Plumbing courses overrun

As courses go, this is the one everyone wants to get on to. Graduates fight it out for places with former City slickers who have thrown in lucrative jobs in the Square Mile. Historians vie with working-class lads out to make some easy money - and there are more than 25 applicants for every place.

So what can this astonishingly fashionable course be? Film studies with Steven Spielberg? Cookery classes with Nigella Lawson?

It's plumbing. This humble line of work, with its stock-in-trade of U-bends and soil stacks, is now attracting some of the brightest and the best in the country.

In the wake of the news that a molecular biologist has quit to become a gas fitter, it turns out that graduates across the country are also putting aside high-flying careers in favour of working as plumbers. One London college alone saw 800 apply for just 33 places on its NVQ course this year. At least one in 10 of the applicants were graduates - and many were women.

With shortages of qualified tradesmen in the capital, plumbers can now command rates that take them comfortably into the bracket of middle-income earners.

Plumbing lecturer Pat Whitcombe said many would-be students were attracted by tabloid tales of plumbers earning £150,000 a year. "That's just farcical," he said. However, Mr Whitcombe, who teaches at Newham College, added: "I know of three plumbers who were earning £100,000 a year doing emergency work. But they were working practically 24 hours a day, seven days a week."

For a regular plumber, he said average earnings are about £1,000 a week, or £50,000 a year. "If you're good enough, have the contacts and put the work in, it's an easy target."

How much a plumber earns depends, of course, on how much he or she charges. Experts say a plumber has to charge at least £55 an hour to keep a business going, although an Evening Standard survey found that rates varied from £55 to £110 an hour.

Hackney Community College saw the flood of 800 applications for so few places. The college's head of plumbing, Ken Daniels, said: "In the last two years there has been a massive increase in the number of people who want to take the course.

"On the course I'm teaching there's a guy with a degree in anthropology, one with a degree in political science and a lady with degree in Asian history."

Mr Daniels, who has been teaching for 28 years, added: "It really is flavour of the month. This is the highest demand that I've seen. There is a shortage of plumbers in London and people are following the demand, especially when they see what plumbers can earn.

"I teach people aged from 16 to 65 and a lot want a career change that lets them please themselves when it comes to hours. They like the idea of being on the road and popping into a cafe for a cup of tea. They find it more relaxing than being stuck in an office."

Mr Daniels isn't surprised at the increasing number of white-collar converts. "It's not a job for stupid people or for someone who just wants to leave school with no qualifications," he said.

"Modern heating systems are complex and you need to be brainy to understand how they work."