My overwhelming feeling upon reading this Act is that the intent within it is good, but it will be let down by a host of aspects that haven’t been addressed for decades.
Employers get what comes through employability and skills funding through job centres, colleges and training providers. The elephant in the room is that the quality is often poor, the results aren’t being measured by the Department for Work & Pensions [DWP] and there is a mismatch between what employers need, what is funded and what providers can deliver. This disconnect has lingered for many years and worsened to the point where recent research by the London Chambers of Commerce found that 63 per cent of businesses have no intention of engaging with government employment schemes. We must ask why that is.
Firstly, courses are often too theoretical and don’t withstand the first contact that learners have with work on the ground. Furthermore, many skills required in the workplace are soft skills and colleges don’t necessarily teach those well either. Should those providing the courses focus on the needs of employers and individuals, we could see improvement. However, too few understand how to do that beyond the scope of a contract. Many colleges in my view have only survived from playing the system and securing a good course uptake to access funding. But bums on seats doesn’t equate to addressing employer needs properly.
However, moving the dial in the marketplace to make further education providers do things differently and deliver the paradigm shift we need is no simple fix. People have been institutionalised and are going through the motions, so the civil servants and ministers that we need to deliver such systemic change don’t have the capability, competence nor motivation to do it. A senior business leader encapsulated the situation perfectly when he told me recently that: “I agree with you completely, but this stuff is in the ‘too difficult box’.
You’re dealing with people who don’t want a solution and business wants to deal with people who do.” If the appetite isn’t there to resolve this, the Act will make little difference.
Elsewhere, the funding model itself is an issue. For instance, a young person in terms of funding is worth five times more than an adult, so colleges are less inclined to admit unemployed adults to courses and this is a key demographic we should be targeting. It has also become too difficult for quality providers to get into the market because it’s a largely closed shop. Some big providers have become too big to fail and regularly secure government contracts even if they aren’t delivering quality training.
Looking further at the adult workforce, since the pandemic we’ve accumulated around one million people who are economically inactive and aren’t claiming Universal Credit. We should ask where these people went to get quality advice on their career options. If those services are put into place to establish what these people want to do and why, this can feed into what colleges are offering and be used to help improve what’s there. As it is, there is no communication and poor provision keeps these people trapped in the system and not progressing into work instead of helping them better themselves while meeting the needs of business, society and the economy.
By way of solutions, the Act talks a lot about local engagement and putting employers and skills needs at the heart of how courses are designed. But this assumes that such collaboration will work smoothly while current reality suggests otherwise. If business owners haven’t engaged with government employability schemes and colleges for so long, what has changed in this Act for them to suddenly want to do so now?
The Act also mentions accountability and giving the education secretary the power to intervene where colleges are not meeting local needs. But if Nadhim Zahawi assumes he’ll be able to simply click his fingers and instigate change, then he is in for a huge shock.
Key Points:
• There is a huge mismatch between what employers need, the education that is funded, and what providers are delivering.
• Training provision is sub-par, but funding model keeps poor quality providers in contracts.
• There is not the appetite within government departments to resolve the issue, but we’ve reached a point where we can ill afford not to.
This article originally appeared in The Leaders Council’s special report on ‘The Impact of the Skills & Post-16 Education Act on the Construction, Engineering & Manufacturing sectors’, published on July 4, 2022. Read the full special report here.
Photo by Green Chameleon on Unsplash
