Skills for Jobs: What Does It Mean? Part II

By Emily Fielder

Providing the Advanced Technical and Higher Technical Skills the Nation Needs

The second part of the Department for Education’s white paper clearly follows Gavin Williamson’s eminently justifiable decision to abandon Tony Blair’s pledge to send 50% of young people to university earlier this year, citing his exasperation over an ‘inbuilt snobbishness about higher [education] being better than further.’ University graduates currently outnumber those in apprenticeships or trainee schemes, but this does not imply the great upward mobility that Blair promised, especially when one considers that earning premiums for higher-level apprenticeships exceed many university courses after four years, and that many degrees do not set graduates on a straightforward career path; as a humanities student, I’m currently experiencing this problem first-hand. Such considerations, alongside the huge unemployment crisis precipitated by the pandemic, are not the sole issues underpinning this chapter of the white paper either. The Government is currently facing the prospect that, by 2030, there could be a shortage of 2.5 million high-skilled people and a surplus of 6 million intermediate or low-skilled people to available jobs. These skills-shortages are likely to be mainly felt in sectors such as construction and manufacturing, which could seriously put a spanner in the works (no pun intended) of the Government’s Green Industrial Revolution.

The second part seeks to address the problems discussed above via the following policies; the creation of a £2.5 billion National Skills Fund which will allow any adult to take their first level 3 qualification for free; the introduction of employer-led digital bootcamps to upskill their employees; the establishment of Institutes of Technology and T-Levels, the technical equivalent of A-Levels, and a reformation of higher technical education insofar as a national approvals process will now show which qualifications are worth taking, with a reduction in funding for those which are not approved. What is immediately obvious is the Government’s attempt to base their initiatives for post-16 technical training on the German dual vocational model. Under this system, there is strong co-operation between mainly small and medium-sized companies and publicly funded vocational schools, with trainees typically spending part of each week at the school and the other at the company, or spending longer periods at each place before alternating. Similarly, those studying for T-levels under the new English system will spend at least 45 days on an industry placement. Indeed, the interest in how Germany has kept its youth unemployment numbers low, at least pre-pandemic, permeates the white paper.

Another striking aspect of this chapter is the Department’s emphasis on approval processes and communications campaigns surrounding its intended reforms. There is now a clear understanding that something needs to be done in order to challenge the entrenched perception that technical education is a second-best choice for those who academically struggle, a perception that successive governments have thus far failed to remedy.

This chapter of the White Paper has received its fair share of praise, especially from those working in the further education sector who welcome government funding and attention, but it’s worth noting that these proposals are not as radical as they might first appear. On the contrary, the policies and their underlying motives bear a striking resemblance to a white paper written for Thatcher’s government in 1981 entitled A New Training Initiative: A Programme for Action, which highlighted three major objectives; to develop skills training in young people; to move towards a position where everyone under the age of 18 has the opportunity to continue in full-time education or enter a period of planned work experience, and to re-skill or up-skill all adults, which led to the creation of the Youth Training Scheme. Just as Thatcher’s government reacted to the 1981 riots which had brought to the fore the issue of youth unemployment, Johnson’s government has reacted to the pandemic-fuelled unemployment crisis in a similar fashion. It remains to be seen whether these skills initiatives will have a greater long-term impact.

Regardless of whether the Government are wise in building upon initiatives that historically have had some beneficial outcomes for unemployment rates in the past, it is worth mentioning two potential criticisms. The first is that the Department is proposing major structural changes in further education without much up-front or even long-term spending promises from the Treasury. If the Government wants to initiate major reform, a clearer investment plan is required. The second is that although the Government seeks to redress the skills shortages faced by recent school-leavers and working adults, it has as yet failed to recognise or address the fact that young people leaving school without the required skills for today’s job market is, at heart, a failure of primary and secondary education. Research by the OECD has strongly indicated that in order to improve youth employment prospects, it is essential to combat schools’ failures to equip students with such skills. Greater impetus needs to be given to up-skill school pupils, rather than merely trying to solve the problem once they have already left secondary education. If the Government truly desires to ‘build back better’ after the pandemic, longer-term thinking is required.