I am not expert in UK apprenticeships, but I've done one. I came from Canada to do what was called a grad apprenticeship in the heavy machinery shops of British Thomson-Houston in the early fifties. A very smooth move! To my surprise, the school-leaving age was then 14, and there were many young craft apprentices who had come straight from school. As far as I know, their five years began then. The BTH scheme was written up in the Times Educational Supplement as a "Great Social Experiment", observing that in the Rugby apprentice hostel, a former stately home of England, each race-horse had been replaced by six apprentices. The Times also mentioned that "the level of luxury...was not such as to rot the moral fibre". Bruce Dodd Ottawa, ON