‘Steady on!” says John Hitchcock, managing director of Savile Row tailors Anderson & Sheppard, as his apprentice for the day – that’s me – takes his inside leg measurement just a little too forcefully.

“Usually, we’re a little gentler with our customers,” adds Prince Charles’s tailor, his eyes watering.

After watching Mr Hitchcock make me a pair of trousers in the morning, I did the same for him in the afternoon. Setting aside the unfortunate incident with the measuring tape, the day went well. Mr Hitchcock, as we apprentices are honoured to call him, watched closely as I cut, pressed and sewed, so little could go wrong. All the same, I was pleased when he declared my finished work satisfactory. Indeed, he even promised to wear the trousers I had made him.

On such experiences is a great apprenticeship traditionally based. After all, Mr Hitchcock learned from Mr Bryant, and Mr Bryant learned from the founder, Mr Anderson.

A few days later, as apprentice to a plumber, I did a safety check for gas leaks, helped to solder pipework and ripped an old bathroom from a cottage in Hertford-shire. In doing so, I inadvertently drenched the site foreman – during an apprenticeship that lasted just one day, I could hardly be expected to get everything right.

Every bit helps, because Britain has never had such a dire shortage of skilled workers – and the government believes apprentices are the answer. It wants to guarantee apprenticeships to every qualified school-leaver who wants one by 2013; and by 2020, it intends that half a million apprentices should be in training each year. Last week two ministers and the head of the civil service announced with some fanfare that Whitehall would itself take on apprentices. On paper, this all seems splendid and sensible.

But hang on: is the government doing too little, too late? Professors Alison Fuller of Southampton University and Lorna Unwin of the Institute for Education certainly have some doubts. In a new report funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, they say that the much-ballyhooed apprenticeships may have become just another scheme for meeting bureaucratic targets.

Government-approved schemes will prove too narrow, they say, if they fail to give apprentices the chance to study as well as to work. Meanwhile, almost a third of today’s “official” apprentices drop out before finishing their training.

Does this matter? Unlike terrorism, MRSA and economic meltdown, Britain’s skills shortage does not make the heart pound and the eyeballs swell, but just consider how, over recent years, we have methodically rendered ourselves incapable as a nation.

Since the 1980s many once-thriving industries have off-loaded their work overseas. As a result, few young people in Britain have the skills that were once taken for granted. Tailoring, as carried out at Anderson & Sheppard, is a special case; most of the rag trade has vanished. And one of the last British potteries, Spode, recently moved its manufacturing to China.

Some jobs can’t be exported: even the best plumber in India is no use if your lavatory happens to leak in Britain. However, many UK-based skilled manual jobs have been filled in recent years by a million or so Poles and other “new” Europeans. Now a lot of them are returning home. Can Brits fill the gap? Not necessarily, because rather than encourage people into vocational learning, the government has spent a decade promoting university education – promising that graduates can expect to earn far more if armed with a degree.

Which turns out – big surprise – to be an exaggeration. Many graduates, after a decade in work, aren’t yet earning £15,000 a year. As one of them complains: “If I could go back to when I was a teen, I would almost definitely do a trade. I have a degree, but one of my biggest regrets is never doing a trade – my brother’s a sparks [electrician] and rakes it in.”

Leaving graduates aside, Britain has more 15-to 19-year-olds out of work – or not receiving education – than almost any developed nation: we come 24th of 28 countries.

From the employers’ viewpoint, the case for apprenticeships is compelling. Three quarters say apprentices improve their company’s productivity, while 60% agree that training apprentices through govern-ment-approved schemes is cheaper than hiring skilled staff. This does not entirely reassure Anderson & Sheppard, whose co-chairman, Anda Rowland, worries that her apprentices may be snapped up by rivals who don’t put themselves to the trouble of enrolling in the government-approved scheme.

So much for the “official” route. Shortly after my stint with the tailors, I persuaded Keith Read, my own plumber, to give me a strictly unofficial apprenticeship.

When Read trained as a plumber in the early 1970s, companies were subsidised to train apprentices, but lost that financial support as soon as apprentices qualified. The perverse result was that apprentices were sacked on qualifying. “It’s a miracle that anyone got trained up at all,” he says. Soon afterwards, apprenticeships in plumbing dried up entirely.

“We were encouraged to go self-employed,” he explains, “and when you’re self-employed, you can’t afford to train people.” Nevertheless, he’s taken on several individuals over the years through ad hoc, informal apprenticeships – including his son Frank and now his grandson Dean, aged just 14, who was kicked out of school a year ago for persistent bad behaviour.

“If I wasn’t doing this, I’d be on the street,” Dean tells me. “I’d be a bum before I’m 16. Most of my mates have been kicked out, too. They’d like to do well but they don’t get a second chance.”

“You get loads of disruptive kids like Dean,” says Read, “who are never going to go to university. They should be doing a couple of days’ work each week to keep them interested at school – put them into a job so they can have some time with grown men they can look up to.”

If this gives the impression that Read is some kind of softy, it’s worth adding that when Dean fluffs the gas safety check, his grandfather calls him a berk; and in time-honoured fashion, he plays practical jokes on his “apprentice” – such as sending Dean to hardware shops to buy elbow grease.

Read has been able to take on his grandson only because officials proved wise enough to disregard regulations. It’s all most unorthodox, of course.

However, even if Dean never features in the government apprenticeship statistics, at least he’ll be able to fix a leaky pipe when the last Polish plumber has gone home.

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