What Should We Do with the ITBs?: Meeting manpower, training, and consultancy needs in a new national system

What's Happening? The industrial training boards, as organised at present, are an example of that peculiarly British trait of thinking of a good idea and then modifying it in the interests of “pragmatism” and “individual freedom” so that it becomes ineffective. As a nation we seem to believe that a collection of tactical initiatives added together equal a total strategy. They do not. As conceived, ITBs were intended to ensure an adequate supply of trained personnel at all levels of British industry, to secure an improvement in the standard of industrial training and to share the cost of training more equitably amongst firms. In other words, they were meant to make a very direct contribution to industrial efficiency and economic growth.