HUDDERSFIELD still produces the best textiles in the world – but the industry has an image problem.

Young people don’t want to enter what they perceive as a dinosaur of an industry. In many Kirklees schools, textiles are taught as a historical subject, rather than as a career choice.

This is the view shared by a Huddersfield textile boss as well as a career services manager for Kirklees.

Brian Haigh is Managing Director of Taylor and Lodge, one of the town’s oldest textile firms. Founded in 1883 and once one of the largest employers in Huddersfield, Taylor and Lodge now employs less than 40 people.

Like Paragon Textiles featured in last Friday’s Examiner, Mr Haigh has also been unable to find young people to train as pattern weavers. He has taken a 40-year-old on to retrain, but is still looking for another apprentice to replace an experienced pattern weaver who is leaving in three weeks time.

Mr Haigh said: “Textiles has had a bad Press.

“People have seen hundreds of mills close down in the area and they see us as an extinct industry, but that is anything but the truth.

“We are definitely alive and kicking, albeit somewhat smaller. The few companies that have survived are in a healthy position at the exclusive end of the market.

“We are not the dark satanic mills that people imagine. Inside these old buildings is modern machinery. And it is generally accepted that in Huddersfield we still produce the best cloth in the world.”

He added that young people were not encouraged to consider working inside a textile factory as a career.

Linda Beever, services manager for Calderdale and Kirklees Careers, agrees that textiles has an image problem.

But she believes that textile bosses themselves were partly to blame as they have done little to promote their industry to young people.

She said: “There is an issue with the image of the textile industry, but none of the companies have come to us for help.”

Ms Beever said that in the year to March 31, 2010, the careers service had placed 1,296 people between the ages of 16 and 19 in work or apprenticeship schemes in Kirklees and Calderdale.