White paper fails to put employers at the centre of our FE universe

I have read the skills white paper from cover to cover, revisited it, discussed it, commented on it. Each time it feels less like a coherent, single document and more like a collection of loose ideas at different stages of maturity, all trying hard to be seen to say the “right sort of thing”.

It lacks a North Star: a fixed point guiding where we are going that would bind the ideas and create a unifying purpose. Without this, drifting into the doldrums feels like a very real risk. 

Members of the Association of Employment and Learning Providers span the skills system. Best known for our independent training providers (ITPs), we have a growing number of FE colleges, universities, assessment organisations and employers among our ranks. This breadth gives us a rounded and grounded view of how the system does and could work.

So, what do we think should be guiding the North Star for the skills system? The institutions that deliver it all – the ITPs, colleges and universities? Frontline staff, perhaps, the people who make the magic happen? Or the learners we exist to support? 

All are vital.  

But none are as important as the stakeholders for whom the system should be built: employers. 

There are three reasons for this:

1. Employers are the end user and the ultimate gatekeeper. If it doesn’t work for them, it doesn’t work at all. We can train people endlessly, but if employers don’t value or use those skills, that effort is a waste of time and money. 
2. Employers, when involved and harnessed properly, simplify and improve the system because they have to live with its results. 
3. Engaged and equipped employers would amplify and multiply government inputs, creating a virtuous cycle of skills, confidence and growth, making precious taxpayer pounds go much further.

The white paper does not ‘get’ this. There are some warm words about meeting employers’ needs, but at a superficial level. There is no exploration of how and why employers act and respond in the way they do and how that might be influenced. 

The white paper gives the impression that the government sees employers as a means to its own skills needs, rather than government being there to serve employers’ needs. 

Even if you think this is the right way to view the skills system, it is not an effective way to get employers on your side!

This government’s blind spot about employers is beginning to cause problems. Good ideas – foundation apprenticeships, assessment reform – struggle to gain traction and their implementation consumes precious resources, including time and goodwill. When employers are put front and centre instead, this changes dramatically for the better.  

That means a more structured, engaging and confident approach to consultation with employers. So far – across not just employers, but also providers, awarding organisations and other stakeholders in the system – the government has really struggled with consultation. It starts, but does not follow through. 

What employers and other stakeholders want is proper consultation, which means true co-creation. We want to work through messy problems and trade-offs together, all the way through to implementation and impact.  

There is a risk that the government looks at its hit-and-miss involvement of employers to date, for example through route panels and trailblazers (the groups of employers and other experts who provide strategic oversight for specific sectors within the apprenticeship system) and draws the conclusion that there should be less engagement with them. 

This would be precisely the wrong conclusion. It needs MORE engagement with employers, including a refreshed and strengthened mechanism for employer involvement in Skills England, in programme and assessment design and in policy formulation.

A live example of this at the moment is around reform of apprenticeship assessment, where two of just five ‘exemplar’ reformed assessment reforms have run into the buffers (and the other three have emerged only torturously), precisely because employers are pushing back – hard – on what to them are obvious problems that they could have told government upfront.  There is a risk that this experience could be repeated in the creation of new apprenticeship units.

So I want to see a new coda to the white paper in which the government commits to genuine partnership with employers, providers, and assessment organisations, with employer wants and needs as the North Star.

Not only will this maximise the chances of us getting the skills system we so badly need, it will also happen more quickly and with much less of the friction we are beginning to experience.