Why aren’t employers paying for short, L4+, courses for employees?

Skills England’s annual report arrives alongside a set of ten Sector Skills Needs Assessments, based on the 10 key sectors from the Industrial Strategy. Each has a similar presentation and methodology, providing an overview of the current work force, a list of current and future priority occupations, plus notes on the education and training supply routes and the potential influence of AI.

So, to pick an example, we learn that we need around 900,000 people able to work in the creative industry between 2025 and 2035 – covering both the replacement of existing workers expected to leave the workforce (493,000) and new growth (416,000). Some 81 per cent of these new opportunities will require qualifications at level 4 and above, and historically the most important of these have been at level 6 and above.

The tenor of the analysis here is very broad brush – there’s not a lot of evidence of specific skills being identified and linked to training opportunities. And there’s still not really any connection between employer needs and training that extends beyond identifying very broad subject domains (eg business and management) or high-level skills (eg adaptability).

For more specific skills, you would perhaps hope to see employers offering training rather than expecting the qualification landscape to keep up. But chapter three of the annual report suggests that this is not happening – spending on training per employees is down 31 per cent on 2011, and down 13 per cent from 2019. The average across all sectors is £1,690 per employee – with the sector average in manufacturing as low as £1,100.

These figures are based on the venerable Employer Skills Survey – so represent around 20,000 mostly larger employers. Among that sample the fall in private spending on skills training since 2011 is an astonishing £10.6bn – a figure equivalent to forty per cent of the UK higher education sector’s total tuition fee income.

Skills England’s approach here is primarily to support the skills system in developing training (in terms of delivery patterns, and subject domain) to suit employer needs. The only demand side intervention is to help small and medium enterprises (SMEs) engage with the skills system.

It is employer demand that has led to the development of “apprenticeship” units, and has driven the redevelopment of assessment standards for apprenticeships.

The UK is a global outlier in employer spending on training and staff development – and what I was looking for in the Skills England analysis is why over the past 15 years (a period during which education and training providers have been urged to move closer to employers) spending has fallen so dramatically. It can’t all be SMEs struggling with complex systems and administrative requirements.

An unexpected omission in this examination of plans for short, skills-focused, higher level courses is the onset of the lifelong learning entitlement. While on the face of it, you would expect a wider availability of short courses to make it easier for employers to offer staff training, the design of the LLE shifts the financial burden from employers (who previously may have funded employees to do courses) to employees themselves (who have the ability to borrow money from the government to fund training).

It’s an intervention that almost feels designed to deter employers from engaging with higher level skills providers, like universities, all together.