\n<\/p>\n
Ensuring England\u2019s workforce has the right skills for a rapidly changing economy is key to Labour\u2019s hopes of boosting social mobility and kickstarting economic growth.<\/p>\n
So it seems unfortunate that more than a week after Keir Starmer\u2019s drastic reshuffle, ministers are still wrangling over exactly which bits of the skills agenda will now move to Pat McFadden\u2019s beefed-up Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).<\/p>\n
Broadly speaking, the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, is expecting to hang on to responsibility for further education, while McFadden will probably take on apprenticeships and adult skills. Jacqui Smith, the skills minister, will work across both departments.<\/p>\n
Labour market experts say there is some logic to the shift: ensuring the right training is available in the right places is one crucial part of tackling the issue of economic inactivity in a rapidly changing employment market, which falls within the DWP\u2019s bailiwick.<\/p>\n
But \u201cmachinery of government\u201d changes, as official parlance has it, can often bring more disruption than clarity.<\/p>\n
Over the past two decades alone, responsibility for skills has bounced around Whitehall, from education into the short-lived Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (2007-09) then on to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (2009-16), back into education again, and now across to the DWP.<\/p>\n
Perhaps this nomadic status helps account for successive administrations\u2019 chronic neglect. Government spending on adult education halved between 2011-12 and 2019-20. It then recovered somewhat as the worst years of austerity came to an end, but by last year it was still \u00a31bn down in real terms.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, despite endless speeches by politicians of all stripes about how vocational skills should have the same status as university (I have sat through quite a few: it is compulsory to mention Germany), the numbers of people completing apprenticeships have collapsed.<\/p>\n
Official figures show 178,220 people earned an apprenticeship in England in 2023-24, down by more than a third on 2017-18, when the apprenticeship levy was introduced.<\/p>\n
Recently rebranded as the skills and growth levy, this is charged at 0.5% of the payroll of larger firms. It was meant to encourage a flowering of workplace training, although employers have long complained that it is too rigid.<\/p>\n
Since Labour came to power, Phillipson has made some changes, cutting the minimum duration of an apprenticeship to eight months.<\/p>\n
Enrolment in apprenticeships has risen this year, by just over 2%, but business groups are still hoping for a more substantial shake-up.<\/p>\n
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Sign up to Business Today<\/span><\/p>\n Get set for the working day \u2013 we’ll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Companies have their own significant part to play, too. It must surely be a piece of the UK\u2019s productivity puzzle that, according to the Learning and Work Institute, employers\u2019 annual spending on training for each member of staff has fallen by 28% in real terms since 2005, to \u00a31,530, a level less than half the EU average.<\/p>\n The longtime education expert Sir Philip Augur put it well in a recent Institute for Fiscal Studies podcast about post-16 education. Welcoming the changes to the apprenticeship levy, Augur said: \u201cEmployers have to step up to the plate here. For employers, \u2018I can\u2019t get the staff\u2019 is quite often an excuse for bad management. Now, on this occasion, they can\u2019t get the staff because the skills aren\u2019t there. But there needs to be honesty and self-appraisal on the part of employers.\u201d<\/p>\n Augur called for the levy to rise \u201cvery slightly\u201d to free up more resources for expanding apprenticeships.<\/p>\n McFadden\u2019s team say he is keen to ensure young people get the skills they need to benefit from the jobs scheduled to be created by new government investment in defence and green energy. That will mean working with firms and unions to get the training landscape right.<\/p>\n There is plenty of innovative thinking going on at local level. The West Yorkshire mayor, Tracy Brabin, announced plans last week for what she called \u201cskills-led growth\u201d in Wakefield, the UK\u2019s largest city without a university.<\/p>\n She hopes to establish a new Wakefield Futures Centre, led by employers, where local people can do courses directly linked to finding work in the fastest-growing sectors in the surrounding economy. The idea is to make the courses flexible so that adults with caring responsibilities, for example, can take up the offer.<\/p>\n This kind of relatively fluid, employer-connected approach could allow mums to pick up new skills, or older workers to switch sector or dip their toe in the market after a period off sick, for example.<\/p>\n It could also be used to tempt young people to think about a wider set of options: in Manchester, Andy Burnham is pushing to set up an Mbacc \u2013 an Ebacc equivalent, intended to be an alternative to GCSEs, which is tailored to local jobs.<\/p>\n Jobcentres, which are getting a rejig under Labour to present a more encouraging face, can then signpost to local opportunities such as these.<\/p>\n Getting the skills offer right will have to form one crucial part of any genuine effort to bring down the UK\u2019s unusually high economic inactivity rates, and therefore, ultimately, the welfare bill.<\/p>\n Last year\u2019s crass attempt at cuts failed because Labour could not justify to its own MPs the crude way in which it planned to cut eligibility for the personal independence payment (Pip).<\/p>\n If the government wants to have another go \u2013 as McFadden certainly does \u2013 then a fresh skills and training offer could be part of the package for the hard-to-reach claimants Labour said it had a \u201cmoral case\u201d to help last time\u00a0\u2013 but for whom across-the-board Pip cuts would have done nothing.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not a quick fiscal fix by any means, but get it right and the upside, for individuals, employers and the economy, would be significant and long-lasting. The sooner ministers can clear up who takes on which bits of the task, and crack on with it, the better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ensuring England\u2019s workforce has the right skills for a rapidly changing economy is key to Labour\u2019s hopes of boosting social mobility and kickstarting economic growth. So it seems unfortunate that more than a week after Keir Starmer\u2019s drastic reshuffle, ministers are still wrangling over exactly which bits of the skills agenda will now move to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21413,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[911,13137,311,4854,13138,1275,134,2938,945],"class_list":{"0":"post-21412","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-apprenticeships","9":"tag-collapsed","10":"tag-england","11":"tag-fast","12":"tag-finetune","13":"tag-heather","14":"tag-labour","15":"tag-solution","16":"tag-stewart"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21412"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21412\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/21413"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}