Where have all the engineering apprentices gone?

The view that many young people who apply to enter the engineering industry as apprentices these days are totally unsuitable for that activity is, unfortunately, no pessimistic exaggeration. In my own experience as Managing Director of an electronic engineering company, I have been forced to abandon the search for promising apprentices during this last year simply because we could not find one out of a large number interviewed who had a basic education sound enough to make him of any use to us. An example of this was their total lack of numeracy; they were not able to do even the simplest mathematical calculations, as for example: