As a professional engineer I take great joy from the occasional opportunities I get to encourage young people to explore, or even take up, engineering. Last month it was a great pleasure to judge the entries and attend the award ceremony for our region’s Primary Engineer competition: a national science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) initiative to encourage primary school age children to think like an engineer, trying to solve problems and improve other peoples’ lives. My fellow judges and I read through, discussed, smiled at and were humbled by the fantastic ideas drawn and described in the 250 best submissions from hundreds of children across our region.
I was very pleased to note that Sixpenny Handley First School was well represented in the best submissions! Our children were thinking up and setting out their ideas for a better future: I hope the families and friends were as inspired as I was. I left feeling uplifted and confident that the future will be better in these young hands as they mature.
Much of the conversation between the judges was about the challenges of skills training, the availability of good apprenticeships and the sharp reductions we have seen in vocational training places over the last ten years. All the judges were drawn from major engineering companies, all with substantial early careers programmes: yet there is clearly a big gap between supply and demand.
Last month’s government spending review announcement, and subsequent industrial strategy, set out spending plans for skills training and apprenticeships, but little specific detail.
Total apprenticeships fell 40 per cent over the decade, from a high in 2011. The new spending plan will only take investment back to 2014 levels.
The details are promised in the post-16 education and skills strategy before parliament disappears for the summer on 22 July. Given the government’s frustrating foot-shooting as it flounders desperately to dig out of the winter fuel and personal independence payment hole of its own making, I am not sure we will see this important piece of growth-related policy before next term starts.
The reason I get so excited about skills and training is that every pound spent in the early years is well spent for the long term.
Sure Start, childcare, education, skills are all investments in long-term growth, good health and happiness in later life. Skimping on these in the past has been penny-wise-and-pound-foolish. Just before Covid struck, the skills budget reached its lowest point. We know the damage Covid did to education and young people’s mental health, yet the previous government refused to take its own experts’ advice on how much it would take to recover educational lost ground after the crisis.
If the current government is serious about sustainable growth, it needs to look harder at the areas where it will make the greatest difference. Skills, knowledge and our young people’s future is one of those no-regrets choices.
Gary Jackson
North Dorset Liberal Democrats
