If we wanted to do skills planning, could we?

Running a session on “green skills” at the Festival of Higher Education was, if we are being honest, a poorly designed cover to think about the idea of skills needs planning. I’m grateful to Charlie Ball and Benedikt Steiner for playing along with that.

Benedikt’s contribution solidified my view that, as a nation, we are failing to invest in developing the skills and industries that we are likely to need in the next ten to fifteen years. That the UK can only offer one school of mining (in Camborne, a part of the University of Exeter) with a total of eighty students given how much our future is predicated on getting stuff out of the ground.

There’s a bunch of other shortages – we need a lot more nuclear technicians, we are perennially low on science teachers and nurses – and likely future needs – who is providing the staff that will deliver health support and preventative medicine, is there a skilled (and sustainable) model of care work, and who exactly is going to run the community arts projects that our largest ever cohort of pensioners will need to tear them away from doomscrolling facebook?

But if Benedikt brought the hope that someone, somewhere, is doing something useful and futurefacing (people who learn about mining spend time on everything from community relations, to planning law for instance) my cheery decision that if we agreed as a nation we needed about 10 more Cambornes then the problems would be largely logistical was blown out of the water by Charlie Ball’s brutal assessment of our planning capacity.

Basically, other than picking attractive winners, there is no way of producing a priorities list that is in any way satisfying. We don’t as we learned – know what a green skill is: we have three different ways of thinking about this (green industries, green jobs, green firms) that are at best analogous, and produce answers from “about 12 per cent” to “probably pretty much all” of the work we currently do.

On one level that makes sense (any sustainable and just transition would involve all of us making changes to the way we work and live), but on the other it makes it fairly clear that we can’t just decide to have more green skills (or digital skills, or whatever else you are talking about to avoid making a proper definition).

But let’s imagine we could, and we wired a big green button onto Ed Miliband’s desk that would spit out one clearly specified skilled person per press. What would the other end of the wire connect to?

Do we know which providers teach these particular skills? Honestly, not really. We could maybe find plausible courses on the secretive government course database called Discover Uni, and if we are lucky the provider in question may have tagged this course as being accredited or validated by a professional, statutory, or regulatory body (PSRB). If our luck holds, that particular PSRB specifies particular skills and how they need to be taught and assessed.

This would all tell us that there was one course at one provider teaching that was both teaching that skill, has bothered dealing with the accreditation processes of at least one PSRB, and has been prepared to put the extra effort into making a good quality Unistats data return despite absolutely no benefits gleaned by doing so.

So when Ed presses the big green button, the next stage is figuring out who is going to teach this new student. For niche subjects (like mining, as we learned) there are very few people with the qualifications, teaching skill, and industry experience and no immediately obvious way of generating them. Ideally, the skills planning starts with training tutors, about 15 years prior to our decision that we want to chuck some 18 year olds onto a university course.

And then we have the question of sustainability. If you are setting up a new mining school or a new whatever else you need to be fairly confident that your initial investment will eventually be recouped and the thing has a life beyond the next general election and a new minister for the environment that saw on YouTube that climate change is a hoax. If you don’t have a little bit of confidence, you can’t do it – nobody will lend to you, no finance directorate will ever sign it off.

While balancing the industrial future of the nation on the aggregated decision making of 18 year olds is probably good news for said 18 year olds it is probably not good news for anyone who wants to have any semblance of control over the next chapter in our island story. It is tempting to believe that the dead hand of the market prevails by ideological choice, but that is a convenient myth that disguises the fact that even with the best of the best of our data on employment and skills (seriously, by international standards we are ahead of the game) we simply do not have the range.