled labour. Subsidies on wages may relieve the shortage temporarily in a few trades; but they leave the real problem untouched. In any case, it seems at least doubtful whether the Government's scheme will be a success even as a palliative. As a correspondent pointed out recently, the amount which employers have to find in addition to the subsidy is actually higher than the amounts they have to pay in Canterbury under existing apprenticeship orders. In the first year of an apprenticeship commencing at the age of 18 years the difference is only 2s 6d a week; but in the third year it is as much as 32s 6d. For apprenticeships commencing after 19 years of age the difference is even greater. The possibility is, therefore, that the subsidy scheme wtfl not increase the number of ap-

prenticeships and will not greatly assist youths who have passed the normal age of apprenticeship. ___^___«___————