Setting out to improve apprenticeships

I have sat at the fringes of apprenticeships throughout my career in optics, sitting currently on the Optical Sector Steering Group (a subsidiary committee of the Optical Confederation Joint Education Committee) and being involved with similar organisations on and off since the mid 1990s.

Like the waxing and waning of the popularity of the Ray-Ban Wayfarer, most things in life seem to happen in cycles, and so it has proved with apprenticeships. When I turned 16 in the early 1980s apprenticeships were still all the rage, and where I live north of Liverpool there was a wide variety of apprenticeships for skilled jobs, mainly in the engineering sector and competition was fierce for places at companies like British Aerospace, Pilkington Glass and a variety of local manufacturing and engineering businesses.