It’s time to rebuild the apprenticeship system

The nation needs to rebuild the apprenticeship system

The Productivity Commission has sounded the alarm across two generations of Australia’s failing skills training system. This echoes Scott Morrison’s address last week around the need for a post-COVID educated workforce. They are not the first. The causes of the gradual degrading of the status of trades as a life pathway are nationwide, complex and profound, and far too big for blame.

One of the unfortunate causes, and consequences, has been the mass loss of the nurturing relationship between master and apprentice. Apart from parenting, for centuries the guarantee of the master-apprentice relationship, enmeshed in vibrant and honoured institutionalised artisan guilds, lay at the core of how our village raised children into adults, novices into skilled workers, disoriented youths into responsible young men and women. It is a page that has been gradually erased from our social contract.

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For whatever the government comes up with in the bold plan to hit the re-set on skills training, there is a vital dynamic that must not be forgotten: kids are kids, and status is status. Without the rich network of master craftspeople to absorb them, the model of kids leaving the highly structured school context, its class bells, pastoral care and friendship networks, and wandering off to TAFE, has notoriously failed the skills sector in recent years.

With the declined status in the trades pathway, it’s a sad reality that many of the kids who currently leave in year 11 to get a trade — and indeed many who go to TAFE after graduating school — are the ones who could not stand, and were not geared for, the exclusively academic focus of school. They became outsiders shunted into a defeatist narrative, lacking honour in a narrow schooling system that no shows little honour to trades pathways.

David Hastie

Without structure, many have drifted, into and then quickly out of VET, onto the all-day Xbox, and thence into anti-social pathways. In days gone by, the mentor-master would clip the selfish ego of youth, when the novice shows up to work late or hungover, or says something outrageous on a building site. In previous days, the master-apprentice relationship formed a nationwide safety net for the family — it takes a village to raise a child.

Frequently, the master apprentice relationship was literally father to son, as in the case of my own mining and mechanic grandsires. It was a pathway to honour and status for families in a community.

Even if the government’s initiative can turn the structure of skills training around, to rebuild a solid, confident, authoritative and nurturing guild of master tradespeople, it will take a generation, perhaps two. If we start right now, we are talking about 2035, minimum.

Until such time, the immediate and obvious solution to this is to effectively teach trades in school. This entails restoring the honour of the trades direction as a senior school pathway, not a second rate track compared to university entry. The student needs to be able to hold their head high as they train in the skills track, and the skills track needs to become an enviable pathway for students who are headed for university.

VET has been in schools for many years, but only ever as an add-on, not within its own dynamic high status narrative. For status to return, this narrative has to change. One approach has been to nest specific trades into integrated ‘entrepreneurship’ training, as an alternative path to graduation, dynamically connected with a local business ecology.

Partnerships between school communities and higher education and VET providers would develop not just certification, but ‘jobmaking learning ecologies’ which are able to evolve with local business skill needs. The existing models in South Australia and Cessnock have successfully developed training pathways with local industry such as mining, hospitality, IT, tourism and social service.

Internationally, Germany is the envy of the world on the training front. The federal Bundesinstitut für Berufsbildung (BiBB) has established a dual pathway system, into university, or into highly skilled trades. The model lies not only at the heart of student honour, but national honour, with key systemic partnerships between large industries and schools. Students are not only trained at school but are also employed by companies such as Volkswagen and Bosch, while at school. These students lie at the heart of Germany’s hi-tech economy, and they know it.

For Australian students who would otherwise have been throwing spitballs at the ceiling in HSC Standard English, headed to a woeful and self-esteem crushing year 12 result, this is a path to honour, and success in a real world sense. It is learning to not only learn a trade, but also set up a real business.

The key broker between all these relationships, become the familiar school, rather than an unfamiliar third body, such as a separate TAFE system.

There is still a vital place for a strong separate TAFE system, but until such time as the guilds of master craftsperson return guarantee the nurturing space, there needs to be a viable alternative for the immature youth. Student needs to be able to stay in the school footy team, the Duke of Edinburgh program, the structures and the disciplines of schools. Kids are kids, and status is status.

Dr David Hastie is the deputy dean of education at Alphacrucis College.