The Circular Nature of Skills Policy: A Groundhog Day Experience

There’s lots happening in the world of further education and lifelong learning… as always. Skills England has been launched, the apprenticeship levy is being replaced by something called the ‘growth and skills levy’ and we have assurances that lifelong learning will be a key pillar of government policy. All fine and dandy. But it’s starting to look like the film ‘Groundhog Day’ as a corner of my brain is thinking that we’ve heard it all before.

Policy Amnesia: Old Issues, New Names

A recent conference run by the Lifelong Education Institute (on 29 April) left me wondering whether policy makers are suffering from collective amnesia, as it seems we are debating the same issues that people were grappling with 30 years ago, with no real solutions. Gone are initiatives such as YOPs, YTS and TOPs (Youth Opportunities Programme, Youth Training Scheme and Training Opportunities Programme), Train to Gain, the Work Programme and Centres of Vocational Excellence (COVEs), which have all ended up in the trash bin. In their place we have Skills Bootcamps, the Back to Work Plan and the Youth Guarantee. But aren’t they essentially dealing with the same things under a new brand name?

The perennial problem of skills shortages was a hot topic at the conference. Over the years a series of reports have been published, all bemoaning the difficulty employers have in recruiting skilled staff in particular occupational sectors. Currently these include digital, green energy, construction and care. The latest figures show that more than a third (36 per cent) of all job vacancies are proving hard to fill and the total number has doubled between 2017 and 2022.

The Revolving Door of Agencies

Hey presto, we have a new body called Skills England to address this, replacing the Institute of Apprentices and Technical Education, which was a bit of a clunky mouthful. The latter was an independent government organisation, whereas Skills England will be an executive agency within the Department for Education, which presumably means that it will have an “arms-length” relationship with government. The new agency will have to address the rise in NEETs (young people Not in Education, Employment or Training), the fact that employers are spending 26 per cent less on training than they were 20 years ago and cuts to the budgets of further education colleges, as well as skills shortages. I wish the new body well. But the lessons of history raise concerns about its longevity.

Here’s an example. A quango called the Quality Improvement Agency for Lifelong Learning was launched in 2005, formed out the Learning and Skills Development Agency (formerly the FE Unit) where I worked for five years. It lasted barely three years and was metamorphosed into an organisation called LSIS (the Learning and Skills Improvement Service), which closed in 2013. Some of its work has passed to the Education and Training Foundation (founded in the same year), whose remit is all about workforce development and improving the quality of teaching and leadership. If your brain is getting addled, I have your sympathies.

Gaps in the System: The NEET Challenge

Then we have the worrying number of NEETs, a problem that has never been successfully resolved. New on the block is the Youth Guarantee, which aims to ensure every young person aged 18-21 has access to training, an apprenticeship or help to find work. Sounds simple, but in practice, the bits may not be properly joined up, as this case illustrates. The son of a friend of mine completed a one year level 2 course in plumbing last summer and expected to progress to the next level, until his college said they hadn’t received funding for a level 3 course, so they couldn’t run it. That left him without access to education, training or employment, essentially NEET. After considerable effort, he landed a temporary job at a supermarket, but he had no luck finding an apprenticeship. He is now waiting to see if the college level 3 course is running, but will have to pay for it himself as he is now aged 19.

Apprenticeship Churn

And what about the continual churn with apprenticeships? We’ve seen young apprenticeships, modern apprenticeships, foundation apprenticeships, traineeships and constant tinkering with the levy. A motion at the conference stating that “only radical surgery can fix a broken apprenticeship system” was defeated by a narrow margin. The message was that the system was functioning just about OK but needed greater flexibility and some tweaking. So churning will continue until the apprentice onesie in the washing machine comes out spun, shrunk and unrecognisable.

History Repeating Itself

In its 2019 report ‘Sense and Instability’ City and Guilds revealed how many of today’s policies were simply old ones recycled. This concern was raised by Stephen Evans, CEO of the Learning and Work Institute, who highlighted the cyclical nature of skills policies and lessons from history, from the 1882 Samuelson Royal Commission (which was established to compare technical education in England with that in other European countries), through the Manpower Services Commission in the 1970s to the present day. We need to learn from past successes and failures, he said.

“It seems like beyond a certain age we muddle through on our wits,” said skills minister Baroness Jacqui Smith at the conference. The situation is that we have a sector beset with acronyms that are incomprehensive to a lay audience, organisations with overlapping remits and a funding system that turns brains into gloop. Dame Ann Limb mentioned a constant “reinvention of the wheel”. That’s assuming that the wheel was working properly in the first place.

Building on What Works

My view is that the government needs to focus less on tinkering with structures and launching new initiatives and build on what works. For instance, during the pandemic, wage subsidies for apprenticeships led to a 70 per cent increase in take-up as they lower employment costs for businesses but also provide a direct incentive to hire young people. Of course, one obstacle is the lack of money. The further education and lifelong learning sector has suffered constant budget cuts over the past decade as schools have been prioritised. Further education college lecturers and staff are paid significantly less than the equivalent teachers in schools. And why would a qualified plumber or electrician want to teach when they could earn double by working in the construction industry?

Skills England will need to prove that it can address all these issues. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland face the some problems. Meanwhile, I will keep my eyes and earns open when an MP or civil servant announces a new initiative to check whether they are reinventing the wheel or guilty of collective amnesia.

By Anne Nicholls, a freelance writer and public relations consultant specialising in education who has worked in universities, colleges, policy organisations and awarding bodies. Her early career was as a college lecturer.