For decades, the main – and, frankly, warranted – criticism of skills planning has been that nobody has any idea what skills we need.
Employers can have a reasonable go at working out what they need in their own businesses. Regions can sort of work out what they need in their own area.
But, it doesn’t really work when trying to work out what the country needs overall.
Enter Skills England
According to DfE opposition costings, Skills England is a £7m, 100+ headcount, data router of a non-departmental public body.
It’s a piece of information architecture that can connect to stuff like the “occupation shortage” bits of the Home Office’s migration work, DfE’s Unit for Future Skills, and the local commissioning bodies that look set to become the way that skills provision (however this ends up being defined) is managed and funded.
Skills England is embedded within the Industrial Strategy Council and Migration Advisory Committee to “identify skills and labour needs” but it is also mandated to work with devolved nations, businesses, and combined authorities to meet Labour’s plans for their industrial strategy and Green Prosperity Plan. It is a swiss army knife of an agency that will simultaneously support local initiatives, coordinate plans to meet national ambitions, and work with business on better planning.
If you are into joined-up government it is a big win. The processes and endpoints that determine skilled immigration needs and skills commissioning at a local and national level will be synchronised for the first time ever. Both will be informed using the latest and most accurate data and analysis of the current state of the job market. Local Skills Improvement Plans (LSIPs) can be reconfigured – to include all relevant skills providers (universities being a glaring omission here) and conform to the same local boundaries as the rest of the newly empowered devolved bodies.
The central part of localism
Skills England is explicitly framed as complementary to a devolved skills planning regime. Should every local authority area in the country decide it needs to train people in cybersecurity or green technology, Skills England would be able to take a national overview to ensure that, overall, all these priorities can add up to something sensible without excessive duplication. It would also supply the data that would inform those local choices – taking on a role filled currently by the Unit for Future Skills.
It also has the teeth to ensure that within combined authorities there is “clear accountability for skills spending, which aligns to economic priorities.” If Labour is to achieve its wider ambition of more devolution to more areas, Skills England becomes an ever more powerful force of measuring, cajoling, and supporting local government to support national priorities. It is devolution but it is devolution with a catch.
Eligible programmes will include modular courses in digital and green skills, social care and child care, function skills, basic digital skills, pre-apprenticeship training and programmes related to net zero. Skills England’s challenge, as the IfS has pointed out, is in determining the high value programmes outside of apprenticeships that should be funded without wasting public money on programmes that employers would have funded anyway. This would also not resolve the problem that a significant proportion of upskilling programmes flow into the well employed, remunerated, and older, parts of the workforce.
Further Education colleges deliver a fair amount of higher education, while higher education is increasingly offering courses (at a number of levels) that it would make sense to consider alongside a wider skills offer. Though most recent thinking about parity between FE and HE has been focused on funding, there is a chance that the next few years will be dominated by discussions about commissioning and coverage.
That’s not to say funding is off the table. Why should Skills England recommend that local plans need to approach yet another national body (say the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, or the Education and Skills Funding Agency) to develop qualifications or fund provision? If research and development funding can be devolved, why not skills funding?
Delivery mission
In their mission to break down barriers to opportunity the Labour Party has written that in working with the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education “[…]Skills England will hold responsibility for maintaining a list of accredited non-apprenticeship courses which businesses can spend Growth and Skills Levy money on, to ensure they are of a high quality.” Effectively, Skills England is the gatekeeper to the new Growth and Skills Levy which will allow companies to use up to half of their apprenticeship levy on non-apprenticeship training.
The administrative scaffold needed to bring about these changes should not be underestimated. We are most likely looking at major primary legislation – amending large parts of the 2023 Skills and Post-16 Education Act (the previous government’s attempt at local skills), the Education Act 2002, and the Learning and Skills Act 2000 (under which powers the ESFA currently provides funding).
It was the last Labour government that centralised what used to be a local system – the new one will be localising a centralised system: with Skills England as the vestiges of national oversight.
You point to ‘universities being a glaring omission’ from Labour’s skills planning: perhaps because nobody would dare define undergraduate futures purely in terms of the nation’s ‘skills needs’. And, whilst any movement of funding away from well-paid managers towards young people starting out in life would be welcome, neither should further education be defined solely as learning to labour.