Sir Keir Starmer’s decision to move adult skills policy out of DfE and into a new “super ministry” focused on workforce productivity and growth is a golden opportunity for the FE sector and the country.
Details are still emerging on exactly how this latest machinery of government change will pan out under its new secretary of state, Pat McFadden.
DfE officialdom will resent the fact that a large chunk of its FE budget is to be taken away. Education ministers are set to lose responsibility for at least £5 billion of annual public expenditure, including the apprenticeship budget and the adult skills fund.
Skills England shift
Skills England will become an arms-length body of a UK-wide department, which itself presents an opportunity to create a more coherent approach to skills and devolution. The emergence of “post-code lotteries” for adult learners and costly “parallel skills bureaucracies” across the UK has created stark inequities and inefficiencies in delivery.
McFadden, born in Scotland and representing an English Midlands constituency since 2005, is a stalwart of the Labour movement, having cut his teeth in student politics.
Of course, this move takes place in the context of a terrible decade for adult learning. Following the Wolf Review in 2011, the Conservatives significantly reduced the qualifications available to those seeking access to the lower rungs of the opportunity ladder.
Austerity delivered cuts of 40 per cent to the adult community budget. It meant that participation has plummeted, from 5 million 16-64 years in FE during the early 2000s to just above 2 million today. Historically, we are far removed from the working-class self-improvement movements of the nineteenth century that gave rise to the first mechanics’ institutes.
Sluggish growth
The tragedy is that this underinvestment in publicly funded skills capacity has coincided with sluggish productivity growth, exacerbated by the fact that private sector training volumes have halved since the abolition of the industrial training boards in the early 1980s. Many workers are paid little more in real terms today than they were at the time of the 2008 global financial crash.
It is one of the leading causes of today’s cost-of-living crisis. That’s because the skills engine has been allowed to decouple from the growth engine: policy has focused on tinkering around with skills supply instead of focusing more laser-like on tackling skills demand.
Focusing on demand requires an entirely different policy approach from the one that Whitehall officials have been pursuing. Instead of top-down training products designed by the centre and delivered via FE, the model needs to shift its focus to skills utilisation and creating good jobs in every community. It requires local differentiation within a universal framework of properly funded learning entitlements. Crucially, it requires the seamless integration between domestic skills policy and the issuance of work visas to overseas nationals.
The new ministry has these kinds of levers, should it choose to use them. For example, instead of the emphasis on taking minimum-wage jobs inherent in universal credit eligibility, it should now be possible to upskill and reskill the workforce to secure higher-paid employment.
It can also implement strategies to address the impending job dislocations that will result from increased automation and AI.
Levy upside
Apprenticeships are another area that could benefit substantially from a UK-wide approach. I dedicate a whole chapter to this issue in my forthcoming book.
After all, the growth and skills levy is collected on a UK-wide basis. Employment policy is reserved for Westminster. By reclassifying apprenticeships as part of employment policy, ministers would acquire the levers to ensure a common approach to apprenticeship standards and delivery regardless of whether apprentices and firms reside in England, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland.
Such a move would help bolster the UK’s internal market, as well as reduce red tape for training providers and assessment bodies to work in all four nations.
Of course, success alone doesn’t come from government machinery changes. However, this move by Keir Starmer might just get what has been a hollow and hugely disappointing year for skills policy back on track.
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