To The Daily Telegraph
With Brexit, the problem for my structural engineering consultancy business is not the collapse of the construction industry. Far from it, our order book is overflowing. The problem is getting staff. Last year we advertised for civil engineering graduates and attracted 80 applications, only two resident in Britain. The same has been the case this year, with the most interest from very able and yet terminally unemployed fellow Europeans from Italy, Spain and Greece. They are enterprising and eager to work, and, frankly, Brexit without them would make life very difficult for us.
By contrast, the UK crop of youth is much less inspiring and seemingly sleepwalking into non-vocational higher education in the belief that employers will want them. We won’t. For us, the aftermath of Brexit raises serious questions about our education system and how it is failing to get the next British generation working. (M.H. Fisher, managing director, Pure Structures Ltd, Little Hadham, Hertfordshire, UK)

In both the UK and the US the problems are similar – the educational system is so poor that it’s hard to find well- trained local people. I believe that, in the British context, the problem dates back to the idiotic decision to encourage technical colleges and polytechnics to become universities. They then began to teach drama, history and the other arts subjects and watered down their technical offerings. What we should be doing is to have people take a basic BA and then go on to do high quality training at a “polytechnic” (most Germans don’t start serious jobs until their late twenties or beyond). Thus, in theory at least, they would have thinking and reasoning skills, be able to problem solve, but would also have valuable technical skills that companies need. The conversion to “universities” was a chapter in the stupid class war. It was perceived by the class warriors that technical schools were “inferior” to universities such as Bristol or Exeter, so they were “levelled up”. This was a lot of utter nonsense and has set Britain back behind other Western countries. Both types of further education have their place.