The vanishing apprentice

Given the voluntary nature of our further education system, the reported decline in the number of students attending day and block release courses in recent years should generate not surprise, but a feeling of hopeless inevitability. For support for further education is being withdrawn as many parts of industry react to the general economic malaise afflicting Britain by recruiting fewer apprentices and/or insisting on a full week's labour from those traditionally released. It serves to remind us that education plays only a dependent role, the absence or presence of students being determined not by educational policy but by decisions reached within individual firms.