School put me off college but it was the right move

“I have close family members who do the same, which had let me see the benefits of doing so from an early age. By the time I was 16 I knew that this was the route I wanted to go down, rather than staying at school or going to uni.”

Despite the certainty and determination, Johnny had to push through a number of roadblocks, including those erected by his school which, he says, seemed desperate to stop him from leaving at the end of S4.

“The school was eager for me to stay on rather than going to college,” he says, “and were quite forward in trying to push me to do so. They wanted me to do anything other than this.”

But Johnny was adamant that his school days were coming to an end, and had already secured a place on a pre-apprenticeship City and Guilds course. No matter how much his teachers argued otherwise, he knew that moving on to the next stage in his life was the right thing to do, even if it didn’t fit in with other people’s advice or expectations.

He had a “very positive” experience in college and was even helped to find the apprenticeship he needed to get started in his chosen trade – although it didn’t quite work out. Working with a bathroom company turned out not to be quite the right fit for Johnny, who is keen to prepare for the future by learning about the green technologies – like air source heat pumps – that will have to replace fossil fuels in the next ten to twenty years.

“My initial apprenticeship was only dealing with a small aspect of the trade,” he says, “and I did not feel that I was getting the experience of being a heating engineer that I would need as my career developed.”

Things are different now. He left his previous company and joined Union Technical, a business focused on retrofitting buildings for improved energy efficiency. They also install technology such as heat pumps.

He spends two weeks at a time ‘on site’ followed by a week in the classroom. As part of the terms of his apprenticeship, he also needs to accumulate enough hours working with gas systems. As Union Technical don’t perform that kind of work, they have formed a collaboration with a company that does to make sure Johnny gets all the different experiences he needs.

“As I went into the third year of my apprenticeship at my previous firm, I had lots of exams coming up and I felt like I hadn’t actually had much modern plumbing experience due to my current job.

“I was struggling to understand what they were talking about at college, having never seen some of the heating systems we were covering in class.

“Since joining Union Technical I have had the opportunity to work on a range of heating and renewable projects which have let me develop my skill set and knowledge base.”

By all accounts, Johnny is exactly the sort of person that 21st Century Scotland needs. He is intelligent, hard-working, and learning how to do what may already be, and will certainly have to become, one of the most critical jobs in the country. In so many ways, this should be what the transition to a green economy looks like.

And yet, there is a strong sense that his success so far has been achieved in spite of the systems and structures in place around education and training, rather than because of them. Having been discouraged from going to college at 16, and then forced to change employer to secure the right skills for his future, he also found that the actual content of the apprenticeship course can feel out of date.

He laughs as he explains the considerable amount of time spent “bashing lead pipes”, and points out that he will “only spent a small period of time on renewables during college hours". This, he says with considerable understatement, “is not really sufficient to build up knowledge".

That’s a problem for apprentices like Johnny but, more and more, it’s also problem for the rest of us.