The Great Skills Con: How Britain Trains for Nothing
The colleges are minting credentials, not craftsmen. And the tragedy is that this isn’t their fault. It’s the system’s.
Walk on to almost any building site in Britain today and you’ll hear the same story.
A young lad, maybe gal, turns up from college with a certificate saying he’s (she is) qualified. Polite enough, means well, but can’t mix mortar, hang a door, or wire a socket without help. The paperwork says he’s/she’s a tradesman. Reality says otherwise
My own son’s a general tradesman. He calls them clipboard kids: trained to pass assessments, not to do the job. He and his mates say the same thing, the colleges are minting credentials, not craftsmen. And the tragedy is that this isn’t their fault. It’s the system’s.
Paper over Practice
For thirty years Britain has turned practical training into a bureaucratic enterprise.
We measure qualifications instead of competence, attendance instead of ability. Ministers stand at lecterns boasting about “millions of learners” while the very industries those learners are meant to serve can’t find people who can do the work.
Colleges, quangos, and private training companies all feed from the same trough. They’re paid by the head, not by the outcome. Complete the course, tick the boxes, collect the funding. Whether anyone can actually build, weld, or fix anything is beside the point.
It’s a racket dressed as reform, and everyone in it knows it.
As John McDonough, Managing Director of Recro Consulting, puts it:
“The employability and skills system has lost its way. It’s become about the system itself, not the employers and learners it’s supposed to serve.”
The Bureaucratic Cartel
The DWP, the Department for Education, and a web of agencies have built a self-serving ecosystem that exists to manage “skills provision,” not to deliver skills. They hire consultants to design schemes that other consultants evaluate, while the people who know how to teach the trades are left out entirely.
They call it “capacity building.” What they’ve actually built is a skills bureaucracy, a multi-billion-pound layer of administrators, assessors, and auditors whose main achievement is proving to each other that the system still exists.
The Death of Apprenticeship
It didn’t used to be like this.
A firm would take on a teenager, give them a broom, teach them to use eyes and ears, then put real tools in their hands. By the time they had finished, he was part of the trade, proud of it, earning, learning, belonging.
Now we’ve outsourced all that to bureaucrats. The new apprentice is processed by half a dozen agencies before he ever meets a proper tradesman. The “competence” is judged by forms, not foremen. They end up demoralised, unskilled, and unemployable, another casualty of Britain’s addiction to paperwork.
“Commissioners go to market and it’s all about the process, not the outcomes,” says McDonough. “Policy can’t learn, so it imagines, then tries to impose that imagination on employers.”
Tick-Box Britain
This same mentality runs through every layer of government.
The DWP buys employment programmes that don’t employ anyone, because it values “completion rates” over jobs. Colleges claim success because students finished a course, not because they found work.
We’ve built an economy of appearance, a certificate economy. On paper we’re world-class. On site we can’t build a wall straight.
The Cost
The human cost is obvious: a generation of young people who believe they’re trained but discover too late they’re not. The economic cost is ruinous.
Employers spend millions retraining “qualified” staff. Projects overrun, productivity collapses, and foreign labour fills the gaps.
In construction alone, the skills shortage adds billions to project budgets. Every school, hospital, and housing scheme costs more and takes longer because the talent pipeline has turned into a paperwork trail.
Across all sectors, the UK now spends an estimated £6 billion a year on “skills initiatives” that rarely result in a single sustainable job. It’s industrial-scale inefficiency, and nobody is accountable for it.
McDonough observes:
“Fixing this sits in the ‘too difficult’ box. Politicians aren’t equipped for it, and civil servants avoid it because it’s career-limiting. We need to change how professionals think and behave before they can ever improve outcomes, but turkeys don’t vote for Christmas.”
The Culture of Pretence
No one in authority speaks up because the system protects its own. Colleges need the funding; quangos need the contracts; ministers need the headlines. Everyone has a reason to keep the charade going.
The truth is that Britain doesn’t have a skills shortage. It has a training fraud, a bureaucracy that certifies incompetence and calls it success.
The Vanished Apprenticeship
I served my time the old way, five full years as an apprentice at BSA Guns in Small Heath, back when the place still smelled of oil, metal, and pride. The factory’s changed, the city’s changed, but BSA’s still there in name, a ghost of what once was.
When I started, the skilled men told me straight: “You’ll serve five years, lad, but you won’t really be any good until you’ve done another seven.” I hated to admit it, but they were right. Skill takes time. It takes repetition, mistakes, correction, and pride. You can’t download it from a module or prove it with a certificate.
Golden Apprenticeships
Like Keir Starmer, I trained as a lawyer, though I did it later in life, long after serving my time at BSA Guns and becoming a toolmaker. I know what it means to learn a craft properly, whether that craft is law or metalwork. You can’t train for the law in under five years, and you certainly can’t train a toolmaker in less.
When Starmer spoke recently about bringing back “golden apprenticeships,” I wanted him to push further. I thought he might speak about the grounded, gritty skill his dad had as a toolmaker, the kind of craftsmanship that doesn’t come from theory but from time served.
If Starmer means business, he must strip the money from the middle-men and give it to the firms that actually train. Reward those who teach, not those who administrate. Otherwise his “golden” promise will turn to tin.
Where This Ends
If nothing changes, the next decade will see the same ritual repeated: ministers announcing “trailblazers,” colleges delivering box-ticking courses, industries crying out for real workers, and taxpayers footing the bill.
Britain will keep pretending to train people while importing the skills it no longer knows how to teach. And when the old tradesmen retire, there’ll be no one left to pass the torch, just more paperwork to certify the darkness.
A Line in the Sand
It doesn’t have to be like this.
We can still take training back to the coalface, where real work happens and real standards are set. But it means breaking the monopoly of the bureaucrats and funding the doers, not the deliverers.
As McDonough concludes:
“We’ve spent too long building systems that serve themselves. It’s time to serve the learners, the employers, and the economy, not the administrators.”