6th November 2010, 01:25 PM
All this talk about vocational training by universities is rather overlooking the fact that the average university hasn't got a 12-months-a-year site available for the lttle darlings to practice digging on? Buying large plots of land in the centre of old towns (which is pretty much the only place they'd be guaranteed of large quantities of stratified deposits) would be just a tad expensive? The typical university training dig currently is conducted for a couple of weeks a year on someone else's land, who needs to use it for something else the rest of the year. The only realistic way at the moment of giving students any significant level of site experience would be longish placements with commercial units, which under the current regime isn't a goer since any unit doing that would immediately be accused of undercutting and using cheap labour....and no unit is going to pay full wages to 'trainees' when they can get 'experienced' diggers for the same money....as the heading says, Catch 22...