The UK’s modern industrial strategy recognises that skills increase productivity, increase innovation and support technology adoption. There’s just one wording missing from that sentence: excellence. WorldSkills UK has learnt through successive international skills Olympics over the last ten years that competence in skills is good but excellence in skills is game-changing.
Skills excellence is essential for international competitiveness and a magnet for global investment, key pillars on which the industrial strategy is built. The FE sector, some would argue long overlooked in discussions of economic growth, is now on the front line of delivering these ambitious national growth plans.
Colleges, independent training providers and universities are essential in embedding world-class, international standards at the heart of how we train, develop, and empower the next generation. They also serve as anchors of regional growth, ensuring investment reaches every corner of the country.
What do we mean by skills excellence?
Skills excellence is the development of world-class technical and professional standards. At its pinnacle it encompasses high-level expertise, precision and innovation – for example milling to a 1mm tolerance, working under time pressure to meet changing deadlines and having the confidence to bring forward new ideas. But it can start off with simple steps, such as encouraging learners to go outside their comfort zone and understanding, and through clear assessment frameworks how to keep improving. These are all qualities essential for driving productivity and sharpening the UKs competitive advantage, which is why they should be built into the government’s new skills packages for the digital, engineering and defence sectors.
Aligning with the skills that employers need
Bringing employers and the skills system closer together is a critical part of embedding skills excellence. Employers are involved in setting the standards that we use at international and national level competitions, making sure they are focused on the latest industry practices and technology. Our competition model includes practical and project-based assessments which mirror the application of skills that employers need, with many involved in the setting and judging of competition tasks. WorldSkills UK is helping ensure that global industry standards are built into UK occupational standards and curricula through our network of international skills experts.
Investing in educators
The ten-year timeframe set out by the Prime Minister in the industrial strategy gives the UK time to invest in its technical education workforce so we can shift from teaching for competence to teaching for excellence. We know the appetite is out there. Our centre of excellence programme, in partnership with NCFE, has shown enormous demand for a pedagogical approach that focuses on skills excellence. We’ve already worked with 14,000 educators and nearly 230,000 learners have already benefited from their adoption of a world-class teacher methodology.
This drive towards high-quality skills development is further reinforced by DfE’s criteria for becoming a college of technical excellence in construction, which recognises institutions that demonstrate a commitment to quality through initiatives like our national competitions and the centre of excellence.
International insights
The UK needs to understand how other countries are developing skills excellence. The WorldSkills movement, now in its eighth decade, is a perfect way to do this and has been giving us the opportunity to bring global standards of excellence back to the UK and benchmark UK technical education against the best in the world. With an industrial strategy focused on making the UK the best place to invest and improving competitiveness of our home-grown industries, these international insights will be critical.
Mainstreaming skills excellence isn’t about focusing on an elite few. It’s about setting high aspirations for every learner, at every level. The UK’s modern industrial strategy, with its promise of additional funding and the political recognition that skills is an enabler of growth should give us the opportunity to make skills excellence a reality for all young learners and build a high-skilled economy.
I am sorry to say that your idea of excellence is way off beam if milling to 1mm accuracy is considered the norm
Routinely one would expect to mill to 0.1mm in a normal workshop and 0.01mm in precision work. We are for the most part now missing 2 generations of real engineers who can pass on their lifetimes knowledge. I do not know how we can recover from here. The training schemes such I have seen are no more than silly paper excercises.