UK jewellers forge education links to rejuvenate workforce

Rachael Taylor, September 6, 2024

A tie-up between Birmingham businesses and a local university illustrates the need to plug the skills gap and attract young trainees.

At Hockley Mint, a jewellery manufacturer in Birmingham’s historic Jewellery Quarter, many of the workers with the most specialist skills are over the age of 50. This, says managing director Gary Wroe, is a problem. But it is not one unique to his business: throughout the city’s jewellery hub, workforces are ageing and a widening skills gap threatens to cripple the local industry. To address the challenge, Hockley Mint has been on a recruitment drive. Last year, it employed 11 people under the age of 24 and it currently has six apprentices, with plans to take on two more this month. It has done this through a mix of recruitment fairs, advertising, and connecting with local schools.

The UK’s largest jewellery manufacturing cluster might have its home in the city, but Wroe says Birmingham’s children know “very little” about it and are not considering the industry as a career. Two minutes’ walk from Hockley Mint are the offices and factory of Weston Beamor, a business founded in the Jewellery Quarter in 1947 and now part of Germany’s Heimerle + Meule Group, one of Europe’s biggest precious metals refiners. Here, talent is also a concern: managing director Andrew Morton cites an ageing workforce, a shrinking industry, and the difficulty of attracting young trainees. “The first time I ever worked in this trade was 44 years ago, and there were probably between 3,000 and 4,000 more jobs in this industry in Birmingham [than today],” he says. “The jewellery sold in the UK in those days was predominantly made in the UK.

“We don’t have that volume [now] and there are less jobs because there is less work, but there is also this need for instant gratification with the younger lot coming in. They aren‘t willing to do those long-term apprenticeship-style roles to learn the proper standard.” Morton says this predicament is a knock-on effect of the industry reducing investment in training new craftspeople as the volume of UK-made jewellery fell. Now, workers in specialist roles are retiring and cannot easily be replaced. “A really urgent skill shortage has been identified in jewellery-making, silversmithing and the creative industries at large,” says Michelle O’Brien, head of charitable partnerships at The Goldsmiths’ Company Charity. To address this, the organisation announced a £10mn Landmark Grants Programme last November, to fund projects to “accelerate skills development in the UK”. One of the first recipients of these grants is Aston University Engineering Academy (AUEA) in Birmingham. It has been awarded £500,000 to fund the opening of the Goldsmiths’ Institute, a new jewellery training hub that will offer skills- and design-based learning for school students in year nine to sixth form (ages 13/14 to 17/18).

This will include T levels — two-year vocational qualifications taken after GCSEs as an alternative to A levels. T levels are designed in collaboration with employers and act as a talent funnel, driving young people into skilled employment or apprenticeships. O’Brien says the AUEA Goldsmiths’ Institute represents The Goldsmiths’ Company Charity’s largest investment in jewellery industry training since the opening of the £17.5mn Goldsmiths’ Centre in London in 2012. The partnership between the livery company and AUEA is more than just financial: Chris Oliver, head of professional training at The Goldsmiths’ Centre, will be working with the university to develop its courses. Oliver believes that wider collaboration across the industry to amplify the Goldsmiths’ Institute project will help address the skills gap, as well as highlighting to the government “the importance of preserving craft as a career option for a young person”. In February, he took part in a round-table discussion with Sir Chris Bryant, now minister for the creative arts, which was hosted by the National Association of Jewellers. Bryant also attended a Goldsmiths’ Company trade livery dinner at Goldsmiths’ Hall in April, at which he pledged his support for crafts and creative career paths. The £1mn Goldsmiths’ Institute, which has received its own pledges of allegiance from 10 local businesses — including Hockley Mint and Weston Beamor — will open this month, but AUEA principal Daniel Locke-Wheaton says outreach work started earlier. Recently, for example, AUEA hosted a weekend course for secondary school children to teach them how to make a silver ring. The Leopards, a philanthropic group founded by jewellers including Stephen Webster and Theo Fennell, donated jewellery toolboxes for the workshop as part of an ongoing programme. The first boxes, which were sponsored by diamond miner De Beers, were delivered in March, and The Leopards plans to donate 50 boxes by the end of 2024.

“Working closely with the Goldsmiths’ Institute, the toolbox[es] will be placed in schools where applied arts education funding is low,” said Carol Woolton, author and podcaster, and one of the founders of The Leopards, in a statement. AUEA has also invented a portable desktop jewellery bench that can be used in classrooms. “A significant part of the project is outreach,” explains Locke-Wheaton. “The biggest barrier at the moment is that people want to do jewellery, but they don’t know how to do it. So all the resources will be packaged together on the institute website, available free of charge to any school or any training provider in the country.” Locke-Wheaton is also looking to speed up the apprenticeship process through a new government initiative. “We’ve been asked to work with these super-apprenticeships to link up the new T levels with the industry’s Level 3 jewellery apprenticeship — because, up until [recently], the new course cancelled out the apprenticeship, which clearly would be a major issue. “We’ve now worked very closely with the Institute for Apprenticeships [and Technical Education] to join those together, so it means that a student could do the T level and then top up for a year on the apprenticeship under the new government accelerated apprenticeship scheme. That would be the first one in the country.

“It also has a big impact on employers as you’re now saying you’ve only got to have them for a year as an apprentice and they’ll be qualified.” While the Goldsmiths’ Institute, on its own, is unlikely to solve the jewellery skills gap in Birmingham and beyond — and the current T level remains 50 per cent a business course rather than pure craft — employers in the city are hopeful. “If it increases access to the trade, if it increases its profile, then that’s absolutely everything we should be doing,” says Weston Beamor’s Morton. “We need to get people to see this industry, because people think it is all dark, gloomy rooms, but actually there’s this huge amount of high technology in our industry — powder printing, 3D printing, laser work, [computer-aided design] programs — and those are skill sets that could go elsewhere. They don’t have to stay in this industry.”