The airline industry. But in both that case and with the TOCs, you fundamentally gain a licence that can be used elsewhere and indeed even in different countries, with suitable retraining. Besides which, if you're a qualified driver then there are vacancies aplenty for you in the UK.Zero. Which other industries make you pay for training which qualifies you to work only for one "company" (the British railway network)?
I don't think there is any significance in whether or not you can use your qualifications to become self employed. It's very difficult to become a self employed actuary, say, and yet no-one says that that makes it unfair to pay for qualifications to get you there.The difference is those people can use their qualification to get a job with countless employers, or set up in business themselves. This train driver qualification would give you access to an interview for a job with a tiny number of vacancies at an effective monopoly employer, with no possibility of self employment.
Oh, I don't know, maybe bus drivers? Or in fact train drivers, not all that many years back? Plenty of metro and tram systems pay their drivers about that much. The only reason train drivers get paid so much is because of their strong unions, who make use of the political and contractual situation the railways are in. Those things don't exist in other systems and thus work which is broadly speaking similar attracts much lower pay.The train drivers job is only as popular as it is because it's so well paid for a job that anyone can get if they pass the process. How many people would want to get up at 0230 in the morning, miss loads of family and social events, get their holidays when they are allocated rather than when they choose, not be able to drink when they want to, spend hours alone, and potentially get banged up for making a mistake if the pay was £25,000? Not many I suspect.
Except that you don’t complete the driver training and pass based on those written exams. The driving training itself has to be done as an employee of a TOC, working full-time; not on an ad-hoc basis.I’d think it would be worth a few thousand quid, maybe £3-5k, assuming that you go straight to the pretty much full rate when in a role.
I think skipping the year or so of lower pay would be well worth the initial outlay. Even more worthwhile if the training could be done at a time and location of your choice, even whilst still holding onto another job, then when the role you want comes up you can slot straight in.
A lot depends on whether you can afford (financially) to take a leap of faith by leaving your existing job.However.... Would you pay £3k to potentially get a £60k job ?
The Rules course is only part of the qualification to becoming a Train Driver. There’s PTS, Traction, actual driving with a DI,Final Assessment,Route Learning. The £2-4K price people are saying they would pay is a drop in the ocean of the actual price. TOC’s budget around the £100K per trainee, so to pay for a full licence you are then getting into airline pilot training money.
Drivers pay has only gone through the roof since privatisation. I'd suggest it has far more to do with the free market than strong unions. Drivers weren't paid anything close to an equivalent amount in BR days but were in the same union. I'd also argue that the union is nowhere near as strong as many outsiders seem to think it is.The only reason train drivers get paid so much is because of their strong unions, who make use of the political and contractual situation the railways are in. Those things don't exist in other systems and thus work which is broadly speaking similar attracts much lower pay.
My contract includes the training funding agreement which quotes £9k for training ...and if leaving before 2nd year qualified they’d possibly seek to recoup around £5k from me ? Not sure how enforceable that would actually be but regardless they value the training fairly highly and expect s return on the investment? But subbing it out ... could they guarantee consistency ?
It's the unique mix of extremely high rates of unionisation, in a industry that's always going to be underwritten by the government, and that requires employees who can't be replaced overnight, with competition between employers due to staff shortages. If you took away a couple, or even just one, of those factors then you would get much lower pay. Drivers' pay used to be very low but it is now very high.Drivers pay has only gone through the roof since privatisation. I'd suggest it has far more to do with the free market than strong unions. Drivers weren't paid anything close to an equivalent amount in BR days but were in the same union. I'd also argue that the union is nowhere near as strong as many outsiders seem to think it is.
True, but is that a justifiable situation? Effectively the taxpayer is subsiding people to get free training that puts them straight into a high paying job for life. It would be unsustainable to do this for every high paying profession, even those that the public thinks of as "important", such as doctors and surgeons. So surely what you are saying is "it's OK for those of us that have got their foot in - and screw anyone else"?The current training regime is in my opinion effective and the TOCs/FOCs spoilt for choice when it comes to choosing the successful candidates. That's ultimately what they get out of the bargain as things stand.
When it comes to us drivers, I'd say that ASLEF are a sort of backstop, they protect our terms and conditions and usually negotiate a fair price if the company wishes to purchase productivity from us that they don't already have. A lot of the wage increases I'd say have been driven by competition between TOCs, supply and demand has worked in our favour in that regard.
ASLEF must never allow a situation similar to that which has developed in much of the commercial pilot world, where training schools continually produce candidates regardless of the state of the industry, so that there is almost always a surplus of newly-qualified candidates desperate for their first flying job.
Train driving is one of the last well-paying careers for people from working class backgrounds who don't fancy the idea of a university degree and all of the debt that most degrees in the UK now bring. Let's keep it that way.
The airline industry. But in both that case and with the TOCs, you fundamentally gain a licence that can be used elsewhere and indeed even in different countries, with suitable retraining. Besides which, if you're a qualified driver then there are vacancies aplenty for you in the UK.
I don't buy the argument that it makes it an elitist profession, or one only for those with money. Well so what? Lots of professions are elitist. Lots are only accessbile to those with money. Why are, or should, train drivers be any different?
I think there would be quite the market for someone to come up with a scheme to get people qualified for train driving, like a sort of university or technical academy, paid for by student loans.
True, but is that a justifiable situation? Effectively the taxpayer is subsiding people to get free training that puts them straight into a high paying job for life. It would be unsustainable to do this for every high paying profession, even those that the public thinks of as "important", such as doctors and surgeons. So surely what you are saying is "it's OK for those of us that have got their foot in - and screw anyone else"?
And have you seen the recent news on fraudulent paid-for licences, not in the UK, that could still have legally slipped unnoticed through the net and been used to gain commercial pilot work in the UK.
Pretty simple really. Other industries make you pay for your training. How much would you be willing to pay if :
You passed your Assessments
You passed your Medical
You could then pay for an independent rules course so you would be fully rules trained and could then apply to any TOC for local rules and traction.
Lots to discuss but I really wanna hear your magic number.
The same order of magnitude of risk applies with pilots and commercial drivers and yet there is no state subsidy for either of those careers. If you want those licences you need to pay for it yourself or find someone else who will. The notion that a bad candidate can buy themselves a licence purely with money is nonsensical. The money simply lets them have a chance to be assessed. An unsuitable lorry driver won't be given a licence any more than an unsuitable train driver would.Because the ‘quality‘ of the applicant is everything, and far beyond what can be paid for in monetary terms. You are putting one individual in charge of several million pounds-worth of kit, travelling at speeds of up to 125 mph, with probably as many as 1500 lives on board at any one time. Making a mistake with that lot is going to be somewhat more serious than just having a bad day at the office.
There are already limits on who can become a train driver through aptitude and psychological assessments, with a maximum number of times you can attempt them. Many other professions don't have such limits but there is no reason why this couldn't be kept if you allowed for paid-for training.And just like a degree the applicant can keep on paying to re-take failed assessments until they pass. I don’t think I would want to be employing that individual to be in charge of the said several million pounds-worth if kit, travelling at speed, with 1500 people on board.
An unsuitable lorry driver won't be given a licence any more than an unsuitable train driver would.
To be fair, I can think of plenty of examples of unsuitable train drivers being given licences!
The same order of magnitude of risk applies with pilots and commercial drivers and yet there is no state subsidy for either of those careers. If you want those licences you need to pay for it yourself or find someone else who will. The notion that a bad candidate can buy themselves a licence purely with money is nonsensical. The money simply lets them have a chance to be assessed. An unsuitable lorry driver won't be given a licence any more than an unsuitable train driver would.
What relevance does the fact that the training is paid for have? Safety is taken just as seriously in the aviation industry as it is in the railway industry. Some standards are in fact higher. You get bad eggs in all industries.In the airline world they have an awful creation known as "pay-to-fly", whereby people pay for line training, basically flying revenue passengers under supervision from a line captain. One such individual attempted to buy a place in a Boeing 737 cockpit but he wasn't good enough so the training organisation said "well, we could try putting you into the Airbus A320, that's a bit easier to handle". I believe many of his landings in the simulator required control input from the training captain because he consistently flared too late. Since he was still paying the money, he was allowed to fly passengers and damaged an Airbus A320 belonging to a British charter airline at Kos in Greece. The report is below:
Airbus A320, G-DHJZ, 5 July 2007
www.gov.uk
We don't want this sort of thing on the trains thanks.
Nobody is ever going to be forced to stop their training when they are paying for it. But if they are not sufficiently competent then they will never gain the qualifications they need to complete their training. The incident you link to was clearly a case of the captain not taking over control of the landing at the appropriate moment. The railway equivalent might be a driver trainer not intervening when the trainee misses a PSR or station. It can always happen, regardless of the money aspect of things.Line training is an essential part of commercial pilot training, just as a trainee driving trains in service under the supervision of an instructor is an essential part of train driver training.
In this case is that the candidate's training was not ceased on grounds of ability anywhere near early enough, a considerable number of repeated training exercises were required and this should have rung alarm bells, it didn't. During the early stages of line training the necessary technique for safely landing the aircraft was not consistently displayed, again this should have caused serious concern. The big problem is that the candidate was paying the organisations which ultimately should have made the decision to cease training for earlier than they actually did. Unsurprisingly, the decision was made after the incident, by which point it was too late.
If an individual is paying an organisation to provide a training service, then I think it is less likely that the organisation will cease the training due to the trainee's performance than if the situation was reversed. When organisations pay, they expect results, compare the commercial flying schools today to the BOAC/BEA schemes at Hamble and there's a huge difference in the chop rate. I suspect some of this may be accounted for by training methods but certainly not all of it.
The reality is it's not going to happen, because, being a government subsidised and thus controlled industry, the railways are never going to be dynamic in the same way that commercial industries have to be to survive.
There are already limits on who can become a train driver through aptitude and psychological assessments, with a maximum number of times you can attempt them. Many other professions don't have such limits but there is no reason why this couldn't be kept if you allowed for paid-for training.
If you start allowing people to pay to complete their training, those with enough cash will simply keep paying to have themselves reassessed on rules, traction, advanced route learning, PTS etc, in the same way a university student can keep re-sitting failed exams by paying an additional fee. Whatever they fail they will just pay to retake it. If people are paying from their own pocket, the academy or university offering the qualification won’t want to refuse taking more cash from any student willing to part with it.
Rules are something that can be done wholly within the classroom. Rules are something that are also a recognised national standard. The Rulebook split a few years back to have a standard set of rules for everyone and then TOCs have a bespoke additional set of rules. The potential is there to take this to the next step.
In the airline world they have an awful creation known as "pay-to-fly", whereby people pay for line training, basically flying revenue passengers under supervision from a line captain. One such individual attempted to buy a place in a Boeing 737 cockpit but he wasn't good enough so the training organisation said "well, we could try putting you into the Airbus A320, that's a bit easier to handle". I believe many of his landings in the simulator required control input from the training captain because he consistently flared too late. Since he was still paying the money, he was allowed to fly passengers and damaged an Airbus A320 belonging to a British charter airline at Kos in Greece. The report is below:
Airbus A320, G-DHJZ, 5 July 2007
www.gov.uk
Nobody is ever going to be forced to stop their training when they are paying for it. But if they are not sufficiently competent then they will never gain the qualifications they need to complete their training. The incident you link to was clearly a case of the captain not taking over control of the landing at the appropriate moment. The railway equivalent might be a driver trainer not intervening when the trainee misses a PSR or station. It can always happen, regardless of the money aspect of things.
Give someone enough practice, and if they also have enough money, by sheer repetition they will eventually get through it. Those are not the drivers any TOC would want, but if it’s a pay-to-play course, the monied, well rehearsed, but actually incompetent, will be the ones getting through it.
A valid observation which makes me slightly uncomfortable. I've come across individuals who persevered to qualify in their profession but who really weren't good performers in real life - it showed. Either you've got it or you haven't, and I feel the current two attempts situation is safeguarding against candidates who are likely to come unstuck once qualified.Would you accept that pay till you pass still means that the candidate has met the minimum standard. It may have taken them longer but they still met the required standard ?
What makes you believe that pay to play would override the standards ? Do you believe it would become money talks ? As I just posted in another thread. Trainees do not always make the grade. Are you suggesting that 'pay to play' also becomes 'pay till you pass' ? Would you accept that pay till you pass still means that the candidate has met the minimum standard. It may have taken them longer but they still met the required standard ?