The government has at last decided to increase the number of doctors in training in the UK. The benefits of this investment will not be felt for a minimum of five years but at least it is a start. Over the past decades, the policy of every government seems to have been to increase the numbers of students going through our university system without any particular thought about the needs of our health service or our economy. In the meantime there has been a lot of huffing and puffing about skills training but frankly we seem to have made very little progress so far.

The problem relates to the things we really value as a society. Look at who is best paid; those who work in the City do well along with professionals working in the commercial sector. Bright young things want to study Law and Accountancy and work in the Commercial and Financial sector. Practical skills in the building trade and in manufacturing are given little status and not a lot of reward. The consequence is an economy skewed to professional and intellectual pursuits and very little towards engineering, IT and “making things happen”.

At a recent dinner, I happened to be sitting next to the Chairman of the Anglo German Chamber of Commerce. Why is Germany so much better at skills training than the UK I asked? He thought it was something to do with humiliating defeats in two world wars. Each time, the people had to literally rebuild their economy and their infrastructure. Engineers and manufacturers were at the heart of this work and they gained financial reward and status in their society for this work. The skilled operatives who worked in manufacturing and trades were trained through apprenticeships and well rewarded for the skills they gained. 

If you think about our history, that’s how it used to be here. The Guilds of the City of London were groups of trades people. The City of London Guilds still have names like Butchers, Chandler and Ropemakers, but now they are honorary clubs for the rich and famous in the City of London. But in the old days they were the powerhouse of the economy.

The origins of Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) was the founding of a Mechanics and Apprentices Library in 1823 and the Mechanics Institute in 1825. There was a need to train new generations of “doers” who would transform our economy and fire the industrial revolution and the growth of the Empire. Somehow down the years we have lost our focus and moved to a more complacent and, let’s face it, professional and class based reward system which has not served our economy so well. No wonder we need to import so much labour into our economy. We simply do not have enough skilled tradesmen and tradeswomen and we depend on Europe and the rest of the world to make up the shortage.

Perhaps all is not lost. At last, the government seems to be taking apprenticeships more seriously, including apprenticeships at degree level which LJMU amongst others is pioneering. As a practice, we are large enough to be subject to the Apprenticeship levy which we can then draw down on to fund our own apprenticeships. Over the years we are proud of the way we have taken young people and trained them to become vital to the success of our practice. A legal practice needs so many different skills now to innovate and provide those excellent service for clients. The fact is that we have concentrated on training our own and it has repaid us many times over.