You Decide 🤔... Modern Slavery or Apprenticeship

November 22, 2025

Oxbridge graduates aren’t a resource our industry draws from, but we are open to them.

We look for candidates who can develop their vision and creativity, technical dexterity and social skills. They may not be so hot on calculus or Chaucer but can still progress into being great performance artists.

Without academic qualifications the pool near the bottom of the school exam tables can easily be overlooked, and drift down paths with scant opportunity and dismal life chances. It’s a big problem for society.

But examples of exploitation in apprenticeships led post-war Governments to virtually destroy the system in favour of state-led training, to keep those without O-Levels off the unemployment register.

Programmes to move people from welfare to work included TOPS, YOP, YTS, and latterly the broad system of NVQs, of which well over 500,000 have been issued in hairdressing since inception.

The ultimate failure over time to produce a market-capable workforce led to a transition back into apprenticeships (MAs) and now supporting them at much higher levels of industry including law, finance, engineering and medicine which have a growing intake directly at apprenticeship level.

Is it better to learn the theory just from college where the tutors are no longer or never were connected to the real-life activity, or do you learn mainly from someone successfully operating in the field you want to work in?

I think the latter for most work, but it can take time for people to see a new way for them, and we get trolled mercilessly online by some in our industry who are too young to understand that apprenticeship is the historical norm in many work roles.

 

 

The college-only route is a modern aberration. Take a look at these new videos we’ve uploaded answering comments about slavery.

Apprentices develop fast with us and it's something regulars to the salon notice. The awkwardness and hesitance of the early months develops into someone more confident, capable and assured

Clients often ask how long the training is and I struggle to answer. I think people want to hear something nice and clear, like, it's a one-year apprenticeship, or a three-year programme.

But really, in my own mind, it's for ever. Whether that's informal, or formalised into courses and certificates for CPD (continual professional development). I find that if people don't stay curious to explore and go deeper, they start to fall behind professionally and become less interesting personally

Berni is one of our senior colourists, certainly the top tier in the UK, and exceptionally talented with a tint brush. And that was before taking herself off to complete a degree in colour mastery with Wella, where she just came top of the year group.

This helps her not only directly with the broadening complexities of hair colour but also in her teaching the next generations of colourists

CPD - Continual Professional Development

This is the ongoing process where professionals maintain and enhance their skills and knowledge throughout their careers. Many profession like teaching, healthcare, law, engineering, finance etc., require CPD to stay registered or certified.

Lifelong Learning

The world changes faster than our original training, and what we learned back then was for a world that may no longer exist. Technology, regulations, client expectations, even the language - which starts on the street or at schools and evolves into everyday parlance which then affects our social and professional interactions.

Without updating ourselves, our skills gradually fall out of sync with reality. Perhaps even more importantly, without evolving to deal with new stimulus and challenges, life can get dull. The safety of the familiar becomes a rut that denies us a bigger brighter life. So holding onto an explorer's mind is important for me and we support continual development for the whole team

 Michael Van Clarke

---

---

Also in Blogs