Tresham Gregg reports The unacceptable face of the lory Youth Training Scheme Training for capitalism

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Organising youth to fight the Tories THE Youth Training Scheme which the government hopes to launch in September of this year has already received some critical attention from the socialist press in this country.

Very largely this criticism has limited itself to a certain denunciatory rhetoric; a cheap labour scheme designed to undermine union rates and of course a employment furls and the disguise and falsify the real extent of joblessness in the United Kingdom.

Just as these criticisms are, too great an insistence upon the vulgar propaganda activities of the state and its government can obscure more fundamental strategies that the government is pursuing in the field of education, and in the field of reproducing, replenishing and retraining labour itself.

"I am confident that industrialists want to get closer to the teaching professions" is not the banal utterance of a bilious busi• CLASS FIGHTER ULMOO TIGRILA Monthly paper: new issue now out, 10p intact Class Fighter at 21 nessman but a managing director speaking at a recent conference on the YTS scheme organised by the Department of Employment.

For industry to intrude at an early stage and directly shape working class education is a central purpose of both the Youth Training Scheme and its companion, the New Technical and Vocational Education Initiative for 14 to 18 year olds at school. Thatcher's crusade to roll back the creeping socialism of the post-war settlement (as she and her supporters see the Welfare State) is directed as much at the achievements of patrician Tories like Butler and Macmillan as at the anaemic social democrats of the Attlee/Wilson variety.

The imposition of Victorian values demands the repudiation of a generous liberal approach that provides higher education for all who can benefit from it. Instead we have a narrow imparting of practical skills that will fix working class children in their place at the earliest possible moment. * Speaking at a national training exhibition in Birmingham last year the Chairman of the Manpower Services Commission claimed that:

'What we do in the fourteen months before the start of the Youth Training Scheme, in the next two years in the reform of apprenticeships and in the rest of the decade in the provision of adult training and retraining will not only reshape our 80s and 90s but our future prosperity well into the next century.

In an attack on the present apprenticeship system David Young, the MSC Chairman, continued:

•.. how can a system in today's world of rapid change that confines entry to 16 year olds who serve a set term and then achieve craft status, that imposes on employers who wish to recruit apprentices the need to predict skill needs four or five years in advance, do anything else than produce skill shortages in new areas and people overtrained in obsolete skillls."

With less than four months to go before the Scheme becomes fully operational the details of how the government intends to meet the challenge posed by David Young in Birmingham last July are starting to emerge. While the Youth Training Board has responsibility: for overseeing the Programme at national level, the Manpower Services: Commission will be implementing the scheme. The Mortintonit in mintonl and grant approval to individual schemes through local Area Manpower Boards, of which 54 will be set up to cover England, Scotland and Wales.

The MSC hope to have over 400,000 places on the scheme available by September. Of these 100,000 — nearly a quarter - are "good quality" places from the presently running Youth Opportunities Programme (YOP) which is being superseded by YTS. Another 100,000 places are being taken up by companies such as Sainsbury, GEC, London Clearing Banks, the Hairdressers' Association and British Rail.

This leaves the MSC with barely half the places it hopes to offer. Cheap labour though the scheme may be, unskilled workers are of limited value in a recession while there is no extra demnd for their products. Nor are the grants that the MSC will pay out to employers all that attractive.

For employers to take part they need to set themselves up as a manging agency for the scheme and then submit for the approval of their local MSC Area 223 WEN: 44: 884 7 *80:6 192 a AS It:

20 00 0 0 1/10 000100014 Tebbit: out to create a pool of cheap labour job training. Smallet compandes Some companies will merely leaving une on-tne-Joo crawwg - a minimum of 13 weeks in the year - to outside bodies. The training agencies that are expected to rise up to provide this "service" are viewed with some alarm by the teaching unions and are seen by some as an advance raiding party on the state education system.

Wages For each trainee a managing agency will receive £1,950 from the MSC. Out of this they will have to pay the trainee's wages. At present these stand at £25 a week, though unions and employers are permitted to negotiate improvements.

The fees for off-the-job training must also come out of that £1,950. With YOP, Further Education Colleges charged the MSC £22 per hour for the courses they provided. Just before Christmas the MSC managed to negotiate a third reduction to £14.70 per hour on each course Further Education Clearly the direct financial A rather more attractive notion of what the MSC scheme calls 'additionality'. . The idea is that for every three YTS trainees that an agency takes on they will receive a grant of £1,850 for each of two trainees they would have taken on anyway. A number of employers will doubtless be encouraged to come together in one agency to take advantage of this 'additionality'.

But additionality has clearly failed to attract the degree of employer support upon which MSC banked A-JºS Iine, Mol bankea. Ana l tne 300,000 target of employersponsored places (Mode A) is not realised the MSC will be obliged to compensate by raising the number of Mode B places - places provided by local authorities, community and voluntary organisations.

YTS is supposed to be a real training scheme, much more substantial than YOP. But on present evidence it is doubtful that the MSC is able to provide a fundamentally different scheme from the Youth Opportunity Programme (YOP).

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