The UK needs to get to grips with the skills crisis that is contributing to its flatlining productivity. With that in mind, the Prime Minister’s ‘five pledges’ speech last week included plans to make students study some form of maths until the age of 18.
But how close is the UK to having a full-blooded skills policy that adds up, and what part can regional and local government play?
Rishi Sunak said education needed to stop being seen ‘as something that ends aged 18 – or that sees university as the only option’ and that we need ‘more technical education, lifelong learning, and apprenticeships’.
A day later, Labour leader Keir Starmer presented his vision to get the UK economy growing again, with an emphasis on boosting local levers. He said that if his party won the next election it would prioritise a Take Back Control Bill. This would devolve power to local areas on employment support, transport, climate change, housing and other policies, including how councils run their finances.
What are the main challenges facing the UK on skills and what should a really effective place-sensitive strategy prioritise?
Writing on Twitter, chief executive of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, Henri Murison, said it was ‘bad skills policy’ to spend so much on GCSE maths and English resits [with] huge chunks of the adult education budget used for it in northern city regions’. He added that Multiply – Rishi Sunak’s £559m flagship project as chancellor aimed at improving adults’ functional numeracy skills and the first priority of the UK Shared Prosperity Fund – ‘also has its issues. It has been at the expense of other place skills programmes’.
Professor Graeme Atherton is head of the Centre for Inequality and Levelling Up at the University of West London. He told The MJ the Government is already taking some steps to improve skills through the Apprenticeship Levy paid by large employers to support apprenticeships and the Lifelong Loan Entitlement to be introduced from 2025 for the equivalent of four years of post-18 education. There are also duties on designated employer representative bodies to implement and review a local skills improvement plan. And there are, of course, the metro mayors ‘who have some money to do stuff’ in the skills realm.
Professor Atherton said there had been a marked decline in the last 10 years in the numbers of adult learners. He asked: ‘How would a locally-delivered skills and learning strategy address that? You’ve got to resource these things as well.’ He added: ‘Would local government engagement allow you to get better connection with the private sector?’ Incentivisation might have to come from central Government too. ‘You need that combination of strategies as well, from both central and local.’
Adam Hawksbee is deputy director of the centre right think-tank, Onward. He told The MJ the UK has ‘three big interrelated challenges’ on skills. The population is ‘massively underqualified’. It is also ‘quite under-prepared for a transition to a world where people are going to have to constantly update their skills because of new forms of technology’. The UK is additionally ‘hugely unequal’, with people with qualifications concentrated both in cities and in the South East, and there are pockets of places with very low levels of formal qualifications.
Giving local areas new money and powers over skills – as well as transport and housing – are fundamental to devolution.
In December, the North East became the sixth area to agree a devolution deal with the Government, continuing progress with the White Paper mission that by 2030 every part of England that wants a devolution deal will have one.
The White Paper also announced the opening of negotiations for the ‘trailblazer’ deeper devolution deals with the Greater Manchester and West Midlands combined authorities.
Forging a skills pipeline involves the problem of how to convene all the different actors involved – and devolution helps with this, said Mr Hawksbee.
Pointing to the West Midlands, he added: ‘I think there’s really good evidence that West Midlands Mayor Andy Street, particularly on the digital side of things, has been fantastic with people such as Goldman Sachs.
‘They moved their second headquarters to Birmingham. That was partly because the Mayor was able to promise that a lot of the money he gets for adult education and for bootcamps would be targeted towards the sort of tech skills Goldman Sachs needed.’
But he accused the Department for Education (DfE) of holding back progress. ‘The DfE have historically been real opponents of devolution and have really dragged their feet when it comes to giving mayors the autonomy and accountability that would let them move really fast. They’ve now got a real opportunity with these trailblazer deals to signal they are going to give mayors – particularly Andy Street and Andy Burnham – the tools they need to address some of these skills gaps, boost productivity and secure green jobs.’
He added: ‘If Andy Street could bring a gigafactory [facilities that produce batteries for electric vehicles on a large scale] to the West Midlands – if he hatches a deal with Coventry University, Solihull College, some of the really good providers around there – he needs the tools to do that. There are grounds for optimism in the sense that this could be an enormously powerful set of conditions for growth, but needs the DfE to act differently.’
A Government spokesperson said in response to Mr Hawksbee’s criticisms: ‘We remain committed to addressing skills gaps in all areas of the country, including the trailblazer areas of Greater Manchester and the West Midlands, and are currently engaged in negotiations on the skills elements of the Trailblazer deals which are due to be announced early this year.
‘We recognise that there are different skills needs in different regions and that national skills policy needs to be adapted to the needs of each area. That is why many of our skills programmes have local flexibilities that recognise this difference. Work continues apace to deliver devolution deals.’
The West Midlands has had devolution of the adult skills budget since 2019. Dr Fiona Aldridge is head of insights and intelligence, economic delivery, skills and communities, at West Midlands Combined Authority. She told The MJ the trailblazer devolution deals are an opportunity to act as a test bed for new place-based approaches.
‘It’s a kind of focus on us as a region, at what we think we would need in order to be able to deliver a better deal for the West Midlands, but it’s absolutely about being able to trial something, being able to shape something that could have a broader applicability to other devolved areas and indeed to newly-devolved areas.’
What the West Midlands is trying to do is create an integrated skills and employment support system for the region. ‘But we are still very much in negotiations with Government departments. I would expect it would be the first few months of the year before we get the final agreement about what that might look like.’
She emphasised having timely and robust data and data from the right geography are ‘really critical to make sure we can target our investment and our interventions well’.
There are ‘three key asks’ for the region. The first is for greater influence over post- 16 technical and vocational education. The second is for a new approach to co-commissioning employment support provision in the West Midlands, ‘recognising that when people are trying to get jobs and progress at work, it’s often a combination of employment support and skills that helps them do that.’
Currently, those portfolios are in separate departments at a national level. ‘We think we can deliver better outcomes by integrating them together at a regional or local level. We have some experience because we work closely with the Department for Work and Pensions regionally at doing that and are getting good outcomes.’
The third devolution ask is for a West Midlands careers service, because ‘to have an integrated system you really need to help people find their way about it’. She concluded: ‘We don’t know how much of that we will get, whether it will be in stages, and how integrated it will be. But our vision is to be able to integrate it and we think that creates better outcomes and better value for money.’
