Former jockey turned trainer Richard Hughes knows a thing or two about apprentices and how the system works, after all, like George he started out as an apprentice too and today in the Racing Post he added his weight to the argument against recent calls for the system to be totally overhauled.

One of my long standing owners- a former “apprentice” of sorts himself sent me an interesting email………………………….

Ann, 

I had noted the RP article on apprentices and have read the two days’ worth of your blog entries on the subject. Here is a question – what makes the apprentices’ situation worse than in any other industry? The real answer is nothing, except that perhaps things are a bit more transparent in racing.

I was once an apprentice Chartered Accountant – we were called Articled Clerks in those days – and was paid a very small salary by my employer. It hadn’t been many years before that the Articled Clerks had been paying the employer for the privilege!

The partners were then able to charge a lot more to clients for my time. However that was the deal – they were training me on the job and paying for my courses in the lead up to exams. They were also paying my salary whilst I was away studying and taking those exams. Additionally they had to suffer the lost revenue if someone more senior had to put right trainees’ mistakes or compensate clients.

Apprentices in all fields have hidden costs to the employers that train them. This is why there are government incentives in some industries. There needs to be some compensation to those that take a risk on another person who may not succeed.

It is also true that the attrition rate was high – not everyone made it through the training period to emerge as a qualified Chartered Accountant. All of the above doesn’t seem a lot different to the situation with racing apprentices.

Anyway I knew the deal when I was starting out on the training. If it worked I should do well financially and might even be able to afford to pay to have a few racehorses in training in later life…..