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Four good reasons why apprentices are good for charities    

My dad was an apprentice, and his indenture papers are among my most important and cherished possessions. Unexpected, perhaps, but every so often I gaze at them, have a read and a think.

His apprenticeship was - and in its own way still is - an important part of my family life and the opportunities and aspirations I grew up with. He died when I was a kid, but to the day he died this master bookbinder, ardent left-winger and union man argued that the rights of passage, equalities and admissions that apprenticeships afforded young people were, and always would be, transformational. If only, he would grumble, we “bloody well invested in them”. 

                 
Twenty-five years later, I am privileged enough to be able to make hiring decisions because of the opportunities I was given. Therefore employing apprentices is fundamental to the culture of BB and to the integrity of the sort of charity I want to work for.  

So I got uppity about “rights of passage” and “choice” when I spoke at a Skills - Third Sector event last week about how apprenticeships can help charities. According to Skills - Third Sector, there are more than 1.5m people working for third sector organisations, but fewer than 8,000 apprenticeships available - crap take-up, in other words. Once again we lag miles behind the private and public sector on skills and training. Yet there are a zillion reasons why charities should employ apprentices, all evidence-based, process-driven and respectable.  

Apprentices improve quality and productivity because, when well-trained, they are enormously skilled employees.  Retention is improved, and you can be sure cost savings on training and development will be made. There is also a growing belief that apprentices make great potential managers of the future, so it easier to make plans for succession. 

And when you hire apprentices, your reputation is enhanced in the eyes of your stakeholders, funders and staff, because you are seen to live the rhetoric on equality and diversity. In summary, apprentices are good business. That’s OK, then.

Well, no, actually - it is not. Hiring apprentices for our sector is surely about obligation, service, social impact, equality of opportunity and the integrity of our mission, as well as economies of scale. According to the most recent Government figures, there are 850,000 young people unemployed in this country. Do we want a return to the wastelands of the 1980s, where a generation of young people got left behind?  Jobless, hopeless, blamed for just about everything and now struggling to look their kids in the eye?  

Apprenticeships transform young people’s lives. They get money in their pocket, aspirations, opportunity, skills, status and a sense of their own self worth – it’s called a job.  

We as a sector have a duty to hire them and hire them now, or we will, I can assure you, meet these young people in the coming years and the story of their rights of passage, and that of their families they are yet to know, will once again shame us all.

We could of course let them all stay at home and watch Tricia. I can I think of worse things!