H—ll

|(6) New Zealand Apprenticeship Committees (1) Every industry in which there were local apprenticeship orders prior to 1947 has now a New Zealand Apprenticeship Committee. The twenty-two Committees now registered are for the following industries and groups of industries : baking, bootrepairing, boilermaking and moulding, bricklaying and masonry and plastering, carpentry and joinery, clothing and tailoring, coachbuilding, mechanical dentistry, electrical, mechanical engineering, footwear-manufacturing, furniture, gardening, men's hairdressing, jewellery and watchmaking and engraving, motor engineering, painting, printing and photo-engraving, plumbing, saddlery and leather goods and canvas goods, ship and boat-building and coopering, sheet-metal working. Within these industries there are 111 trades or combinations of trades recognized by the Committees, and specified in the appropriate apprenticeship orders as branches of the industries. (2) Fifteen New Zealand apprenticeship orders (two recommended by one Committee) had been made by the end of March, and applications for a further six had been filed with the Court of Arbitration. Mechanical engineering and footwear-manufacturing are the only industries in which the New Zealand Committees have not yet come to final decisions on their applications for orders. With the making of New Zealand orders by the Court, the previously existing local orders are revoked. Conditions for apprentices thus become uniform throughout New Zealand in each industry, and particularly in the smaller industries are brought up to date, for in some cases the local order had been made as long ago as 1925. One practice is now universal —that of setting out the wages of apprentices as percentages of the rates received by journeymen in the relevant industry. (The practice was first instituted by the Court in 1945 in amending local orders.) The most commonly used scale of percentages runs by 6 per-cent. intervals from 23 per cent, in an apprentice's first period to 77 per cent, in his final period. <c) The Education of Apprentices (1) Now that New Zealand Apprenticeship Committees have been set up and the bulk of New Zealand apprenticeship orders made there is a change of emphasis in the activities of the Committees and of the Apprenticeship Division of the Department. A number of orders make provision for the technical education of apprentices during normal working-hours and the organization of these " daylight" classes is a big task, in which the Education Department and technical and other schools are co-operating to the fullest extent possible. (2) Up to the present year technical education of apprentices has been carried on in evening classes, and occasionally on Saturday mornings. To send apprentices to school in daytime means, therefore, that an immediate problem to be solved is that of finding accommodation for them in schools which already have their available space used to the utmost by full-time scholars. While that problem is being solved (not without difficulty) by the schools and the Education Department the New Zealand Committees concerned are busying themselves over questions of syllabuses of instruction and the ■organization arising from the answers to those questions. (3) The technical schools, and some high schools in districts where one such school serves all the purposes of the district, have had a new element introduced into their planning for apprentice classes. This new element is the New Zealand Apprenticeship Committee, for the apprenticeship orders use such words as " where the New Zealand Committee is satisfied that a school, &c.," and " a syllabus approved by the New Zealand Committee." Each Committee includes " a person conversant with technical education," nominated by the Director of Education, and those persons are of great .assistance to the Committees through their knowledge of schools and syllabuses.

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