Apprenticeships in Britain plainly have not worked
POLITICIANS faced by persistent social problems often dream of reviving old institutions. Youth unemployment in Britain recently passed 1m. No surprise, then, that historical solutions are being proposed for the UK’s present day problems with youth training. Politicians of all stripes believe that increasing access to apprenticeships will turn those young people not in employment, education or training into industrious young workers. The government is even considering reviving the role of London’s livery companies, the city’s ancient guilds of craftsmen, to improve the status of apprenticeships.
But apprenticeship in old London town was not as appealing as many imagine. Our recent research on apprenticeship in seventeenth and eighteenth century London shows that on-the-job training was often far less successful than stories of Dick Whittington’s extraordinary ascent through hard graft and luck from poverty, to become Lord Mayor of London in the 1390s, suggests. Dick was not even an apprentice.
Apprenticeship within the livery companies offers cold comfort for modern Britain’s ills. It was unstable. Around half of apprentices in the 1600s left their employer before finishing their contract, a failure rate that would today lead a school or university to be shut down. It was expensive. Children from poor families could afford places to train in manual crafts such as tailoring and carpentry. But masters demanded hundreds of pounds for accepting an apprentice who wanted to become a merchant or professional. And it was inefficient. Regulations meant that apprenticeships dragged on for at least seven years. Once training was liberalised in the nineteenth century, terms fell quickly and completion rates went up.
Apprenticeship was certainly important in pre-industrial Britain. It was the main way in which youths acquired skills. Around one in ten English teenage males started an apprenticeship in London in 1700. But it is easy to forget that they had little choice. Elizabethan laws meant that a seven-year apprenticeship was in theory required to work in most jobs outside of farming. This was an idea that was borrowed from London’s Livery Companies, which had been controlling apprenticeship in the city for centuries. And the Livery Companies’ main interest was not improving quality, but in limiting numbers to keep their members’ earnings up.
After last summer’s riots, David Cameron renewed his call for young people to be given worthwhile employment and training. But he should take heed. London’s apprentices were a troublesome bunch. In 1517, apprentices led riots against foreigners in London. Thirteen were later executed for treason. Apprentices rioting in the 1640s even helped eject the King, and in 1647 apprentices briefly took control of the Houses of Parliament and purged it of politicians who were ignoring their demands for an extra holiday.
Britain’s historic apprenticeship system, with its combination of national laws and local guilds, offers a warning against the dangers of regulation, no matter how well-intentioned. Apprenticeship in the past worked in spite of the guilds, not because of them, as youths and their families worked out deals that allowed them to overcome the restrictiveness of training regulations. The government is right to try and find ways to get more young people into work and training that has real value. But apprenticeships and guilds are not the panacea that the government thinks.
Dr Chris Minns and Dr Patrick Wallis are lecturers at the London School of Economics.