I once had
a friend, who, sadly, died only a year after retirement. He was a superb
craftsman and ran a small boat building and repairing business in Brittany. He
was able to shape wood or fibreglass so that every part looked perfect - a true
professional. He told me more than once that he was able to assess every young recruit
within a few days of them starting work and tell whether they were gifted for
manual work or not. With those who passed muster he was generous with his time
and advice, but he was also quick to discourage those he felt would never find
fulfilment in manual work. Most of the youngsters he encouraged stayed on in
the business and one even went on to set up a similar company in another part
of Brittany. Without realising it, they had been given an excellent start to their
career by benefiting from the shrewd assessment and generous mentoring of an
experienced professional at just the right time.
All this comes
back into memory as I listen to the endless debates about President Macron’s
promised and much needed reform of France’s byzantine system of vocational
training, apprenticeships and unemployment insurance. It has long been a mantra
of politicians that France needs to reform its vocational training system to
bring down high employment, especially youth unemployment, by giving young people
the skills they need to get a job or retrain those whose job has been lost. It sounds simple but, like most things in an advanced industrial economy,
and particularly in France, it isn’t.
Take the school
system to start with. Not so many years go, kids who did not do well in school
were weeded out early and ended up in unskilled jobs on a farm, in a factory or
in a shop. Soon after I first came to France, over 40 years ago, I did a stint
of teaching at a “collège” (for kids up to the age of about 16) in a small provincial
town. At the end of their compulsory schooling, pupils, especially girls, who
were not considered academic were told, pretty dismissively after the final
class assessment, that they would do better to leave school and look for a job.
At the time, jobs were more easily found – even for the unqualified. Today most
jobs require minimum levels of competence to work with modern technological
tools. Recognising this, the monolithic Education
Nationale has, over the years, introduced alternative paths to the baccalauréat, (high school leaving exam)
for those whose academic performance has not been stellar. Pupils who are not deemed
academic enough to do a general baccalauréat
(in maths and science, literature or social studies) are directed towards these
alternative, vocationally oriented, courses, supposed to equip them with the
skills required for the jobs market or some form of higher education. And yet it
is still the case, despite the huge changes that have taken place in society
and the economy that those who are not considered “academic” at school still
carry a stigma of failure as they take up these alternative baccalauréats, widely considered as second
best solutions for the ungifted. The system does ensure that 80% of any given
age group pass some form of baccalauréat.
However, many consider that vocational subjects suffer from teaching that is overly
academic, an inadequate level of out-dated resources, little regard for
employability and are therefore ill matched to the skills required for the labour
market. But then schools and those who run them have always defended the view
that their primary task is to educate pupils to be well-rounded citizens, and
not be too distracted from this noble mission by designing and delivering training
for commerce or industry.
In contrast
to all this, it should not be forgotten that France boasts a number of very selective but world-class
higher institutes of learning and training. For those who do well in high school,
elite engineering and business academies beckon, opening up prospects of responsible
and highly paid jobs all over the world. Graduates from the famous Polytechnique and the elite engineering
schools (Ecole des Mines and Ecole de Ponts et Chaussées) for
instance, or top business schools, are among the best and the brightest anywhere.
But the impact on society, as a famous French journalist, Pierre Viansson-Ponté,
wrote many years ago, is that “France chooses its future elites on the basis of
their excellence in mathematics”. It was only a slight exaggeration at the time
and not much has changed since.
In other
words, the French education and training system works well, even very well, for
the select few who are able to meet such exacting requirements. It works a lot
less well for many others with different talents that are not always identified
and nurtured at school. If high school students pass any baccalauréat, they can claim, without further ado, a place at a
state-run university charging no tuition fees, regardless of their school
record or job prospects. They roundly reject any attempt at “selection “, because university is seen
as the default choice for further training, even though only about 50% succeed
in their first undergraduate year.
This state
of affairs is exactly what Macron’s bold attempt at reform is supposed to remedy:
change attitudes towards apprenticeships and vocational training; identify areas
that require skills and ensure that relevant training courses are on offer to
provide them; identify pupils who are likely to benefit from such opportunities,
even if they have a patchy school record; retrain employees who need to upgrade
their skills or learn new ones, paid for in many cases by their “individual training
account”, a welcome innovation introduced by a previous government three years
ago.
And it is
not as if the money to fund such an effort is not there, not to speak of the
savings that could be made if more of those who are entitled to claim a place
at university decided to opt for more promising avenues towards employment. All companies are required by law to pay contributions
towards training and there are plenty of central and local government bodies
that are supposed to dispense and oversee it. The trouble is that the whole system
has become mired in bureaucracy, content, like most bureaucracies, to observe
the letter of the law rather than its spirit. Money is directed towards training
by numerous committees made up of employers, trade unions and civil servants. Vocational
training for adults is doled out by over 65 000 registered providers. There is precious
little individual counselling and practically no evaluation of what works and
what doesn’t. The input of individual businesses, when it is requested, tends to
be cancelled out by the dead hand of the Education
Nationale. The unqualified and long-term unemployed vegetate on the
sidelines.
President Macron’s
purported reforms, now being discussed with all the parties involved, sound
promising, but a lot will depend on how they are presented and if the
inevitable resistances can be overcome. And there will be plenty of resistance on
the part of the many and various bodies that hold the power and the purse
strings in the current system. Three years ago for instance, as part of a regional
reform programme, regional authorities were given, on paper, the responsibility
for vocational training in order to bring it closer to local employment
requirements. Since then, bureaucratic confusion and infighting has ensued and
above all, the Education Nationale is
quietly resisting any attempt to take training for the young out of its remit.
While there is a lot to be said for the idea of giving all children a well-rounded
education and preparing them for citizenship, there is surely the need, in a country
with one of the highest unemployment rates in the EU, for a new balance to be struck,
so that attractive and promising vocational training opportunities can be
brought to those whose talents are suited to them, young and less young. After
all, a fulfilling job also makes for happier employees, more stable families
and a better society in general.
Whatever
new arrangements are eventually put in place, they will of course be light
years away from the simple but effective method instinctively applied by my deceased
friend in Brittany. But there are nevertheless small, everyday signs of hope
that the deep culture may be changing. The other day, in the garage to which I
had taken my car for servicing, I spotted a youngster working on a car engine. “Got
an apprentice?” I asked the owner. “Yes”, he said, “he’s on a vocational training
course, one week here, one week in school, doing well, likes the job. Nice to
see a youngster like that getting stuck in.”
France
certainly needs a lot more of them.