A ROCK school for wannabe roadies and tour managers and a nuclear college for new recruits into the energy industry will be among the first National Skills Academies.

Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, announced yesterday that three skills academies would open their doors before the end of the year, focusing on manufacturing, construction and financial services.

The academies, which will provide vocational training for school leavers and adults, will be followed by a second wave that will prepare students for jobs in the nuclear industry, the performing arts and the chemical and hospitality sectors.

All will be joint projects with employers, who will design courses around the needs of their own sectors. Britain has 9 million skilled jobs, but by 2020 it is estimated that there will be 14 million. At the same time, the number of unskilled jobs is predicted to fall from 3.5 million to 600,000.

Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, said yesterday that the skills academies offered young people alternative routes to employment. “What our educational system been good at is providing an academic system. We have not been good at providing for those people who say they want to do something different,” he said.

The prototype, Sir Philip Green’s Fashion Retail Academy, opened its doors last year.

Mr Johnson said that the nuclear industry, which employs 40,000 people, desperately needed a new generation trained recruits to help with the decommissioning of Britain’s nuclear power stations He said that even if no new nuclear power stations were commissioned, the country needed more workers in the industry. “There is a feeling in the industry that we have lost some of our skills in this area.”

Most of Britain’s 28 civil nuclear sites, which include power plants and reprocessing plants, are nearing the end of their active life and are expected to close by 2022.

The nuclear skills academy, which will work through local colleges near nuclear sites, will train workers for decommissioning and clean-up activities, and possibly in epidemiology and radiation biology, which will be crucial in monitoring the effects of radiation.

A spokesman for the Nuclear Industry Association said that a growing demand for clean energy and renewed interest in nuclear power meant that more young people were wanting to come into the industry.

One of the driving forces of the creative and cultural skills academy, Feargal Sharkey, the pop musician, said that there was an acute shortage of behind-the-scenes technicians in the perfomring arts.

The Undertones singer said that he knew of a pop group that had recently sold two million records but was unable to break the market in the United States because they ha been unable to find a competent tour manager. “You need a special sort of project manager, who can take 60 people and several tons of equipment to a foreign country for 1½ years, but (they) cannot find one.”

Sharkey said that a lack of skills had meant that British companies were missing out on the demand in China for pop acts, and light shows for rock concerts and shopping malls The new creative and cultural academy, he said, would cater equally for people wanting to stage a Guns ’n’ Roses tour or to mount a Verdi opera at the Royal Abert Hall.

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