All Red Wall voters want is apprenticeships – but they aren’t happening

One of the best ways to start a row in a pub – alongside asking how to avoid the A565 bypass – is to express an opinion about the number of young people who go to university “these days”.

It’s perfectly divisive material. Everyone has a view, and many of the drinkers you engage will instinctively take a strident position. There is little space for nuance.

Once the debate has really got going, someone will almost certainly suggest that what “most kids need” is not to go to university at all – but to instead do “something like an apprenticeship”.

It is easy to patronise the “wisdom of the pub,” but there is often a lot more real-life insight present than can be found in the average Twitter exchange – assuming you can see beyond the hyperbole.

Certainly, the government would agree, at least on this subject. For a good while now, ministers have been keen to push to rebalance the relationship between university education and vocational training.

Since Brexit cut off the flow of cheap labour that filled the UK’s enormous skills gap, there has been a pressing need to channel more British teenagers into further education colleges.

After the totemic 2019 election, this drive gained even more urgency with Conservative politicians convinced that their most important electoral was found among skilled lower middle class voters in towns rather than upper middle class grads in cities.

Less cynically, the idea of encouraging young people to take up skilled trades – and specifically apprenticeships – in sectors with a big future (such as those associated with the drive to net zero) have quickly become a cornerstone of “levelling up” policy. Earning while you learn, avoiding tuition fees in the process, fits with this narrative too.

Ministers believe that – taken together – this is both the right thing to do for the economy in “left behind places” and likely to be supported in their new Red Wall constituencies.

These instincts appear to be correct. Public First, where I am a director, has just released a poll that gets under the skin of what voters think about levelling up – and shows the full extent of support for the idea of drastically accelerating the flow of apprenticeships.

When asked which policies would best help the university and training sector to “level up” their areas, 56 per cent of Conservative voters picked apprenticeships as their most favoured option, as opposed to 38 per cent of Labour voters. This number climbs in the areas outside London, and perhaps most interestingly, was highest (61 per cent) among those identified as Tory-waverers.

Focus groups I have run with Red Wall voters tell the same story. Time and again I have been told that apprenticeships are the “gold standard” – and that they are easily as valuable as a degree.

It is beyond question that they are overwhelmingly popular – and that they tick many of the policy boxes that the Tories need to check.

But there is one big problem. These apprenticeships – at least as they are probably conceived by most ordinary voters – really aren’t happening.

The picture is stark. Despite several high profile policy interventions, there simply hasn’t been a ramping up of apprenticeships since the 2010 election that ushered in David Cameron. And among school leavers, who voters associate with apprenticeships, the numbers are actually going backwards.

Some £1.6bn of taxpayers money was spent on the apprenticeships programme in 2017-18 and yet between 2015/16 and 2017/18 there was a drop of more than 20 per cent of 16-24-year-olds starting apprenticeships. One cannot fault the government for trying but to this point it has struggled badly.

Speaking Wednesday, Michelle Donelan, minister for universities, will demand that the higher education sector steps in and does everything in its power to increase “degree-level apprenticeships” – but the truth is that that would not be enough. Employers must be incentivised to develop and then offer them, and young people will need to be encouraged to take them up. (Interestingly, our polling found that enthusiasm for the idea was weakest among young voters.)

The Conservative government has a lot riding on this and, despite its track record, continues to build expectations – and as our polling and focus groups show, new voters are ready to buy what they are trying to sell.

But as recent years have shown us, success is far from guaranteed. Fail, and there’s a significant chance that more than a few pub-goers in the Red Wall will begin to wonder who – or what – they voted for.

Ed Dorrell is director at Public First