The biggest economic challenge facing Britain is getting growth going, and one of the biggest obstacles to that is our poor performance on skills. It is not all bad news. We are doing better on the education basics at school. And our flexible labour market is relatively good at using the skills we have got. But our adult workers do not have the level of skills of many of our competitors.
There is no one single policy solution to this deep-seated problem. Instead we can think of it as a check-list of sensible interventions at successive stages of the journey through schools and college or university and then out into the labour market. And the first good news is that there can be a more coherent overall view now that there is one minister – and a highly experienced and competent one – bridging the two key departments of the DfE and DWP. This could resolve one of Whitehall’s oldest border disputes. The DfE is frustrated that the DWP does not allow unemployed benefit recipients to get training without losing their benefits. The DWP thinks that the DfE is trying to use the welfare budget to fund education programmes. If anyone can resolve this, it will be Jacqui Smith.
But that is only the start. There is still a lot to do. Here is a short checklist.
The most shocking waste in our whole education system is how we write off the 30 per cent or more of 16-year-olds who do not pass GCSEs in maths or English. Resits only rescue at best 30 per cent of them. For the rest, their long-term job and employment options are badly damaged. We need to be bolder in finding different types of routes to get them to Level 3. This is rightly a priority in the government’s wider education and skills strategy.
BTECs can play a big role here. It is a pity that their future is once more under threat. First there was a mistaken belief that, somehow, T-levels could replace them when T-levels were designed as a specific technical qualification, not an all-purpose alternative to A-levels. Now the government is planning to design a new qualification to replace them. This is going to waste years.
I was one of the people encouraging George Osborne to create the Apprenticeship Levy. I saw it as a boost to funding for apprenticeships; to match the fees and loans boosting funding for higher education. But employers have understandably been spending it on their own current employees rather than taking on what they see as the greater risk of a new apprentice. This means that there has been a shift in the age and education level of apprenticeships upwards. It is the younger people at levels 2 and 3 who have lost out. The government should rebalance the system back towards them.
Degree apprenticeships are the most extreme form of this. Students get qualification at higher education level and many go on to well-paid jobs. These courses costs up to £30,000. It is an indefensible diversion of rationed apprenticeship funding to pay for such courses when the levy should be for younger and less-qualified people. Degree apprenticeships should be funded by fees and loans to liberate resources for this. This also reflects the reality that many degree courses are vocational. The only trouble is we don’t know how many. It would be great if the government did more to collect the data that would show how many university students are getting onto a clear route to certain occupations, and indeed often with an explicit licence to practice. Universities are where much of our vocational education is delivered.
Content from our partners
Related
