For most people, an apprenticeship starts at 16. It begins after they leave full-time education and will often be the first step they take on the ladder to employment.

But at North Bromsgrove High in Worcestershire, an apprenticeship is something that begins at school.

This September, a cohort of 14-year-old students embarked on a course that blends schoolwork with hands-on training at a local employer. These 12 “pre-apprentices” will spend one half-day every week in a specially designed facility at local engineering firm Adi Group. They will be supported by lessons in school that make sure the skills they learn at work are related back to the curriculum in other subject areas.

The programme is unique: a school has never connected with a business in this way before, according to the founders.

“The pre-apprenticeship programme is something that we conceived between us,” says David Hadley-Pryce, headteacher at North Bromsgrove High. “[We wanted to] give young people who were practical and good with their hands an opportunity to work in a professional engineering environment supported by the school before they got to the stage of doing their GCSEs and making decisions about their future.”

Potential across the curriculum

Having worked with an engineering company in mid Wales in the 1990s, Hadley-Pryce began looking for a partnership with an employer that could offer his students hands-on experience that could be woven into the school’s curriculum.

“Engineering’s the kick-off,” he says. “I would like to see this kind of work happen right across the curriculum. The experience for every school that makes a priority of giving some curriculum time over to a business…is [pupils] actually see more relevance for the curriculum that [they’re] being taught.

“We understand why we’re being taught maths, or why we need to be able to compose written work in English. It does actually motivate right across the curriculum.”

Alan Lusty, chief executive of Adi, says that the first year is laying the foundations for the programme. In September 2017, another 12 students will join. In 2018, it is due to be rolled out to other schools and businesses up and down the country.

‘We’ve got this strange concept that engineers are people with greasy overalls and a monkey wrench’

For Lusty, a pre-apprenticeship at 14 is just the first step. “Our next plan, in 2018, will be to bring in [pre-apprentices] at the age of 11,” he says. “It doesn’t stop at 14. We think we should be going back to nursery.”

Pre-GCSE apprenticeships are not a completely new idea. In 2004, “young apprenticeships” for 14- to 16-year-olds gave school students the opportunity to spend up to two days a week in work. The programme was later scrapped by the coalition government.

The government’s most recent attempt to prepare young people for apprenticeships is the traineeship programme. There are some similarities to be found with the initiative in Bromsgrove: both schemes offer work-based training designed to prepare someone for an apprenticeship. The key difference is that the pre-apprenticeship programme is being offered to younger people, who may still be on the verge of choosing between an academic or vocational pathway.

“In my day, we used to train children at school, [but] a lot of those workshops have disappeared,” Lusty says. “And without a big investment either from the school itself or from the government, [work-based training for schoolchildren] is not going to happen.”

Apprentices on the agenda

Lusty started out as an apprentice himself before setting up his business in 1990. “I went straight into an apprenticeship at the age of 16, that’s my background,” he says. But Adi has struggled to recruit younger apprentices.

“What was evident when speaking to pupils and teachers in that partnership was that the word apprentice is just not on the agenda,” Lusty adds. “It doesn’t get talked about full stop, really.”

Part of solving this problem, Hadley-Pryce believes, is clearing up myths about apprenticeships, especially those in engineering.

“Exposure at a young age opens people’s eyes to what engineering is,” he says. “We’ve got this strange concept in England that engineers are people with greasy overalls and a monkey wrench, and they probably fix cars. We don’t really understand that everything in our environment is engineered and, actually, architectural engineering is a fundamental part of our society.”

The new programme has been designed to shape the students’ views of what engineering is at an earlier stage.

“The key thing that we get from early exposure to a business environment is they start to twig that actually the answer isn’t always going to be ‘Yes’,” says Hadley-Pryce. “We constantly send out young people who have got a great package of GCSEs - but they don’t know how to speak to someone on the telephone or how to host a meeting.

“There are a whole host of employability skills that people who work take for granted, that our young people don’t have.”

@willmartie