Will Skills England be allowed to change the course of the Government's inherited policy Titanic?
On 30th January the interim lead for Skills England gave an excellent introduction to a packed meeting of the Apprenticeships APPG at which all the rights things were said – including making the changes necessary to deliver the skills for an industrial strategy and break out from decades of UK productivity stagnation.
But we have heard similar stories before: in 2001 under when the Sector Skills Councils were announced. In 2016 before the launch of the Institute for Apprenticeships. In each case the new regime was subordinated to educational funding and regulatory hierarchies whose priorities and processes derive from decisions taken in 1917. This time there are signs that the needs of employers and students regime will not come second. They will come third – overtaken by the needs and priorities of the Mayoral Combined Authorities.
Hence the importance of report of the DPA round table in November:
Getting the Skills and Jobs of the Future to YOUR Constituency
Participants in a round table drawn from past and present APPGs and their supporters, reviewed what had changed since the first round table in November 2023 (See here for meeting report and here for the more detailed convenors report), in order to brief the new intake of MPs on the need for co-operation. They also discussed the skills questions in the consultation on Invest 2035: the UK’s modern industrial strategy.
1. Summary and Key Opportunities for a New Government to break from the past.
- An industrial strategy requires plans to provide the skills (at all levels) for planning and implementation. Those plans need to be based on needs analyses and include the provision of career development and training infrastructures to deliver relevant skills where and when they are needed.
- The UK does not have a skills “system”, other than that to filter and foster academic talent for University researchers which derives from the Haldane report in 1917. The rest is an agglomeration of schemes of varying age and provenance. Hence the UK dependence on imported skills.
- The headline fall of 10% in UK employer real terms spend on training since 2011 (when the DfE Employer Skills Surveys began) is more than accounted for by falls per head in the Public Administration (41% accelerating sharply after Covid) and Education (25% all before 2017, with a modest rise since) sectors.
- The success of any Government-led change will depend on rebuilding the skills of Central and Local Government to analyse, plan and deliver. It will also require investment in training the trainers to use the techniques and technologies developed over recent decades to handle accelerating change in content.
- Current measures of success, (e.g. success in achieving qualifications assessed against academic mastery of content), take precedence over the needs of employers (e.g. delivered competences within sector skills frameworks, often international) or students (e.g. jobs with career progression). Far too many programmes have disproportionate penalties when participants leave before the end point assessment to join an employer.
- Programmes require flexibility of delivery and content to support the diversity of need while recording competence against employer recognised standards. There is a critical need to better involve UK employers (both local and national) and students in setting priorities, analysing needs and agreeing and delivering programmes to meet their requirements as opposed to those of providers or administrators.
2. The challenge to current UK skills structures and policies
The pace of change (education as well as training) has accelerated with the growth of national and international school and college networks and partnerships to meet the needs of employers who are interested in preparation for global, as opposed to national, career paths.
Delivery is increasingly dependent on reliable, secure and resilient digital connectivity: local, national and international. But the 2023/24 digital experience insights survey reveals that half of UK Further and Higher Education students have connectivity problems and as well as having to take outside jobs to live.
The gap between the needs of employers and the plans of the public sector delivery widened after the integration of Local Enterprise Partnership functions into local democratic (i.e. Local Government institutions. Current Government plans to build on that change with new regional hierarchies appear to prioritise the preservation of existing funding and regulatory structures over meeting the evolving needs of employers and students/apprentices/trainees and of those excluded or signed off as unfit for work.
There is a growing awareness that the combination of the Internet and Artificial Intelligence poses the greatest threat to established academic values and educational hierarchies since the introduction of the printing press. There is less awareness of how that combination compounds the pressures on the current business models of most UK Universities and Colleges from globally networked “competitors”.
The fall in employer spend (in real terms) on training over the period covered by the ESS Surveys (2011 – 2022) was in public administration and education. Net private sector spend did not It changed as employers increasingly became dependant on global skills supply chains. Meanwhile UK public sector providers, constrained by the approval process of their regulators and funding were unable to meet their needs and those of the SMBs unable to afford commercial access.
That problem is beginning to be addressed through Local Skills Improvement Plans which include programmes to enable small and medium sized businesses to access modular programmes which use micro-credentials to provide accreditation against globally recognised skills frameworks like SFIA , akin to that provided via the Royal Signals Caduceus programmes, the BAe Academy or the Rolls-Royce Nuclear Skills Academy , using one of the two main (converging) “badging” standards
Several hundred school governors have been trained under the Cyber Governors programme address the problems with online safety, safeguarding and cyber -security in schools with . This was launched after discussions at the 2023 round table as an add on the STEM Governors programme to improve contact at scale between STEM employers (and hubs) and schools.
The Better Hiring Institute has used inputs from around 8,000 employers to produce toolkits to improve recruitment and hiring processes in the social care, construction, education supply chain, financial Services and local authority Those for Health care and the Recruitment Industry are taking longer.
Meanwhile about 7 million UK residents are not in employment, education and training (ranging from 14% of 18 year olds to 27% of those aged over 50) and 8 million cannot use digital processes to “prove” their right to work the UK. Conversely over 1 in 3 of job ads are fraudulent. Hence the importance of JobsAware to protect those seeking to get off welfare and into work from particularly heatless frauds
3. Summary of responses to the Invest 2035 industrial skills questions submitted by the convenor
The group was asked to produce responses to the Skills Questions in the consultation on the Government’s industrial Strategy. These were:
Q8 Where you identified barriers which relate to people and skills (including issues such as delivery of employment support, careers, and skills provision), what UK government policy solutions could best address these?
The biggest incentive is a rapid return on investment from improving the skills of existing employees and/or enabling new recruits to become revenue earning within days or weeks, not months or years. Basing training programmes on separately accredited micro-credentials enables this and it is often quicker and cheaper for employers to use these to retrain the staff they already have than spend time trying to recruit those claiming to have the skills they need.
The use of micro-credentials in the UK is now growing rapidly after a slow start because of lack of agreement on definition, badging and inter-operability and difficulties in embedding them within publicly funded/regulated courses. OCN London (an Ofqual regulated awarding organisation) recently became an SFIA partner and launched accreditations for micro-credentials and training providers to make it easier for FE Colleges to support local small and medium sized employers. It has already accredited over 1,500 units.
The most effective incentive to encourage more “off-the-job” training would be for those following professionally recognised training and/or update courses to be exempted from national insurance (NI) and/or income tax for the periods spent on off-the-job training and able to offset the costs. IR35 contractors should also be able to offset such costs against earnings. To prevent abuse participants would be expected to maintain log books akin to those used for professional development and/or certificates to practice, cross referenced to employer records and third party accreditation records.
Q9 What more could be done to achieve a step change in employer investment in training in the growth-driving sectors?
The Employer Skills Survey data indicating a fall in employer investment in training is skewed by a 50% fall in spend by “Public Administration”, “Transport and Storage” and “Wholesale and Retail” during and after Covid lockdown.
There are no reliable sources on employer spend and no incentive for most employers to publicise their own lest competitors raid them for those they train. Even if they use training contacts to help encourage retention the legal precedent covers only a requirement to repay direct costs depreciated over two years.
What available reports do indicate is a sharp fall in spend over the past two decades for off-the-job courses with FE Colleges. That is the period which has seen massive growth across the world for English-language packaged learning materials.
Large employers increasingly contract with trusted training providers to assemble staff development programmes (from global English language libraries of materials) and supervise the in-house delivery of customised, just-in-time, blended learning modules. Those trusted providers are usually operating to international, not UK, standards although they include Colleges and University departments operating to both.
The main constraint on other public sector providers is the need to re-train lecturers whose subjects are no longer in demand to assemble, deliver and/or support packages to meet employer needs, using already available materials – as opposed to meeting the requirements of Ofqual and Government funding agencies.
Most of those who are successful appear to do so in close co-operation with industry partners who help provide the necessary subject and application expertise.
4. Engaging with constituency MPs with bringing the jobs and skills of the future to their voters.
MPs should be invited to help lead and/or publicise exercises to help local employers, students and parents make sense of the opportunities and programmes on offer and to identify and publicise those locally successful in getting participants into better paid jobs. Part of the aim should be to help protect these from the Chancellor’s cull. Past Treasury driven reviews of education and training programmes have commonly led to the survival of those which deliver low cost “certifications” approved by funding agencies and regulators, as opposed to those which place participants into jobs.
Those on “welfare to work programmes” who leave before the “end-point-assessment” to join employers who will pay them to acquire vendor specific qualifications (rarely approved by funding agencies), once they have shown they are fit to rejoin the work force, are counted as “failures” with the provider penalised. Similarly those who apply to join the armed forces will be counted as failures because of the time taken to process their applications
This helps explain the number of schemes churning participants between programmes which provide completion certificates but not work experience placements with local employers who might hire them before completion. It may also be important to identify which programmes fail because they are not promoted or understood and which fail because they were not relevant to the needs of employers and student.
Exercises should identify the needs and priorities of employers, parents and students, both national and local. Examples include Local Skills Improvement plans which build on the analyses used by UK employers and recruitment agencies (e.g. Vacancysoft), the annual surveys of organisations like Parentkind or Youth Voice and the local exercises Youth Voice supports, like the Lambeth Peer Action Collective.
It is also important to identify the obstacles to practical delivery. The JISC “Digital Experience Report”, indicates that scale and nature of the transition to on-line/hybrid learning across FE/HE but also the need for co-operation to address the issues students have with accessing their courses. These include the poor quality of wifi and mobile cover in many inner Cities as well as rural areas and the need for safe study spaces with good connectivity for many of the digitally excluded. Increases in traffic loads and delays in broadband roll out means that much of the UK communications infrastructure is not fit to support hybrid learning programmes, which depend on reliable access to cloud based education and training products and services.
Exercises should link welfare to work programmes to employer programmes to diversify recruitment into regulated industries and harness the talents of those currently excluded from the work force.
About 7 million working age residents are not in employment, education and training. The proportion ranges from 14% of 18 year-olds to 27% of those aged over 50. 2.3 million receive long term sickness benefit, including for mental health problems, depression, bad nerves or anxiety but may well be fit for part time “work therapy”. 8 million cannot readily “prove” their right to work because they do not have a current UK passport or driving license (This ranges from 5% is London to over 20% in many rural areas). 11 million have a criminal record (whether relevant or not) hence programmes like Hiring With Conviction.
Updated guidance in needed on using public procurement and social values legislation to help plan and support investment in skills. That available appears not to have been updated since before Covid. It should be reviewed to encourage those involved with major infrastructure projects: examples range from HS2 and the Liverpool to Hull line, to next generation power generation, data centres and secure, resilient energy and communications grids. This should include involvement with funding the long term skills supply chains, at all levels, from basic construction skills to level 6 & 7 programme designers, planners and managers).
Housing and Climate change plans should similarly be linked to exercises to help encourage investment at scale in the skills needed at all levels of the planning and supply chain.
5. Next Steps
Look at support for follow up round tables, including on:
- How success should be measured with regard to skills programmes and employment reform e.g. meeting the needs of students and employers and improving employment, health, productivity etc.
- Using Local Skills Improvement Plans to engage employers (both local and national) and join up welfare to work programmes across DWP, DfE, Health, Welfare and Home Office (right to work in the UK).
- Using Social Values Procurement, including at the planning stage to pull through co-operation in manpower planning and skills development for who-ever wins whichever delivery contracts.
Other topics for follow up include the need for reliable digital access (the Janet and John strategy) and robust/secure shared/interoperable skills identities and records .
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Participants in the workshop are already looking at follow up on all the above and I would be pleased to put readers in touch