Whilst Spring is the defining moment of new beginnings and renewal in the natural world, September can often feel like a cultural reset of sorts, at least here in the UK.
The first month in Autumn marks the end of the warmer months and the beginning of the colder. School summer holidays finish and those strangely quiet two months of various holiday-related absences come to a close. With that, comes new beginnings for the majority of those 20 and under as GCSEs, A-levels, Apprenticeships and University Courses start and a new chapter commences.
You may be (rightly) wondering what on earth this has to do with housebuilding. Well, the reality is we have a well documented and rather sizeable workforce issue in the UK construction industry. In fact, Places for People’s 2025 report estimates that 1 million additional construction workers will be needed by 2032. The industry itself is heavily weighted to an older demographic. According to the same study, 35% of the workforce is thought to be over the age of 50, while just 20% are under 30. The journey to this point, and to the figure that 49% of state school pupils from England had started higher education by age 25 in 2022/23, can be well documented in the past 25 years.
Indeed, the amount of accepted UCAS applicants doubled from 1994 to 2020 according to the House of Commons Library. While a segment of this will be owed to college admissions, the long-reaching roots of Blair’s education policy to get young people into higher education can still be felt. University is in itself not a bad thing at all and it’s great that there is the option to specialise in different elements of education. It really can be a wonderful time for young people to carve out their own element of independence and go on to apply vocational skills or methodologies they’ve learned to a vast array of careers in life.
Yet, something has to be said about the emphasis placed on young people to make University the default choice once they’ve finished school. The education sector has bent more and more this way, encouraging this idea of a tier of options, with a degree placed firmly at the top and a manual labour job at the bottom of the pile. Could it be that the position we’re in now is a result of a continuous cultural disdain for the chippies, brickies and muck spreaders that helped build Britain? The first two decades of the 2,000’s saw the likes of Rogue Traders and Cowboy Traders gracing our screens. Whilst dodgy trades are most certainly something to combat and shine a light on, I don’t remember catching Cowboy Bankers or Rogue MPs on daytime TV.
Something has to be done about the workforce problem plaguing the UK. Thankfully there already those out there who are really trying to make a difference and with some support from Government too. T-Levels, for example, are a wonderful newer option that provide a different path to construction. They seem to be a great success too, with colleges like Leeds College of Building, reporting wonderful end of term results that far exceeded predictions made by the Department of Education. To add to that, apprenticeship wages were also increased in last year’s Autumn Budget and organisations like CITB are renewing their effort to get more apprenticeships going in the UK. And yes, while these are brilliant first steps, the real battle has to be won in mindsets. It’s high time a career in construction stopped being put in last place.
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