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Originally posted on\u00a0WONKHE<\/a>\u00a0on Monday, 25 January 2021<\/p>\n We\u2019ve been here before. But in skills policy we\u2019ve been everywhere before. Putting employers at the heart of the system and committing to high quality education and training are not new. These have been objectives for most ministers and in most green and white papers for the last three decades.<\/p>\n Just before Christmas, the Further Education Trust for Leadership produced an excellent primer on our record over that time: Honourable Histories<\/a> and hats off to Ewart Keep, Tom Richmond and Ruth Silver for capturing what they describe as a \u201cblinding froth of activity\u201d.<\/p>\n The challenge for skills policy in England is not setting out ambitious reform plans, it is sticking to them. Since the Further and Higher Education Act in 1992 there have been fifteen government commissioned reviews of FE or the skills system in England, or significant aspects of it, at least fifteen white papers and five major Acts of Parliament. There have been seven different departments overseeing FE and at least thirty junior ministers with responsibility for skills \u2013 though notably between July and December 2019 the Government forgot to appoint one. Gavin Williamson is the 13th Secretary of State with responsibility for FE.<\/p>\n Williamson, like others before him, found in his round of media interviews on his flagship Skills for Jobs white paper that it is tough to get anyone to care in the first place. Interviewer after interviewer led on schools reopening, on exams, on testing for Covid-19 and his own performance as the Secretary of State. The white paper got the very barest of mentions.<\/p>\n For Williamson his best headlines have come when he\u2019s set up FE announcements at the same time as giving a good kick at universities \u2013 such as when he promoted the reform of level four and five qualifications as a way of \u201cabolishing\u201d Tony Blair\u2019s 50 per cent young participation in HE target. Never mind that they would have counted too. But he might have expected to get some traction from combining the FE white paper with the long delayed responses to the Augar and Pearce Reviews and a consultation on university admissions.<\/p>\n These reforms are important and in some cases, potentially transformative, for a system that needs to be better funded as well as a more significant player in our local and national recovery post Covid. Properly funded and governed FE matters and so too does a functioning vocational qualifications system from levels one to six.<\/p>\n But like the very short interim Augar response, DFE is seeking major system change with few upfront financial commitments from the Treasury. That may come \u2013 as it might for a rethinking of the entire tertiary system \u2013 in a comprehensive spending review in the autumn. But it might not. After all, the Treasury has other things and other spending on its list.<\/p>\n As with Augar, that is a very big can being kicked down quite a long road. The real transformative decisions about the whole post 18 education system haven\u2019t yet been called.<\/p>\n There is, though, more clarity in other areas including many that will already be familiar to both FE and HE audiences. Boosting upper technical learning at levels four and five \u2013 Augar\u2019s \u201cmissing middle\u201d \u2013 more on T levels and institutes of technology and restating FE capital commitments and the lifetime skills guarantee. Even the local skills improvement plans are built largely on the model of local skills advisory panels first recommended in the 2017 Conservative manifesto.<\/p>\n Given the continuing promise to rebalance the tertiary system across FE and HE and to drive universities in the direction of employers and regional skills needs via the restructuring regime, it is worth taking a closer look at the details of the white paper, particularly those centred on employers, places and people.<\/p>\n The first and perhaps most obvious criticism of Skills for Jobs is that none of these \u2013 employers, places, people \u2013 are homogenous groups and yet for the most part in the white paper, they are treated as if they are.<\/p>\n It makes sense to have employers playing a leading role in a vocational training system, but we should also accept that this has been an aim for some considerable time and that over the last decade the statistics for employer and employee participation have been going in the wrong direction.<\/p>\n The latest Employer Skills Survey<\/a> shows a fall in the amount of time employees spend in training \u2013 from 7.8 days per year in 2011 to 6.4 days in 2017. In 1998 just over a third (36 per cent) of training programmes lasted less than a week but this has increased to over half (54 per cent).<\/p>\n According to CIPD<\/a>, the overall investment in training by employers increased slightly from \u00a343.8 billion in 2011 to \u00a344.2 billion in 2017. But at the same time the size of the workforce has grown rapidly, which means this is actually a real-term cut over the same period of 16.7 per cent per trainee, or a fall of 6.3 per cent per employee.<\/p>\n So overall it is questionable whether many employers will have sufficient interest, capacity or expertise in playing such a strategic role in qualification design and system delivery. Or if they do, whether it is sufficient or right for the system as a whole. There are also decisions about which employers might need the most help, and which are the ones that can genuinely provide expertise in designing delivery for others.<\/p>\n Low pay, low productivity sectors will be key targets for increased training activity. They have been for a long time. While the FE sector has a role across all firms it is here that it can be the most transformative. It is also clear that employees might cycle in and out of precarious or low paid work in these sectors and into periods of unemployment.<\/p>\n Across these shifts will be the complexities of Universal Credit and, for a while, the Coronavirus Job Protection (furlough) scheme. The OBR expects unemployment to rise<\/a> to a peak of 7.5 per cent (2.6 million people) in the second quarter of this year. The Bank of England makes a similar prediction<\/a> for unemployment peaking at 7.7 per cent in April to June, but it admits that it\u2019s very hard to predict, saying there\u2019s a small chance it could rise as high as 10 per cent. Apart from a case study \u2013 \u201cHi I\u2019m Cheryl\u201d on page 44, where she attends a \u201cdigital boot camp\u201d and gets a job in a \u201clocal technology firm\u201d \u2013 there is virtually no mention of unemployment, or of joint working with the Department for Work and Pensions.<\/p>\n There is no great understanding of employers in better performing, more productive sectors either. Here they are likely to do more training but will have multiple entry points into multiple, still competing systems whether through the apprenticeship levy, level four and five, private and bespoke training providers, universities and through research and development.<\/p>\n This might put more emphasis on co-ordinating or joining up wider government activity, but it does not. There is very limited mention of these issues and no plan for linking to spending or sectoral support from BEIS or UK Research and Innovation, let alone to other parts of DfE. When the government is doubling spending on R&D, BEIS is refreshing its industrial strategy and UKRI developing a place based R&D strategy, these are a set of big opportunities that the Skills for Jobs white paper misses.<\/p>\n The recommendation for employers driving local skills improvement plans suffers from the same problem. There is no obvious link to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government agendas on place or to levelling up, which gets only one mention in the whole document. That is a broader political problem given its first order priority elsewhere but also a practical gap for the white paper.<\/p>\n There is no sense that new local plans and the systems that create them will build on devolution, city regions, local authorities or even LEP footprints. Chambers of Commerce are mentioned as potential key partners but although important local institutions, they aren\u2019t as powerful or have as much capacity as they do in countries like Germany. All of these issues are problematic and require further thought. Taken together they point to more serious challenges for DfE.<\/p>\n Primarily the white paper feels like it\u2019s been developed in a vacuum. Its conception of employers is overly theoretical and homogenised and the same can be said of its one size vision for employees and local economies too. The vacuum extends to other parts of Whitehall. Potential links with other departmental agendas such as those at DWP, BEIS and MHCLG have been largely ignored. The Treasury is ominously silent.<\/p>\n But perhaps the biggest problem of all is the white paper\u2019s lack of knowledge or understanding of past policy failures in all of these areas. All of the many reviews, white papers and ministers that have come before have done so with the best of intentions and assumptions that new reforms would be in place for some time. None have been and the odds are that nor will these.<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][et_pb_post_nav _builder_version=”3.17.6″ prev_text=”Previous” next_text=”Next” in_same_term=”off” locked=”on” \/][et_pb_comments _builder_version=”3.17.6″ custom_button=”on” button_text_color=”#ffffff” locked=”on” \/][et_pb_text admin_label=”Related posts” _builder_version=”3.17.6″ locked=”on”]<\/p>\n [\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column_inner][\/et_pb_row_inner][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=”1_3″][et_pb_sidebar admin_label=”Subscribe” _builder_version=”3.17.6″ area=”et_pb_widget_area_3″ locked=”on” \/][et_pb_sidebar _builder_version=”3.17.6″ area=”sidebar-1″ show_border=”off” locked=”on” \/][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_section]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Originally posted on\u00a0WONKHE\u00a0on Monday, 25 January 2021We\u2019ve been here before. But in skills policy we\u2019ve been everywhere before. Putting employers at the heart of the system and committing to high quality education and training are not new. These have been objectives for most ministers and in most green and white papers for the last three […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":521,"featured_media":3277,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"[et_pb_section bb_built=\"1\" fullwidth=\"off\" specialty=\"on\" _builder_version=\"3.17.6\"][et_pb_column type=\"2_3\" specialty_columns=\"4\"][et_pb_row_inner admin_label=\"Row\"][et_pb_column_inner type=\"4_4\" saved_specialty_column_type=\"2_3\"][et_pb_post_title _builder_version=\"3.17.6\" featured_placement=\"above\" locked=\"on\" \/][et_pb_text _builder_version=\"3.17.6\"]\r\n\r\n When I\u2019m out and about meeting staff I hear much debate about the why, what, when and how of change in our University. I wanted to share my thoughts on this often contentious topic \u2013 and hear your views too.<\/p> Early in 2020 we will launch our University\u2019s new vision and strategic plan \u2013 Our future. In order to fulfil Our future we need to ensure that we are in a financially sustainable position so that we have the funds to invest in the new staff, facilities and infrastructure which will be needed to bring our plans to life.<\/p> Our Financial Statements<\/a> for 2018\/19, which have been published following approval by the Board of Governors, confirm that more than 95% of our \u00a31.1bn income is spent on our core goals - on our staff and our students - to deliver research, education and social responsibility; with the remainder invested in the long term sustainability of our University. You can find a summary<\/a> of the Financial Statements on StaffNet.<\/p> However, this is a testing time for UK universities, due to the many external factors that have an impact on us - current home tuition fees are falling in real terms, whilst our costs (not just pay but non-pay too) are increasing. There are further and even greater tuition fee funding risks outlined in General Election manifestos as well as a range of Brexit-related risks that could affect our operations. The Office for Students (OfS) demands that we demonstrate both value for money for our students and our financial sustainability (in the sense of being able to invest to deliver our ambitious strategy, rather than survival). There are, of course, also ongoing unresolved national issues around pay and the continuing challenges around funding pensions in the higher education sector.<\/p> Our Financial Statements show an improved operating surplus (3.7% of income compared to \u00a324.7m (2.3%) in 2017\/18), with a rise in income from tuition fees, education contracts and research. As I mentioned earlier, we re-invest the surplus we achieve each year in activity in line with our strategy. Recently our funds have been used to create some new academic and Professional Services posts; to invest in key infrastructure including IT; to invest in some new buildings like our student accommodation at Unsworth Park; to improve the student experience by funding more full-time Residential Life staff and to upgrade a range of buildings and research and teaching spaces and resources. Increasingly it is also invested in environmental sustainability and meeting our ambitious carbon targets. So even when we are making difficult decisions in some parts of the University we continue to invest our surplus.<\/p> Whilst we have reported an operating surplus, our Board of Governors expects us to deliver a much larger surplus than this (at least 5%) if we are to be sustainable in the long-term. Our strategic change programme (including IT Modernisation<\/a>, the Student Experience Programme<\/a>, and the Research Lifecycle Programme<\/a>), alongside our continuous improvement plans, will ensure that we create the financial headroom to invest in people and facilities. The strategic change programme will also enable us to embrace new technologies and new ways of doing things that better support all our staff and students to be the best that they can be.<\/p> Yes, this means that some individual roles will change. New roles (some that we haven\u2019t yet identified) will be created and some roles will no longer be required. I appreciate that this will cause some uncertainty and where that is the case we will do everything we can to support staff, but the alternative is that we never change anything. If we fail to take advantage of advances in technology and develop more joined-up ways of working we will ultimately find ourselves outdated in the eyes of future students, funders and other stakeholders. Staff want to work for a progressive and successful institution, of which they can be proud. This means we cannot stand still.<\/p> When I talk to staff and students I often hear their frustrations about how difficult it be can be to get some straightforward things done, grappling with paper-based, manual and repetitive processes, on outdated systems and infrastructure, all of which serves to increase staff workloads. Everyone wants to do a good job, but regularly feel that our world-class status is earned in spite of our internal systems and processes, not because of them.<\/p> To deliver our new vision and strategic plan we will need to embrace new opportunities and face challenges with courage and determination. That will sometimes mean we have to make tough decisions and no-one is claiming it will be easy or that mistakes will not be made along the way. But where we do have tough choices to make we will commit to implementing changes fairly and with compassion to support the wellbeing of all our colleagues.<\/p>\r\n\r\n[\/et_pb_text][et_pb_post_nav _builder_version=\"3.17.6\" prev_text=\"Previous\" next_text=\"Next\" in_same_term=\"off\" locked=\"on\" \/][et_pb_comments _builder_version=\"3.17.6\" custom_button=\"on\" button_text_color=\"#ffffff\" locked=\"on\" \/][et_pb_text admin_label=\"Related posts\" _builder_version=\"3.17.6\" locked=\"on\"]\r\n\r\n [related-posts-thumbnails]<\/p>\r\n\r\n[\/et_pb_text][\/et_pb_column_inner][\/et_pb_row_inner][\/et_pb_column][et_pb_column type=\"1_3\"][et_pb_sidebar admin_label=\"Subscribe\" _builder_version=\"3.17.6\" area=\"et_pb_widget_area_3\" locked=\"on\" \/][et_pb_sidebar _builder_version=\"3.17.6\" area=\"sidebar-1\" show_border=\"off\" locked=\"on\" \/][\/et_pb_column][\/et_pb_section]","_et_gb_content_width":"","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-faculty-of-humanities"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/viewpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/viewpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/viewpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/viewpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/521"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/viewpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3422"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/viewpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3480,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/viewpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3422\/revisions\/3480"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/viewpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/viewpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/viewpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.manchester.ac.uk\/viewpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Kicking the can<\/h4>\n
Employer appetite for engaging in skills<\/h4>\n
Policy in a vacuum<\/h4>\n
Related<\/h1>\n
Related posts:<\/h3>
Sir Cary Cooper: The seven rules of home working<\/h2><\/div><\/div><\/a>
Colette Fagan and Sarah Sharples: Making the Leap: Accelerating the path from research excellence to...<\/h2><\/div><\/div><\/a>
Melissa Westwood: Impactful research and \u2013 importantly \u2013 how we get there<\/h2><\/div><\/div><\/a><\/div>
Improving our financial performance will help to deliver our ambitious future plans, but we must also increase our capacity to create the funds and time to invest in our core goals. One of the ways we can do this is by changing what we do and how we do things.<\/p>Related<\/h1>\r\n