In September, Skills England published its first report: Driving Growth and Widening Opportunities. The report did two main things: it outlined what Skills England will do and it presented an initial analysis of the skills needs of the country.
The report is stimulating much discussion and debate. For instance:
How will Skills England work with the devolved nations, and mayoral combined authorities and strategic local authorities in England?
As an executive agency within the Department for Education (DfE), how will Skills England operate alongside another arm’s length body within DfE, the Office for Students, which is a non-departmental public body?
More widely, how will Skills England work on migration policy with the Migration Advisory Council, a non-departmental public body reporting to the Home Office?
How will Skills England support the emerging industrial strategy to be led by a statutory Industrial Strategy Council while also ensuring that skills for the ‘everyday’ economy are not forgotten?
And what will the role of Skills England be in the DWP’s soon to be published Back to Work Strategy and how is it going to interact with the Labour Market Advisory Board?
What data will Skills England use beyond the Occupations in Demand Index? How good will it be at the notoriously tricky area of labour market forecasting? How and why will it be better than IfATE in defining qualifications and programmes?
Underpinning these questions are real and valid concerns about the independence of Skills England from the Department of Education and, therefore, about its ‘clout’ in getting the attention and respect of other parts of government.
These many and varied conversations so far are producing a lot of heat but not yet enough of the light Skills England needs. While there were some important points made alongside the technicalities in the debate following the 2nd Reading in the House of Lords of the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education Transfer of Functions Bill, the Department of Education must now force the clarity we need rather than tolerate ambiguity any longer.
In addition to issues relating to the status and clout of Skills England, I believe there are four other key things that are needed to build a strong and effective Skills England that are not getting as much coverage.
These are: proper adoption of a systems thinking approach, full ownership of the ‘loop’, truly effective use of data and insight, and investment in marketing and communications to change how people on the ground think and feel.
Systems thinking
We talk about the skills 'system' a lot. But what does this really mean? Systems thinking is more than acknowledging that a system has lots of components and that they interact.
It is about starting with a clear and shared view that what matters is what the system produces, not how the separate components are working: this means that sometimes it is better to knowingly design some parts to be sub-optimal in order to maximise the impact of the whole system. It is about embracing what people actually do as opposed to creating a design for how people should behave. And, the brave bit for government, it is about being bold enough to explain to stakeholders and the public why short-term benefits are being deprioritised in order to create long term value.
Systems thinking needs to happen at the macro level and the micro level.
At the macro level, we must be clear about the scope of the skills system in England. From a public funding perspective, the government defines the skills system in England as 16-19 education (including school sixth forms); adult further education (including the Adult Education Budget, Skills Bootcamps, Multiply and Adult Leaner Loans) and apprenticeships.
But this definition causes policy makers to forget that the higher education system also produces skills including technical skills (through vocational sub-degrees), vocational skills (through first degrees in medicine, nursing and so on) and employability (acquired by graduate and post-graduate study). And it leads to real questions over the relationship between Skills England and the Office for Students.
The skills system is also debated alongside the need to increase employer spending on training. Raising employer spending on training is rightly seen as a critical role for Skills England. But this is not the same as individual private investment in skills. Skills England needs to include in its system what individuals are self-funding (estimated by the Learning and Work Institute to be 7bn).
And at the micro level it is vital that real behaviours and reactions on the ground (not those economists would have us believe happen) are considered (not judged) and built into design. Consider, for example, the development and introduction of T levels. The quest was to make them as robust and high quality as possible – and who would not want that in a new qualification? But they were designed in isolation from the rest of the system.
The result of this isolation has been the failure to deliver consistently or at scale the unique feature of the new qualification – the work placement. Why? Because the realities of asking employers to create and manage work placements were ‘hoped’ away rather than designed in. In some cases, such as construction, T level rules combined with rules for apprenticeships actively prevent progression in a particular pathway.
Moving to true systems thinking is a tough ask for civil servants who are typically made responsible for individual components of the system, not the system as a whole. Each team wants the part of the system it is responsible for to be 'world class', instead we need them to prioritise saying the system is world class.
There is a chance here for Skills England to be the body that finally is responsible for the skills system. But…
Full ownership of the ‘loop’
There is an elephant in the room here: Driving Growth and Widening Opportunities says that Skills England will be “a single organisation, with a single feedback loop back into government to help inform funding and policy decisions.”
Regardless of the status of Skills England and its independence from the DfE, if it is the DfE deciding on funding, not Skills England, then in what way can Skills England be a single feedback loop? Without the ability to adjust funding up or down in response to the intelligence and relationships it has, Skills England cannot be said to be ‘in charge’ or ‘responsible’ – and yet in other parts of the report, that is exactly what is implied through frequent use of the word “ensure” in describing its other responsibilities.
I would urge DfE to be straightforward with us about this: should we think of Skills England as being ‘in charge’ or should we understand that it is DfE that will ‘call the shots’, informed by Skills England? This is not idle chit chat: where does accountability sit?
Fudging where accountability and responsibility really lie may be the time-honoured way for Government to dissipate the possibility of blame, but for the economy, for prosperity and for millions of lives, we really need to get this one right.
Truly effective use of data and insight
Skills England is to be the ‘peak’ authority when it comes to data and insight about skills across the country. No one should know more than it does about skills gaps, skills trends and skills provision. It needs to prove itself and earn its authority because of what it knows (and does), not because of its anointed status.
The September report was encouraging on this: although only Version 0.1, it is clear that Skills England has a robust methodology for producing skills insight, even if it did not (yet) tell us much that we did not already know.
But the key point here is that data and insight on their own have limited value, except to civil servants and academics. The real value is for the employers, learners and the economy when that data and insight is converted into action.
How the data and insight is therefore disseminated, absorbed and socialised on a never-ending basis is, therefore, as important as the data and insight itself. Knowing that we need more qualified carers is one thing, making people on the ground – employers, employees and learners – do different things to make it happen is another.
Skills England must make it a core task to be permanently engaging in active discussion, dialogue and discovery with employers, learners, providers and others. If engagement is seen as a task for the set-up to be repeated from time to time, then Skills England is likely to fail.
Informing through marketing and communications
This leads me to the final point. Driving growth and widening opportunities is almost entirely silent on one of the most powerful tools it could deploy as a government agency, if it chooses to: marketing and communications.
Stories, inspiration and that feeling that comes from being part of something bigger need to be inside the heads (and hearts) of as many people involved in skills as possible (which is pretty much everyone between the ages of 16 and 70, and many would argue it should apply to those outside of that age range too).
Data observatories, bulletins, digests, reports, seminars and conferences are all necessary. But they are not sufficient to change the culture on the ground. Nor am I talking about the burst of advertising around National Apprenticeships Week (especially now that the blocker is not learner appetite for apprenticeships but employer appetite for apprenticeships).
What we need only comes from sustained, imaginative and newsworthy communications and marketing, in the form of stories, images and concepts that stick in the public imagination. The ambition should be to get something into the everyday lexicon of British life that transforms our collective attitude towards skills (think “they’re so Marmite”, meerkats or “should’ve gone to Specsavers”).
Skills England should, in other words, be thinking about what its major advertising campaigns are going to be and should have a significant budget set aside for this. If Skills England isn’t going to do this then who is?
A stronger chance of success
There is optimism around Skills England – but my sense is that those wishing it well are also doing so with crossed fingers, hoping rather than believing. A Skills England that makes the above four things true will increase its chances of success significantly. I wish all those working on it the very best of luck – they will need quite a lot of it!
Ben Rowland is Chief Executive of AELP
Our regular guest policy views are written by senior leaders and thinkers. They aim to stimulate discussion, identify issues and contribute to debate on post-16 education, skills and employment policy. The opinions expressed are the authors' own and do not necessarily express the views of the Campaign for Learning