Place-based collaboration will become the “new operating principle for UK PLC,” Andy Burnham promised in his People’s History Museum speech back at the end of June.
Beyond the airy sentiment, this was quickly followed by a proper policy commitment: all government departments and agencies would be required to support strategic and local authorities with staffing and resources. The mechanics of such a pledge will take some time to emerge, but we could be looking at the Office for Students, Skills England, UKRI, DfE and DSIT all obliged to – in some form – stump up personnel for work in individual local areas.
In this context, it’s worth thinking about what local-led priorities for higher education would look like if they had greater heft behind them. Conveniently, the latest round of Local Skills Improvement Plans for England have recently gone live.
LSIPs
The new version of LSIPs were launched last November, hot on the heels of the post-16 white paper. In a nutshell, each region of England (39 in total – now covering the whole nation and contiguous with local administrative geography) would have a plan for skills and technical education priorities and actions, drawn up collaboratively by employer representatives, local government, and education providers.
Importantly for higher education, there were greater expectations for HE institutions to have a role in governance and implementation, and for the plans to cover skills needs all the way up to level 8.
Drafts were submitted at the end of March – I’ve heard criticisms from some of those involved that the process was too rushed, but there’s clear evidence of wide-ranging engagement with employers and other local stakeholders. To pick a fairly representative example, the plan for Greater Devon was based on
1,405 direct employer interactions and 194 engagements with providers, statutory stakeholders and partners, alongside 42 events reaching over 3,000 businesses. Primary research was structured through four core instruments: the LSIP Employer Survey, the LSIP Telemarketing Survey targeting non-member SMEs, the 100 Voices Campaign, and the LSIP Workforce Skills Snapshot.
Especially in the new place-based context we supposedly find ourselves in, how these stakeholders (and by extension, these plans) speak about higher education – in particular, about higher-level qualifications and about university graduates – feels very relevant. If local areas are to receive more power, then how would they seek to wield it?
Though we should caveat at this point that the plans provide a necessarily partial understanding of what the local areas they seek to speak for actually require from their education systems. The process is designed around employer needs (and wants), mediated by the Skills and Post-16 Education Act framing as well as last autumn’s Skills England guidance and the quango’s supporting role in the process.
This “national steer” comes across very strongly. Most plans see action within local skills systems through the lens of national-level policies: the LLE, foundation apprenticeships, V levels, apprenticeship units. These are the changes which are happening, and therefore they frame the actions that each plan can commit to.
And as a window into the concerns that local government and employers share, the plans are pretty consistent. Almost all express worries about NEETs, about left-behind areas within their geographies, and about patchy apprenticeship take-up (including some thinly-veiled outrage about the defunding of level 7 and management standards). And all are preoccupied with how the proliferation of AI will change local employment.
Specialisation
In coming up with the new plans, local areas were instructed to give consideration to both the industrial strategy and the post-16 education and skills white paper. The former comes through very clearly – each plan chooses its priority areas, taken from the industrial strategy with a mix of local sectors of strength thrown in for good measure.
The plans’ agreed actions then focus on these sectors, outlining how the skills system can better support employment and employer training. There are often explicit commitments for further and higher education institutions to focus their activities on certain sectors – which to an extent is coherent with the white paper’s quest for greater specialisation. But it’s interesting to reflect that the white paper framed the specialisation agenda more in terms of research strengths informing teaching provision, and in higher education institutions being strategic about how they “consolidate”.
Within the LSIPs, there’s a completely different impetus: the plans’ starting point is the local industries that are most important, and then education and skills provision will follow in service to this. It is still a mechanism for specialisation – but there’s no link made to research, and it’s hard to gauge to what extent this could really ever be complementary.
Still, if you’re wondering how greater local power would play out in education and skills, this ought to give you something of an idea: provision shaped by key local industries, or at least greater exhortation for this to be the case.
Graduates
An illuminating recent article from Yorkshire Universities’ John Harrison reflecting on the LSIP development process made the case that graduates need to be at the heart of plans – not just fitting into the labour market, but shaping it.
It’s true that many of the new plans are deeply worried about graduate retention. Cheshire and Warrington’s says it is a “recurring theme across employer engagement.” Dorset’s notes that the area is “characterised by low graduate retention” and launches work with HE and FE providers to remedy this. Hampshire’s plan observes the competition with London for graduates.
Liverpool’s plan concludes that “graduate out-migration reflects a lack of clear, industry-aligned career pathways within the City Region.” Swindon and Wiltshire’s plan, which frequently bemoans the lack of a local university, suggests that “many young people leave the area to pursue higher education opportunities elsewhere and do not subsequently return.” The North East LSIP says that “the region struggles to attract and retain graduates who do not have prior roots in the area.”
And yet this isn’t consistent. Many of the newly published plans express no concerns about graduate outflow (Berks, Bucks, Essex, Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk – to name a few). While many local areas seem to be thinking deeply about how to ensure that graduates are well-deployed in local labour markets, and commissioning further research on the topic (the Cheshire and Warrington LSIP notes that the University of Chester will take the lead on this, for example), others have their priorities elsewhere.
On the level
The West Midlands LSIP has an entire page titled “increasing modularity.” It’s by no means an outlier – to the extent that the plans speak to changes they would like to see in university-level provision, the calls for modular, or flexible, or “bite-sized” training offers are pretty common.
Duration aside, there’s limited thinking within many of the plans about higher education-level study. It’s noted in some that Skills England’s research has suggested much future demand for skills and qualification will be at higher levels, but this doesn’t track through to the commitments that get made.
And it is really visible at level 7 and 8. This was supposed to be one of the big Labour innovations around LSIPs, which would cement universities’ role within the process and join local systems up with the industrial strategy. Yet such a join-up doesn’t seem to have stuck the landing.
With 39 different plans, it’s not the case that there are no mentions of postgraduate-level needs – but they are few and far between. Hampshire, Cumbria and Stoke are all thinking about level 8 needs, in specific sectors and with reference to longer-term competitiveness as opposed to immediate shortages. Buckinghamshire’s LSIP, on the other hand, abruptly states that “currently there are no skill needs at level 8,” though it promises to keep the matter under review.
It could be that expecting local governments and employers to plan out their labour force needs at the highest qualification levels is too complex a task in a short time-frame – and one that might particularly benefit from Burnham’s commitment to having national agencies provide dedicated resource to local projects. One of the LSIPs gestures at a commitment to “integrate early-stage R&D funding with technical training” and “connect the region’s technical education courses directly with Research England.” This sounds nice, but clearly would benefit from further unpacking.
Or it could be that there aren’t obvious levers for the plans to reach for at level 7 and level 8. If the government had policy in train in this area, or was communicating a vision for what it wanted, then the LSIPs would draw on this (in the same way that they lean into modular provision at lower levels, or more HE-FE collaboration). But it doesn’t, and so they don’t.
Universities’ role
There is plenty for universities in England to be thinking about here, both arising from their own region’s plan (which they will have been involved in) and the wider picture of what local areas want – or say they want – from higher education. Management training is a recurring refrain, for example, especially in SMEs.
Many of the plans present their local higher education institutions as active partners, responsible for the success of specific initiatives. University of Hertfordshire is conducting research into access to training, which will be fed back into the LSIP. In Liverpool, Edge Hill University is running an SME-focused AI diagnostic project. The North East LSIP assigns a lead university for each of its priority sectors, with a mandate to get the other higher education institutions in the area collaborating. In the West Yorkshire plan, the role of the Yorkshire Universities regional grouping in convening and enabling collaboration is prominent throughout.
My overall takeaway from reading the 39 plans over the course of this last week is that local area stakeholders (of the sort responsible for LSIPs) are proud of their higher education institutions, but see their immediate skills needs elsewhere and at lower levels. Many of the things that the sector likes to speak about the most – international students, economic contribution in gross value added – don’t really figure. And you’d be forgiven for thinking that many local areas wouldn’t see positive graduate destinations as anything to celebrate, unless this means those graduates who are staying in that region.
The LSIP aspiration of joining up local skills systems is gradually taking shape, though lack of funding, capacity and accountability all remain open questions, as I wrote when the new guidance arrived last year. A fundamental reshaping of the English state, as Andy Burnham is currently keen to promise, could address some of those challenges.
Perhaps a more persistent concern is that, if you structure education systems around the language of skills needs, employer instincts, and learners’ immediate outcomes, then you might indeed end up with a landscape which can be described as more responsive to local areas. But it can also read like an instrumentalist diminishing of what higher education at its best is really about, and which struggles to connect with universities’ roles in research and the creation of knowledge, as well as culture, citizenship, and much else. If local areas do receive more power, then the mechanisms to understand how best they can be served will need strengthening as well.
