‘Mum, can I drop out of school and get a job?” Parents of teenagers, especially boys, will be used to this question and adept at trotting out the stock middle-class response: “ ’Fraid not, your prospects will be better after you’ve been to university.”

But are they right? After years of being a dirty word, apprenticeships – a chance to learn on the job and get paid – are in the ascendant again. Gordon Brown is driving forward a massive expansion, up from about 100,000 apprenticeships to 400,000 by 2020, backed by names such as Alan Sugar, Gary Rhodes and Alex Ferguson. Some of the companies offering them are quite glittery – including the BBC, Rolls-Royce and the Royal Shakespeare Company.

“We expect one in five of all young people will undertake an apprenticeship in the next decade,” said a government spokesperson.

But are they really a safe bet? What do some of the youngsters who have spurned university for this brave new world really think about them?

Middle-class parents have traditionally dismissed apprenticeships as a deadend option for other people’s children, but in some sectors they may be worth at least a second look.

Take Neil Crewdson who left school in Cumbria with 10 good GCSEs. “When I was 16 I didn’t want to carry on in school,” he explains. “I wanted to be able to buy a car.”

So he joined the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant on a four-year engineering apprenticeship and a weekly wage of about £70. As a teenager still living at home with his parents, he says he felt “minted”. Now aged 28, he’s worked his way up to project manager at the plant, earning £50,000 a year. En route his employers sponsored him to take two university degrees, one in engineering, the second in project management.

Crewdson’s future looks bright, especially with the boom in the nuclear industry. He’s on a career path that would make many of his contemporaries, still saddled with degree debts, weep with envy.

But there are plenty of horror stories out there too. Government figures reveal that about 40% of trainees do not finish their apprenticeships. There have been complaints that some bosses use school-leavers as cheap labour, neglecting proper training. John McGurk, skills adviser at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, says that there aren’t enough high-quality apprenticeships to meet demand.

When Londoner Adam Brown announced that despite getting 10 GCSEs and three A-levels, he was going to be an apprentice rather than a student, his parents were upset.

His mother Elaine, a school science technician, says: “I thought apprenticeships were a form of cheap labour, a way to get someone to do the jobs nobody else wanted to do.” His father, Gary, a facilities manager, feared his son would be left on the scrap heap. “We assumed people with a degree would leap over Adam,” he says.

Unhappily, Brown’s first experience as an apprentice with a small IT company was disappointing. He says he was not given the support or responsibility he felt was appropriate, the wage was low and he had to pay for his own training. “I was a glorified tea boy,” he says.

Within a year he had quit. Demoralised, he wondered if he had made a mistake. Then he learnt about BT’s scheme. Now in the last year of his telecommunications apprenticeship, Brown, 22, is already an acting opera-tional manager, in charge of a 10-strong team. He works as a network designer, responsible for planning the replacement of the copper network to customers’ phones. Last year he started studying for a business management degree at Bucking-ham University.

“I have friends who had a fun time at uni and got their degrees but professionally I would consider myself to be in a superior position to them,” says Brown. “I have a job I enjoy and am at the start of a career in management.”

In 10 years’ time, he is aiming for an executive position with four times his current £23,000 salary. “My mum is no longer afraid to tell friends I am not at university,” he adds, laughing.

Lucy Wilkins actually dropped out of college four years ago and took up an apprenticeship with Somerset county council. Now 25 and living in Taunton, she is an IT systems administrator, earning £16,000 per year with ambitions to move into management and treble her salary inside 10 years. “A lot of my friends struggled when they left university. They couldn’t get a job because they didn’t have the experience,” she says.

Despite such stories anyone embarking on an apprenticeship should tread warily. In fields such as engineering and telecoms, where there are skills shortages, they can be a stepping stone to a satisfying career. In the media too, John McGurk says that a technical apprenticeship with the BBC might prove more valuable than a degree in media studies.

McGurk tips big companies such as Rolls-Royce, BT, Nissan or Network Railas good bets. Retail schemes with firms such as Tesco are worth considering if they lead to management. “The cachet of a university degree has been devalued now everyone goes,” he points out.

But his own early experience serves as a cautionary tale. “When I left school in Glasgow in 1970,” he says, “I was an apprentice tiler but I was being used as a labourer.”

He has drawn up a checklist of questions to ask bosses, including how long a scheme has been running, its retention rate, the qualifications on offer and what colleges it is linked to. Crucially, he says, talk to apprentices who have finished their training. “There are still some poorly designed, poorly planned apprenticeships,” he says. The trick is to choose carefully.

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