BCC warns: UK must produce fully trained prospective employees

The inability to produce fully trained prospective employees is the primary problem of the FE sector, according to British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) director general David Frost.

Mr Frost was one of the speakers today at this year’s AELP conference.

In his final years as head of the BCC, Frost stressed that too much focus has been placed on “structures”, with numerous training boards and agencies, and not enough on the “outcomes” – much to the dissatisfaction of the employers.

“From an employer’s perspective, what they want is a system that they understand, qualifications that they understand, language that they understand and having young people that essentially they can then work with to provide a valuable addition to their company and to do that we need a high quality education system which we don’t have,” he told FE News on the sidelines of the conference.

Mr Frost also stressed that the principal of quality above quantity should be applied to Apprenticeships.

“We should be really careful … If we simply attach the branding apprenticeship to every young person that’s on a training programme it would lose credibility and lose it rapidly,” he said.
Using the application of subcontracting as an example of the need for the sector to look to the future, he said: “We’ve got to look at the way the industry and business works. Subcontracting is a natural way forward.”

Pointing to the importance of the flexibility that characterises training providers, he concluded: “We’ve got to have this endless change, we’ve got to have a system of funding, a system of training that employers, training providers and young people understand.”

Apostolos Kostoulas