Can Skills England really fix our broken skills system?

Can the new quango really fix our broken skills system when so many previous attempts at national skills bodies have failed?

The new Labour government says Skills England will bring together the “fractured skills landscape” of employers, unions, providers, universities and local government to boost the nation’s skills.

You’d be forgiven for thinking you’ve heard all this before.

Skills England’s oversight of the skills system is tipped to have a much broader remit than the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (IfATE) which it’s replacing. Skills needs “will be aligned” with the government’s industrial strategy and it will identify training the new growth and skills levy will pay for.

According to prime minister Keir Starmer, Skills England will also “reduce our reliance on workers from overseas”.

But there’s still a lot we don’t know. Legislation to form Skills England, announced in the King’s Speech, is expected to be debated in parliament soon.

What lessons can Skills England learn from previous incarnations to ensure it isn’t just rearranging deckchairs on a sinking skills ship?

Cut the red tape

Since the Manpower Services Commission was created in 1974 to manage training schemes, Tom Bewick, who is researching the history of skills policies for his upcoming book Skills Policy in Britain, says we’ve “always had a very strong, centrally directed national quango of one sort or another”.

What united them all, “regardless what the plaque on the wall says”, was “bureaucratic market centralisation”, he adds.

While in the 1990s the average college principal only dealt with one quango – the Further Education Funding Council – now they must deal with around five, as well as the Department for Education directly.

Bewick says: “Skills England will have to demonstrate that it isn’t just another part of the furniture getting in the way of a sector that already feels quite overburdened.”

The seven-year itch

Like marriages, skills quangos often succumb to a seven-year itch.

So says Lesley Giles, who was commissioned last year by the Association of Colleges (AoC) to draw up a blueprint for a new arms-length skills body.

She knows all about their short shelf life, having worked for two formed by the previous Labour government: the Sector Skills Development Agency, and then the body it morphed into, the UK Commission for Employment & Skills where she was deputy director.

Neither lasted more than eight years; IfATE has been around for seven.

Giles believes the rise and fall of recent quangos has meant the loss of “a lot of institutional memory”. UKCES conducted “regular, robust analysis of the labour market” (including a 2015 survey of 91,000 employers), which “we just don’t do anymore”.

Sue Pember, policy director of adult education body HOLEX, had to close several quangos as a senior civil servant under the coalition government.

She recalls how these quangos often suffered from “mission drift”. Their chief executives “wanted to do other things than what they were set up for, and often fell out with ministers”.

She believes therefore that Skills England needs to have an “understanding right at the beginning of how the organisation will be successful, to prevent fallouts… otherwise, you’ve got a short lifespan”.

Power and influence

There is broad enthusiasm for a skills body with powers to influence policy and delivery across government.

AoC’s public affairs and campaigns director Lewis Cooper believes that how Skills England contributes to Labour’s cross-government missions on economic growth and immigration is a “key governance question” which is “complicated, but critical”.

He warns of a “real risk that Skills England collapses into being just a body sitting within the DfE, without that real clout across government”.

To avoid this, Skills England’s new chief needs the authority to speak directly to secretaries of state and “raise the red flags” – to warn the health secretary if the NHS workforce plan isn’t deliverable because of a lack of college staff to train them, for example.

A source close to the DfE claims it is looking at ranking the new Skills England chief as a director-level position rather than as a director general. Their status will be a “key bellwether on the degree of freedom and power they’ll enjoy”.

“Influential permanent secretaries from other departments won’t see directors, they see them as being too junior.”

The source believes a clipping of their wings in this way may be a deliberate ploy by officials to “contain” the new body. “They’re worried it could get out of control, it may well be critical of the DfE. Senior civil servants would prefer to have it boxed in.”

The DfE says the seniority of the chief’s role is yet to be decided.

But Robert West, head of education and skills at the Confederation of British Industry, dismisses such concerns.

He believes Skills England’s “clout” will come from the “secretary of state talking to other secretaries of state about their skills plans, and offering Skills England as an opportunity to help”.

There are also signs that Skills England will simply undertake much of the work the DfE does already.

The DfE’s Unit for Future Skills, formed in 2022, has already been transferred to Skills England, along with a number of other existing DfE and IfATE officials.

This worries Pember. “Where are they going to bring in new people with new ideas and new ways of working if they’re just transferring in existing staff?”

Long arms

Skills England’s influence is also limited by the simultaneous creation within the Department for Work and Pensions of the Labour Market Advisory Board. It will, among other things, advise the DWP around the establishment of its ‘youth guarantee’ to offer training, an apprenticeship, or help finding work to all those aged 18 to 21.

And a new Industrial Strategy Council (the previous one being dormant since 2021) could potentially also tread on Skills England’s toes when highlighting the skills gaps required to deliver the government’s promised house-building boom and green energy transition.

Ben Rowland, chief executive of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP), says he is “nervous that the requirement for better coordination across the system has been met by the creation of not one, but three new potentially competing coordinating bodies”.

The DfE is currently said to be seeking to make £1 billion of savings, which may reduce Skills England’s headcount and “further chip away at the edifice of independence”, says FE Week’s source.

“Will it become just another division of DfE’s skills directorate, with a Skills England sign on the door?”

They pointed out how “different arm’s-length bodies have different lengths of arm”, with Ofqual’s arms being “eight miles long” and IfATE’s “eight inches”.

“There’s real discussion needed about how long its arms are. I hope the vision is for something that works across government, really brings people together, and has the authority to decide which horses we’re backing in the economy.”

Core functions

The core functions of Skills England, Cooper says, should be intelligence, coordination and oversight, informing and working across different arms of government, key agencies and mayoral combined authorities.

He says oversight is currently lacking when it comes to the local skills improvement plans, which have “input in working out individual areas’ future skills needs, but not the oversight to ensure those gaps are being addressed”.

Bewick believes Skills England offers the English system a chance to “end the binary divide between FE and HE”. How Skills England interacts with (or against) the powerful HE regulator, the Office for Students, remains to be seen.

Pember says Skills England also needs to consult with students themselves, because “motivating the learner is something we’ve forgotten completely about in the last 20 years”.

Running the show

The government has yet to announce who Skills England’s chief executive will be.

While Giles believes they should have “standing” with the business community, she warns of having seen chiefs brought in from the private sector who were “like bunnies in the headlights” when grappling with the inner workings of the public sector.

“It will require a senior leadership team with a combination of education, public service and some industry skills,” says Bewick.

Cooper believes that leaders from across colleges, universities, trade unions and employers should all be given seats on its board, which are currently being advertised. Doing so would, he says, give credence to education secretary Bridget Phillipson’s multiple recent comments about reforming the government’s relationship with sector leaders, and “could reshape a partnership of ‘doing with’ rather than ‘being done to’”.

But there will be “huge pressure on civil servants and ambitious ministers to move quickly” which “sometimes means we don’t work as effectively in co-constructing. There’s a massive risk they get off on the wrong foot by not working really seriously in partnership with the sector.”

The CBI has attended recent roundtables on Skills England and been “assured” it would not just be “IfATE in disguise”, says West. He is therefore feeling “quite positive” about it.

But there is concern within the training sector over a lack of consultation around Skills England’s remit.

Our source claims the DfE has a “fixed view” on what the new body should look at, which is “very much a DfE-generated impression”.

The DfE is not planning a formal consultation, but sector engagement will follow the publication of Skills England’s first report in the autumn.

Distraction from funding

Cooper says current government funding constraints makes the role of Skills England all the more important in helping decide where to prioritise spending, to fill the biggest gaps.

Rob Nitsch, former director of skills delivery at IfATE and now chief executive of the Federation of Awarding Bodies, believes a significant opportunity will be missed if there is a failure to eliminate overlaps between the activities and functions of IfATE and other institutional bodies, including the DfE.

But Pember sees the new body as a “red herring”, “distracting” the sector from the real issue of a general lack of funding.

“We’ve got a billion less funding in the adult world, even without the mess that we’re in at 16 to 18. We now haven’t got enough staff to actually educate the people who want to be educated.”

Giles believes that the first step for Skills England should be to “grasp the nettle” with a consensus on what the shared national skills priorities are, aligned to the industrial strategy, how they will play out regionally and, crucially, include a sector perspective which is currently lacking.

Another source expressed concern that by making colleges “much more influential” the new body would “drag us back to being a supplier-led system”.

“We used that playbook previously and ended up with a skill system which was not giving people skills that were wanted in the workplace.”

Despite some reservations, the overall mood about the potential of Skills England is one of optimism.

Cooper is “hopeful” it will lead to a “step change”, despite “risks of status quo-ism”.

Giles hopes that the body will be “apolitical and not attached to a particular government administration”, because its missions will be “hard and take a long time”.

“If you’re endlessly closing down and setting up institutions, things won’t ever really change,” she warns.