If we focus on the skills issue for a second, it is quite clear that we are oversupplying graduates. Remember the logic that I just talked about, in which we start with business development, which filters through to organisational development, which filters through to workforce development. That is the chain.
There were those who argued that the point of intervention for Government should be in workforce development—in other words, in increasing the supply of graduates. The argument then goes something like this: you create all these graduates and put them into non-graduate workplaces or jobs. They bring all their skills and abilities with them and they start to grow their jobs. In order to accommodate them, employers have to reorganise their organisation, allow them to make inputs and give them a voice, and that somehow pushes firms up the value chain. They have to compete in different areas to accommodate the graduates.
That just has not happened. All that we are seeing is graduates entering non-graduate jobs. The funny thing is that we do not actually know what happens to those graduates in non-graduate jobs.
We are just finishing some research on the effect of graduates on estate agency in Scotland, which has traditionally been a non-graduate job. We have found what we call hybrid workplaces, in which graduates and non-graduates are doing exactly the same job for the same wages. In many cases, employers do not know what the graduates bring. They know intuitively that the graduates should be bright and so on but, beyond that, they do not know what the graduates offer. In some cases, they hire them because they are available rather than because of a real desire to employ them.
Related to that is the fact that we do not know what is happening to the non-graduates. We have completely forgotten that there is a huge swathe of people out there who are non-graduates who are now competing with graduates for jobs. In the future, will they be pushed out of jobs by graduates?
In the middle are the fairly bright working-class kids who in the past would have gone into the trades but who are now being encouraged to go to university. There are no huge skill shortages in Scotland, except in the intermediate areas. I have been doing work in Glasgow with some of the skilled trades, which are crying out for apprentices—good apprentices; the old-style apprentices who would spend three, four or sometimes five years learning a craft.
Those trades cannot find apprentices now, because the kids who would previously have followed that path are being pushed into higher education. As one of my interviewees said, they are learning their skills at the board, not the bench. That means that they are great at doing computer-aided design but they are not skilled in using tools. That is partly because we have been encouraging young people to go into higher education and it is partly because the people who are teaching them have also gone through higher education rather than learning at the bench. There are many skills issues that we need to address in Scotland.
The short answer is that there is a need to rebalance, but if we are to do that, we need to think about how people are taught and the pipeline for apprenticeships. That is a slightly different issue, which links to job quality. We need to think about the people who are coming into apprenticeships, how they are taught and how they link to businesses, because businesses will take apprentices only if there is a business need for them.
In addition, if we want to encourage people to go into further education and apprenticeships rather than higher education, there will have to be good jobs for them to go into. There is no point in redirecting them from higher education to further education and apprenticeships if at the end of it they do not come out with good jobs.