BOB the Builder is a great hit with small children. It's a pity he hasn't got a counterpart who could fire teenagers with enthusiasm for "fixing it".

In the next five years, nearly 16,000 of those now worrying about options at school or about this term's GCSE exams could find jobs in the construction industry in the North-East alone.

Nationally, by 2005, the industry reckons it will need 370,000 new recruits at every level. That's an awful lot of jobs, and sounds as if it covers everyone from the non-academic but practical types to those who've been through higher education. Women, too, in these equal days.

As the industry is now highlighting its need for recruits, they obviously aren't coming forward very willingly. I'm wondering if it's down to the cartoon image of the lazy, tea-break junkie in the dangerously low-slung jeans who leans on a shovel and whistles at passing girls.

As the minority always spoil it for the hard grafting, decently overalled majority, perhaps a work experience campaign is in order - if health and safety officers and site insurers don't throw up their hands in horror.

Or it may be that on-site work in all weathers and all sorts of places doesn't appeal.

I do wonder, however, if in the push to get as many A-C grades per pupil as possible, the non-academic types who at one time would have gone at 15 into a craft apprenticeship and been a round peg in a round hole, fall through the net to stare blankly into an A-C-less future.

If the industry wants their practical skills, it's going to have to send out missionaries to get them. Publicity is all very well; letters to careers teachers, if my teacher friends are to be believed, may never be read let alone acted on. Don't think for a minute I'm blaming teachers, beset as they are by paperwork, red tape - and the need for those A-C grades.

One thing is sure, with more fragmentation of families and an increasing number of young singles wanting their own setup, the predicted demand for new homes will continue. Then there's the buildings which seemed to go up only five minutes ago and are being torn down to make way for something else, plus the adaptations and conversions. Nothing's a job for life now but a recruit would presumably acquire marketable skills or even those which would enable him to set up in business himself.

The industry doesn't say anything about jobbing builders and that's where most of us hit a problem.

If a good wife is above rubies, a good jobbing builder is levitating somewhere well above a diamond of the first order. Anyone with such a treasure, who gives reliable estimates, keeps appointments, can be trusted in the householder's absence and whose work is first rate, has won the jackpot.

I had just such a builder. Kitchen extended, new bathroom, leaky pipes, slates off, his firm did the lot, but he's now retired and none of his equally reliable workmen, some of whom we had known since they were "the lad", wanted to take over.

I'm badgering all my friends to find out who has a treasure, and his phone number.