OFFICER CADETS (EDUCATION AND TRAINING) (Hansard, 21 June 1971)

§ Mr. John Wilkinson (Bradford, West)

I am pleased to be able to raise the subject of the education and training of Service officer cadets, as it has received so little attention in the defence debates in this Parliament.

Apart from a brief explanation in the Navy debate by the Under-Secretary of State for Defence for the Royal Navy on 4th May, 1971, of the changes in the Navy's pattern of educating and training officer cadets, which were previously announced in a Written Answer on 3rd March, 1971, and a short reference to the Royal Air Force's graduate entry scheme by the Under-Secretary of State for Defence for the Royal Air Force on 19th April, 1971, there has been no mention of this important subject.

I have on two occasions made suggestions for the rationalisation of education and training procedures for service officer cadets. The occasions were 2nd March, 1971, at the conclusion of the defence debate, and 8th June, in the debate on the Armed Forces, to which my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Defence for the Army, whom I am glad to see here tonight, replied. He was unable then to make any comments on the proposals I put forward. I hope he is now able to describe more fully the Government's policies and give perhaps some passing reactions to my suggestions.

The nearest we have come to a synopsis of the Government's view of this subject came in a debate on the defence budget which formed part of a Consolidated Fund debate on 25th March. In a slightly different but nevertheless 1156 relevant context, my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State for Defence for the Royal Air Force described the aim as "to limit the defence resources devoted to training, and, indeed, the other overhead activities, to the minimum consistent with the markedly higher standards which we must maintain".

In a defence environment limited by the strict financial target of approximately £2,300 million in defence spending over the next quinquennium, where manpower costs are some 54 per cent. of the whole, and when the sociological restraints on recruiting combine with the exigencies of the rank and the engagement structure necessary to meet force levels and guarantee of the career prospects necessary for long-service officers, the training which these long-service regulars receive is of paramount importance.

Although the precise requirements are different for the three Services, their officer recruits are taken very broadly from the same age bracket and approximately similar levels of academic attainment. The quality of service training is in many ways unsurpassed. Industry is already appreciative of the merits of the industry-linked short-service scheme for officers, and the airlines find that service-trained aircrew posses a breadth of high performance and command experience which no civilian training can match. The Service academies provide a unique opportunity for leadership and character training. As the Donaldson Report remarked: the Armed Forces have far a long time been the unacknowledged pioneers in industrial training and further education and it is high-time that due acknowledgement was made. In the 1970s civilian further education will doubtless continue to expand but it would be a great pity if the Service units were to lose their unique place in our total provision. This is certainly acknowledged by the Royal Family. It is a great honour and not insignificant that His Royal Highness 1157 Flight Lieutenant the Prince of Wales should be following in the footsteps of his grandfather and serving at Cranwell. This is a unique tribute to the quality of training at the Royal Air Force College, which has, sad to say, received no mention so far in our debates, and it is in no way diminished by his intention to progress to Dartmouth at the conclusion of his flying course.

The worth of a Service career is generally less apparent to the public now than it was in years gone by. Postings to stations outside Europe will increasingly be reduced; at the same time, more overseas attachments and rotational training visits will put a strain on family life. I am not sure that financial inducements will offset all this. Although the concept of the military salary does implicitly attempt to match Service pay to the rate for the comparable job in industry, the Prices and Incomes Board, in its third report, observed that although an increase in pay should be an important factor in making a Service career more attractive, there was no certainty that higher rates of pay would attract all the recruits needed. I know that recruiting figures are encouraging now. But I have reservations about long-term future recruiting, especially of officer cadets.

Perhaps I might quote the Donaldson Report once more slightly out of context, since it refers to boy entrants. It says The idea of joining up merely as a way of earning a living should not be allowed to swamp the concept of adopting the profession of arms with the chance to serve one's country. The latter implies accepting an obligation to stay on the job through thick and thin and to put the country's interests before one's own, even and especially when it hurts. This leads me to question whether, in the laudable and necessary desire to attract those who would normally in a post-Robbins era pursue their future education at university, the Services may not have taken the financial blandishment of the university cadetship scheme a little too far. No one denies that the Services should demand the highest possible level of academic attainment. But I am of the opinion, again to quote the Donaldson Report, that We should present a communal life and an environment of challenge and stimulus entirely without counterpart in the civilian world as the main incentive to officer recruiting 1158 rather than the financial inducement of £1,059 at university. In other words, it is the Service life after graduation and the contact with Service life through the O.T.C.s, air squadrons and university naval units that is more important than the mere financial inducement offered.

At present, the Army and the Royal Navy are only partly dependent on the university cadetship scheme for their intake of long-service officer recruits. Both lay down a mix of pre-Service academy and post-Service academy university education alongside traditional cadet entry and training. That is not true of the Royal Air Force College at Cranwell, which has become a professional training unit for graduate entrants to the Service, who will become the main source of recruitment for long-service permanent career officers, to the tune of some 33 per cent. of the whole. In the old days it was only 15 per cent. of the Royal Air Force's permanent officers who came from the R.A.F. College. I find it admirable that there will be a higher level of academic attainment throughout the generality of the officer corps of the R.A.F. But it remains to be seen whether in years to come this will lead to heightened frustration in the middle ranks of the Service and whether they will have the instinctive reaction to discipline which is inevitable from the traditional system which took officer recruits at the more formative 18–21 age bracket.

I am extremely glad to say that the R.A.F. scheme appears to be going well, and perhaps my hon. Friend will have more to say about that later. However, one must observe that a course of this type must lead to a diminution of the breadth of the military training provided. In a year's basic training programme there will not be quite as much time for the variety of activities such as visits to the United States, to N.A.T.O. commands, to other Services, and so on, which are part of the broadening experience of an officer cadet in training.

To get back to the generality of the issue, I do not believe that the three present systems are the final solution. A number of our allies and friends have different systems which we would do well to study. I have in mind the Canadians, the Indians, the Dutch, the Belgians, and 1159 the South Africans, who all have a system based on a joint-Service academy, where cadets of all three Services spend their formative years of training together. They are all involved in a process not only of military training but of higher academic education.

At present in the Navy and in the Army officer cadets spend a whole academic year in the course of their training. I contend that it would be better if officer cadets of all three Services could get that academic year out of the way at an early stage and could in the course of it complete their basic disciplinary training which is fundamentally common to all three Services. That would reduce overheads. It would mean a rationalisation of the teaching and instructional staffs of all three Services and should logically be done at a joint establishment.

The Howard English Committee recommended something not totally dissimilar. I should very much welcome the findings of that Committee now being made public. I know that the report was an internal one to the Department, but the Committee reported four years ago and I do not believe that there will now be any harm in making it public.

I am suggesting, in other words, that the post-sixth form year and an introduction to military life should take place jointly in fine surroundings in the public eye, preferably near London at Greenwich. When that stage is completed, the officer cadets could move on to their respective academies for their purely professional training: to Dartmouth or to Cranwell, or, if they are engineers, to the Royal Military College of Science at Shrivenham or the Royal Naval Engineering College at Manadon.

There would be no objection whatever to their doing university education later when they had proved that they could satisfactorily complete their professional training, because it is upon professional competence that their later Service careers will be judged. It is only if they prove that they can do the job that they should receive a university education at public expense.

It is an exceedingly costly business to provide university education for officer cadets. It is wholly admirable, as I have said, that as many as possible should 1160 receive such education; but we must realise that in 1970, the last year for which I have figures, the Royal Navy spent £67,000 on the training of officer cadets in its officer cadet university cadet-ship scheme, the Army £75,000, and the Royal Air Force no less than £335,000. I would rather that money, or a proportion of it, were spent on those who prove that they can do the job.

I should like to quote a few parallels. The first is the South African Military Academy. That has two introductory phases lasting just under a year. In phase one prospective officers orientate themselves within the defence force. In other words, they acquire a joint background rather than an over-obsessional loyalty to one Service. They then do a further six months of phase-two training, which comprises the basic leadership requisites, code of behaviour, general knowledge about the Services, and so on. Thereafter they can pursue a Bachelor of Military Science degree for a further two years.

I suggest that our Services' officer cadets should spend that joint year together. If they had an arts background, for example, the course could be orientated much more to the sciences and technologies which they will need to master to become really competent in their professional training. If, conversely, their background is science, they could, before it is too late, acquire a degree of literacy and articulateness which will equip them well for the staff posts which will be important to them if they aspire to high command. I am also convinced that the professional academies themselves will benefit from being able to concentrate entirely on getting on with the job of training and not having, as in the case of the Royal Naval College and the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, to devote too much time to the academic training of their officer cadets, which should come separately.

I am basically satisfied with the present system, but I should like to know a good deal more about it. It is a great pity that we did not hear much more before. Already there are encouraging developments, like the naval idea of giving naval cadets the option of doing a professionally-orientated degree course after Dartmouth. But what I look to for the long-term future is some inspiring scheme 1161 such as the joint college at Greenwich, which might well fit into the future planning of the Armed Services and provide a valuable stimulus to recruiting and a sound foundation for a military career.

§ The Under-Secretary of State for Defence for the Army (Mr. Geoffrey Johnson Smith)

The education and training of officer cadets and young officers are, of course, of considerable importance, and I am glad that my hon. Friend the Member for Bradford West (Mr. Wilkinson) has mentioned them. I shall not be able to do justice to all his points in the short time remaining, but no doubt there will be an opportunity on another occasion. But this is an important subject—important to the Services themselves in meeting the need to attract young men to make their careers in the Services, important to parents and head masters who have the responsibility of guilding and advising their children and pupils and vitally important to the young men themselves who are contemplating their future.

Perhaps I might deal immediately with my hon. Friend's interesting suggestion of a "Royal Defence College" such as other countries have—in other words, a single system of training for all three Services. It is true that this matter was canvassed in the Howard English Report, but I cannot say that it can be made public, because it was prepared personally for the previous Secretary of State. However, it is well known that this was one of the recommendations.

But there are serious impediments to carrying out such a proposal. First, there is the cost. It would be very expensive. It would certainly run into many millions of pounds. This is a very important consideration when we consider on what a tight rein we keep our defence budget. Then there are the wishes of the young men themselves, whose desires very often are to attend a civilian university and obtain a qualification which is recognised in civilian life.

Third, there is the problem of reducing the cost and the options to manageable proportions—this is a very serious practical problem—yet at the same time meeting the professional requirements of all three Services. Fourth, having regard to the professional training requirements of the three Services, we must consider 1162 how to organise the flow of students so that the least academically inclined spend about a year following another course of studies and yet treat the year as the first of a three-year degree course for those who are more academically motivated.

These difficulties have not so far been capable of satisfactory resolution, except by allowing and encouraging the more academically inclined to attend a civilian university and allowing the others—there is more to this process than attracting eggheads—such academic training as is considered essential.

I have not time to go into detail about the many changes which have taken place in the training of potential officers. But my experience and understanding of the three Services is that they do not dwell in the past but are willing to experiment—and a number of exciting things are going on.

We all know that in the 1967 Statement on the Defence Estimates the purpose of the previous Government was to continue to provide facilities at the three Service technological colleges. My hon. Friend mentioned some of the valuable work which goes on there. The second intention was to cease academic education at the single Service cadet colleges and to establish the new inter-Service college to be called the Royal Defence College. For the reasons I have given, this idea lapsed.

I now say something about work done at the technological colleges. Manadon and Shrivenham are continuing to provide degree courses in engineering and on completion of initial cadet training at Dartmouth or Sandhurst followed by a year of professional training at sea or with a unit, all officers attend college. In the case of the Royal Air Force the engineering department at Cranwell is ceasing to be a centre for graduate training. In future it will concentrate on professional and postgraduate engineering studies.

Quite apart from capital cost and problems attendant on training, attendance by air crew at the Royal Defence College would seriously disrupt continuity of flying training and would call for very expensive refresher flying training after completion of studies there.

Moving from the history of why it was not thought feasible for the time being 1163 to go on with the Royal Defence College, the problem we have to work with, accept and try to overcome is that the three Services are suffering from shortage of candidates. This is not a problem unique to the Services; it is shared by all professions. The desire of young people to receive further education has meant that in the last decade or so there has been a significant increase, almost a revolutionary increase, not only in numbers who wish to go to university and other forms of higher education, but in the numbers who attain it. This is continuing.

There is the other group who do not go to university but who hold two or more A-level certificates. This number has also increased sharply. The significance of this from a defence point of view is that the best hopes of repairing current shortages of Service officers lies in offering the widest possible range of options and tapping all available sources of suitable recruits, including the traditional methods of entry. I know that my hon. Friend will welcome that.

I turn for a brief comment to the university cadetship scheme to which my hon. Friend referred. This scheme applies to all three Services. It is one whereby a young man accepted for a commission who has secured a place at a university attends his university and receives about £1,000 a year in pay while his tuition fees are paid by the Service. We do not look to attract people on the basis of money, but we emphasise that his having been commissioned means that the Service man is to hold a responsible position. It means living a life of challenge, both physically and mentally, a life, too, sometimes involving risk.

Students in the university cadetship scheme spend part of their vacation period with their parent Service, and sometimes a limited amount of training 1164 is done in term time. We have had a most encouraging response to the scheme. My hon. Friend has had the detailed figures from my noble Friend, and so I will not go into them tonight; indeed, I do not have the time to do so. It is sufficient to emphasise that the response has been encouraging, and it still is. We certainly look to the scheme to provide the Services with many of the officers they wish to have.

Lest it be thought that the Royal Air Force is placing a disproportionate emphasis on its graduate requirements, I may say that the graduate entry scheme is intended for the foreseeable future to provide only some 30 per cent. of the total officer intake of the R.A.F. We hope to extend this. The Royal Navy thinks of this as a major source of entry. Recruiting officers for the Army is a matter of general concern, and Sandhurst, in particular, is seriously under strength. However, the entry through Mons is encouraging, and university entries are improving. Nevertheless, it cannot be said that the situation is satisfactory, and we are currently reviewing the situation.

This debate has concentrated on academic rather than professional training. I know that my hon. Friend is well aware that we attach enormous importance to professional training for men of all ranks. I hope that parents, headmasters and careers masters will continue to commend the Services to their children and pupils. Certainly since my appointment a few months ago I have been most impressed by the excellence of the men who have been trained and received a large part of their education from and through the Services.