How can we ensure people acquire the skills they need to remain employed?
Two statements within the Government’s recent refresh of its skills strategy – Rigour and Responsiveness in Skills – jumped out at me:
- “If people are not able to achieve basic levels of English and maths, then they will struggle to find work of any kind.”
- “In a competitive global market, the skills needed by workers are increasing, placing greater emphasis on the ability to learn skills and adapt.”
For many years, NIACE has drawn attention to the importance of skills for unemployed people and the Government’s acknowledgement that basic English and maths skills are now vital for employment is very welcome. As is the statement of intent in the new framework for skills and unemployed learners to ensure, amongst other things:
- Skills screening and assessment to identify claimant’s training needs at the earliest opportunity.
- Better interaction between the benefits regime and skills.
- Increased capability and partnership working.
As Rigour and Responsiveness in Skills states, colleges and training providers do already provide training designed to address the skills needs of people who are unemployed, but the system is not always effective and can sometimes act as a barrier to people getting the education and training they need. This was illustrated in NIACE’s recent publication The Work Programme: What is the role of skills?, which described helpful and effective practice alongside systemic barriers to Work Programme participants accessing fully funded skills provision, even though this provision could fundamentally change their job prospects.
The framework should go a long way to dealing with the current systemic obstacles, however, much more research needs to be undertaken to identify which skills approaches are the most effective in enabling learners to acquire sustained employment. We can readily see that sector based work academies are effective due to the direct link between the training provided and actual job vacancies. We know much less though about the beneficial impact of intensive forms of provision, embedded vocational skills within English and maths provision and employer involvement in the design of provision. A requirement for all providers to track the employment outcomes for all their learners would greatly help towards this research. Some providers are already tracking outcomes to undertake their own in-house analysis of what works best and why. Should we not expect all providers to do this?
The second of the two statements that caught my eye represents an even bigger challenge since it relates to people in employment as much as to people who are out of work. As detailed in Scaling the youth employment challenge (UKCES 2013), the balance of occupations in the UK economy is changing. Global competition and increasing mechanisation is remorselessly stripping out lower and mid-skill occupations. Lifelong (or at least recurrent) participation in learning to acquire new skills and adapt existing skills has become a necessity, yet our current skills system is primarily focused on enabling skills acquisition for initial entry into the labour market. There is little done to encourage lifelong acquisition of skills and there are real barriers in place that hinder employed people wishing to learn.
Whilst the introduction of the QCF is potentially very helpful, its inherent flexibility to allow unit-by-unit vocational skills acquisition is only permitted at present for unemployed learners, despite this being of obvious benefit to employed people who struggle to find the time to commit to a full qualification. The loss of full funding for apprenticeships and classroom-based vocational learning for employed people above the age of 24, and its replacement by loans, will inevitably risk excluding the working poor. Rather than taking a loan to acquire vocational skills to remain employed, they will have to wait until they are at risk of redundancy or actually unemployed before they are fully funded to acquire new skills.
Good progress has been made towards ensuring unemployed people gain the basic skills they need to become employed, but the next challenge is establishing a system to ensure everyone has a good chance of remaining employed.
