When I was 16-18 I did a GNVQ in engineering with aerospace options, at a local college it was a last minute thing to get on as I was ‘dumped’ off of my a-levels after the first day apparently the school had over subscribed,so I had to go. I’d been volunteering for a year or so before at OW, so they let me join the course. The problem was the course was supposed to be 5 days a week but was actually 3 and a half and this went down as we went along. The course was run by a couple of ex-raf engineers (2 a/c and 1 fairy) the course did nvq3 as well and was initially set up so FLS could pick the ones they wanted at the end.
It was lacking in a lot of useful hand skills and to be honest I think I picked up as much if not more volunteering at Shuttleworth, when I joined Britannia as an apprentice I was allowed to jump the first year(basic hand skills) and go to play in the hangar, even now 8 years later I’m not as good as I feel I could have been if given a better start at school. But the appo’s we have now are worse on hand skills than when I started, and have a very intensive first year working with Monarch at their training school.
By the way still at OW and still learning.
The root cause of the problem is that the schools either don’t have the time or facilities to teach ‘proper’ hand skills, and I don’t see this is going to change, so getting anyone interested in fixing let alone restoring aircraft, where the money isn’t there, is going to be nigh on impossible. 🙁
I hope I’ll be proved wrong and I’m far too cynical for my age (27) but with a constant threat of all heavy maintenance on ours and other fleets going to less well paid european countries, I can’t see anyone wanting to join this industry, but if everything is outsourced there may be a glut of skilled people looking to light aircraft work in the next 10 years.;)
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