T321 Apprentice Training School

This is where I started at Vickers Armstrongs (Aircraft) on 10 Sept 1962.  There was an intake of about 200 that year. Different grades; Craft, Technician, Engineer and Graduate.  I was a lowly Craft Apprentice.   Five years later I won the Pam Newton Award as the best Craft apprentice of my year.

The school had a large workshop area with fitting benches and a machine tool area with Lathes,   Milling machines, Shapers, Grinders etc.   There were also, I think, three classrooms upstairs, here we learned about the theory of Flight and how to use our tools, plus the admin offices.  Lightly oil when not in use,  was the phrase of the day!

The training was good but looking back I can see that the system was stretched, both the Apprentice school and Brooklands College really did not know how to cope with so many students from the 1945/6 birth bulge. We were, of course, a cash crop the government were paying the company (Grant / Levy) An apprenticeship at Vickers (BAC) was very good with both practical and academic training. My apprenticeship lasted the normal five years but I was still attending college in 1970, eight years in all. My training, the type of work and those eight years at college were so useful to me in my later teaching career. 

From the Visitors Handbook :-

THE APPRENTICE TRAINING SCHOOL.  Lectures, practical workshop and machine experience and apprentice administration are the activities centred on the well equipped Apprentice Training School building opened in 1955.  Comprehensive schemes are in being for the training of Trade, Engineer, Undergraduate and Post-Graduate apprentices. 

Training is designed to achieve a balance between practical experience gained in the Apprentice Training School, the shops and technical offices of the Company and theoretical training at Technical Colleges or Universities.  

The future of the Company owes much to the soundness of the Apprentice Training schemes. Basically, the problem may be reduced to the bringing forward of a balanced supply of skilled men trained to meet the foreseeable needs of a decade or more in the future, in an industry of rapid technical advance. 

The present apprentice population (mid 1962) is about 500.  Demonstrating the intense competition for apprentice training is the fact that the ratio of enquiries to acceptances is of the order of 15 to 1.

The head of the school was Jack Tyrrell the picture below shows him with the package I'm about to received from Sir Anthony Milward.