The Labour government has used up a fifth of its parliamentary mandate. Realistically, it has only 36 months left to demonstrate that it can deliver on its core mission to return growth to the British economy.
A key part of that mission is to raise living standards by fixing the nation’s skills. Labour MPs are banking on a “decade of national renewal”.
Of course, it would be churlish to write off policymakers just yet. Whitehall still has the chance to prove its critics wrong. If they fail, the opinion polls suggest that Sir Keir Starmer will be a one-term prime minister.
If a week is a long time in politics, then a year is a good metric to measure what the government has achieved in skills policy.
In practical terms, the skills mission of this government has only really got going in the past few weeks. We’ve seen a slew of announcements focused on its industrial strategy, including the investment in skills required to deliver Labour’s house building and net zero commitments.
What is still not clear is a detailed roadmap of how the Department for Education and Skills England will shift the dial on the economic doom-loop the country finds itself in: high taxes, poor workforce productivity and low growth.
This blueprint is promised in the post-16 skills white paper, yet ministers are coy about when it will appear, never mind what detail we can expect to see in it.
Over the past year, the government has struggled to communicate a coherent narrative on skills. It came into office after 14 years in the political wilderness with a series of vague proposals built around a single institutional change: creating Skills England.
Strangely, that body is nothing like what Lord Blunkett laid out in October 2022 at the launch of his “council of skills advisers” report – a launch attended by the then shadow education secretary, Bridget Phillipson.
Skills England was supposed to be an independent, cross-government statutory body. Blunkett took a decidedly anti-Whitehall-knows-best approach, calling for a decentralised system to “rapidly restore a sustainable upward trajectory in growth and productivity”.
Newly minted ministers, advised by civil servants, had other ideas.
Not only has Whitehall doubled down on the failed bureaucratic market centralisation model of the past 40 years, senior DfE officials made sure Skills England was placed under the thumb of a permanent secretary and a director-general for skills who advised the last Conservative government. And therein lies the real missed opportunity of Labour’s first year in office.
It started well. Starmer made the point in his August 2024 Downing Street speech, saying: “When there is deep rot in the heart of a structure, you can’t just cover it up. You can’t tinker with it or rely on quick fixes.”
Yet that is precisely how the skills minister, Baroness Jacqui Smith, has marked her first year in office. The veteran Blairite has made technocratic tweaks to apprenticeship assessments, funding and duration, while rebranding other initiatives in a manner that is reminiscent of what the Institute for Government calls “the tendency to abolish and recreate organisations as a proxy for demonstrating progress”.
This performative approach to policy is how Skills England has behaved. Management buzzwords of “partnership” and “simplification” abound, while avoiding any hard metrics of how parliament can hold it to account for raising skills levels.
Maybe that will be revealed in the expected white paper?
In an echo of the cruel disability cuts debacle, DfE ministers have made some very un-Labour choices, such as the 6 per cent cut to adult and community education.
Job updates from officials on LinkedIn felt Kafkaesque
But this is what happens when you rely on the same people who advised the Conservatives. You get poverty of ambition. Take the number of those not in education, employment or training (NEETs). All Smith could tell the Association of Employment and Learning Providers (AELP) conference was that she would “stall” the shocking rise.
It has felt Kafkaesque to observe the job updates from officials on LinkedIn, telling the world that they will be doing the same role for Skills England as they were for the abolished Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education.
Hundreds of hours of wasted parliamentary time to arrive back at square one.
Meanwhile, the real incomes of working people have increased by only 0.1 per cent since this government came to office. The same workers that Labour will need to win over to secure a second term.
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