While WorldSkills UK chief executive Ben Blackledge is hoping for medal glory in Lyon next week, his broader aim is for sustainable excellence in the skills sector
As Team UK’s 31 WorldSkills competitors prepare to do battle next week, the group’s chief executive Ben Blackledge must juggle another challenge.
When we spoke, Blackledge’s wife was just days away from giving birth to a new member of their young family.
And now their baby son has arrived, he must support him, his spouse, his daughter and a global skills competition. So how is he managing?
“It’s the joy of balancing,” he laughs. “I’m manifesting that he’s going to be a good sleeper. That’s the plan.”
Blackledge tells me he started his two-decade journey to his current job after landing a temporary job at the Learning and Skills Council.
He doesn’t have a Starmer-esque vocational claim to fame. His mother was a primary school teacher at his school in Essex, which he says was “completely humiliating” at the time.
Meanwhile, his father was a salesman who sold smoking sundries and lighters, then made a “slightly surreal career choice” when Blackledge was a teenager and set up a business importing tree ferns. Blackledge and his friends would spend their summers doing back-breaking work hauling 12-foot plants.
“You used to find the dust from tree ferns everywhere, so you have it in your nails and your ears and your nose,” he says. “The smell of tree ferns still brings back memories.”
Going to Cardiff University to read business, he says, is one of Blackledge’s “biggest” regrets. Whilst he enjoyed debating the merits of the European Union he now wishes he had a “verifiable” skill set such as engineering, medicine, or law.
But his degree choice allowed him the time to enjoy a proper university experience, a “game changer” for his confidence. He also spent time volunteering through his church which would include organising weekend trips for people from deprived backgrounds.
His temp job at the Learning and Skills Council (before it became the Skills Funding Agency and subsequently the Education and Skills Funding Agency) involved carrying out admin for its prison offender team in the south east of England.
He says: “The repetition of learning was an issue when I was involved. We were looking to make sure if someone did a learning course and was moved from a prison, how did that follow them?”
Finding his future
After a couple of years, Blackledge moved on to working for the Learning and Skills Council’s individual learner accounts pilot, a New Labour policy that gave purchasing power to learners.
Then aged 24, his task included talking providers into adopting a new digital solution.
He says: “I got some fairly hostile responses from people. Some of that was completely justified because individual learner accounts had been a bit of a nightmare before.
“And I was this 24-year-old kid coming in and telling them how this was going to help them and their learners. They were like, ‘You don’t know anything’, and they were right.”
Blackledge moved into careers policy after a few years, and that’s where he got his first experience of WorldSkills – then called Find a Future – although he didn’t realise the significance at the time.
Working at the National Careers Service, he helped set up careers advice hubs in London’s Excel centre at WorldSkills 2011 when the global competition was staged there.
“When I went for an interview for my first job at Find a Future, that was my pitch. You’ve got these competitions, I was there for four days, and I didn’t even really know about them.”
For the last decade, Blackledge has been at the forefront of recalibrating WorldSkills UK towards showcasing and benchmarking technical training standards through competitions.
He says: “We want to make sure that we are benchmarking the UK and showing the level of skills that we’ve got across the UK and internationally,” he says. “The Olympic Games are a very visual example of how you do that through these kind of events.”
WorldSkills UK has been around since 1953 – that’s over 70 years of experience of what world-class quality can look like.
Blackledge joined Find a Future in 2014 to run the flagship Skills Show, the organisation’s annual careers event in Birmingham.
“I realised there was so much more to the work of the organisation,” he says. “Getting to know the large network of people we work with, and who are passionate supporters of our programmes, has given me a greater insight into the sector.”
Climbing the career ladder
Blackledge rose through the ranks, running its national competitions and working with industry and government to expand and embed the charity’s remit into FE, eventually becoming deputy chief executive in 2019 before taking the top job last year.
So how is he finding life at the top?
“I do feel very lucky to be working with so many passionate and talented people both in WorldSkills UK and across the sector, it makes the job that much easier and a lot more fun.”
He adds the chief executive position is “always challenging”, partly because the organisation has received a shrinking budget from the government for several years.
Blackledge says for many years WorldSkills UK has urged the government to view its grant funding as a “must-have”, not a “nice to have” for the sector. Yet its government grants have fallen by a third in the last nine years to £8.3 million in 2022-23.
Under Labour, the Department of Education appears to be maintaining a policy commitment to WorldSkills, proved by the skills minister Jacqui Smith flying out to Lyon to see the competition next week. But WorldSkills UK only has grant funding secured from the DfE until 2024-25.
As a result, the organisation has sought commercial backing and has partnerships with NCFE, Pearson, Autodesk, BAE Systems and Skills and Education Group.
“We can demonstrate that if you invest in us, we can see an increased level of employability of young people, or an increased wage earning of young people,” Blackledge says. “That’s obviously beneficial for the individual and the economy as well.”
Boosting college involvement
Looking at recent UK team cohorts, just a handful of colleges consistently send students to competitions – they include Northern Regional College in Northern Ireland, Coleg Gwent in south-east Wales and Trafford & Stockport College Group in Greater Manchester.
So how can WorldSkills UK drive up involvement from within the sector?
“I do think it is a leadership issue within the sector, not that it’s an issue with leaders, but that they need to grasp this and examine how they look at quality,” Blackledge says.
Talk of excellence isn’t about being elitist
Large college groups such as NCG, he adds, are beginning to think about excellence and competitions in a big way.
Additionally, WorldSkills UK has seen a “big uptake” in registrations for national finals from English colleges. Around 70 per cent of English colleges are now involved.
The byproduct should be a wider geographical spread of competitors who make up Team UK and Squad UK. But it will take time to feed through.
“For the first time we are laying a sustainable approach to develop excellence more broadly across the sector,” Blackledge says.
It’s clear the chief executive is passionate about the word ‘excellence’ and what it means to young people and their education.
“There’s a misunderstanding about when we talk about excellence, and it’s not about being elitist,” he says.
“Excellence isn’t restricted to certain people. If you are an entry-level learner or a level 7 learner, or have special education needs or an academic background, what does excellence look like for you in that space?”
Hosting WorldSkills ‘not ruled out’
Turning to Team UK, Blackledge hopes the UK will rank in the top 10 league table at WorldSkills Lyon next week and bring home plenty of medals.
“I think we’ve got some really strong competitors,” he says. “I think we’ve got some good medal hopes. It’s one of those things that I’m always nervous about, because you never know how things will play out.”
Behind the scenes at Lyon, the WorldSkills general assembly will vote on a host for the 2027 event – which is between Japan and Canada.
Blackledge hasn’t ruled out bidding for the UK to host sometime in the future, but it must “form part of a longer-term plan”, with the government, employers and education providers backing a pitch.
“The time is possibly now, though I’m not sure with the conversations about austerity – talking about an 80-nation event in London might not land quite yet,” he says.
“I wouldn’t rule it out, but it’s not something that we’re actively pursuing at the moment.”
So for now, Blackledge’s focus is on supporting the UK’s competitors in Lyon. Their areas of expertise include auto paint spraying, hairdressing, cyber-security and cooking.
And if things go well he hopes the country’s winners will receive a hero’s welcome similar to those given to our Olympic and Paralympic champions.
He says: “Do I want them to be celebrated and recognised on the BBC Breakfast sofa with their medals? Absolutely.”
FE Week is the media partner for WorldSkills UK. Follow our coverage of WorldSkills Lyon next week.
