Over the past six months, Independent Higher Education (IHE) has been exploring how specialist providers partner with industry.
Building on the findings of our recent report, IHE’s Industry and Skills Week brought together providers and industry experts to discuss what more needs to be done to build a more responsive skills system that supports economic growth.
When we set out to examine how our members partner with employers, we expected to find innovation, agility and strong industry connections. And we did. What we did not expect was how consistently providers traced all three back to a single precondition: stability.
The most inventive and responsive partnerships in our evidence were not built by lowering standards or by favouring speed over sustainability. They were built by people with the confidence to invest in change because they could rely on the system around them. Stability, it turned out, was not a constraint on innovation – it was the foundation that made it possible.
Strong partnerships take time to build
Building a genuine employer partnership takes sustained attention, even when providers are capable of moving quickly. Building a Skilled Economy: How IHE Members Partner with Industry draws on seventeen interviews with IHE Members, a focus group with providers serving the creative industries, and interviews with employers. Across all of this evidence, one pattern held: innovation comes from sustained engagement with employers.
Providers need to understand how roles are changing, translate that intelligence rapidly into curriculum design, and continually adapt provision as sectors evolve. Yet this work depends on employers being both willing and able to engage. Much of the effort behind successful partnerships goes into building trust, maintaining relationships, and helping employers navigate a complex skills system that many experience as fragmented and difficult to follow. Several providers told us that they are spending increasing amounts of time explaining policy changes, funding reforms and regulatory requirements to employers whose primary concern is simply developing the skills of their workforce.
Time spent interpreting, not innovating
One provider described how a staff member who would normally focus on workforce development had spent much of the past year helping employers navigate successive changes to apprenticeship funding and the Growth and Skills Levy. Time was devoted to modelling the impact of levy reforms, explaining changes to English and maths requirements, and responding to questions about short courses and apprenticeship units. None of this effort is wasted if it helps employers remain engaged, but it does not create new routes into skills, improve provision or help businesses grow. Employers have strong incentives to address skills gaps, but many lack the capacity to interpret frequent policy changes for themselves.
This is why stability matters. Escape Studios’ partnerships with employers such as Framestore and DNEG have developed over twenty-four years, while Leiths has supplied graduates to the River Cafe for three decades. The significance is not simply the longevity of these relationships. Over time, they become part of the infrastructure through which innovation happens: employers and providers develop a shared understanding of what good looks like, alumni move between education and industry, businesses feed live intelligence into curriculum design, and providers can adapt quickly because trust and communication are already in place.
When providers and employers believe a funding route or regulatory expectation will endure, they invest time, expertise and resource into changing provision. When they expect another reset, that same energy is diverted into interpreting and adapting to change rather than improving provision. A system that keeps resetting serves no one well.
What we heard during Industry and Skills Week
Our Industry and Skills Week brought together specialist providers, industry leaders and sector bodies from across the built environment, sport, engineering and technology, and creative industries. The week opened with the Industrial Strategy Advisory Council and closed with Phil Smith, Chair of Skills England. Between those bookend sessions and across all four roundtables, a consistent message emerged: instability makes long-term investment in skills harder to sustain.
What was striking was the degree of alignment. At the opening plenary, the Industrial Strategy Advisory Council identified system complexity, policy churn and fragmented information as barriers to investment, particularly for SMEs with limited capacity to navigate the support available to them. At the closing plenary, Phil Smith offered a similar assessment, describing a skills system that is poorly coordinated, uneven in its reach, and difficult to navigate, while acknowledging the costs that constant change imposes on both providers and employers.
The clearest example was high-cost subject funding. In both the creative industries and the engineering and technology sessions, providers described funding being withdrawn at short notice. When support that underpins expensive, specialist teaching can disappear with little warning, providers cannot confidently plan the very provision that sector plans depend upon. Similar frustrations emerged around the Apprenticeship Levy. Housing providers, for example, described needing to upskill existing staff to meet new building safety and social housing regulatory requirements, while being unable to use levy funding to support that training. The problem is not the existence of rules. It is the cost of rules that change after providers and employers have invested around them, or that are drawn too narrowly to support the skills employers are already trying to develop.
Instability does not affect providers alone. It pushes employers to think only in the short term too. One provider described how employers can identify the skills they need now but struggle to commit to the skills they will need in future, making long-term provision harder to plan on both sides.
Stability and agility are not opposites
There is a deeper point here about innovation, one that runs against the common assumption that stability and agility pull in opposite directions. In practice, they are often mutually reinforcing.
IHE Members can move quickly when circumstances require it. New programmes can go from concept to enrolment in a year. NMITE, for example, developed its autonomous systems degree with the Ministry of Defence and the British Army in just twelve months, responding directly to a strategic priority. That speed is a product of institutional design, not weaker governance. Agility is far easier to sustain when providers and employers can plan beyond the next policy change. Specialist providers make this challenge particularly visible because so much of their provision is closely tied to employer demand.
Make change predictable
The consistency of what we heard suggests this is not a sector-specific concern but a systemic one – and policymakers should take notice.
So, what would help? Our report makes eight recommendations, but the first underpins all others: the Department for Education (DfE) should prioritise stability in the design and communication of skills funding policy, including the transition from the Apprenticeship Levy to the Growth and Skills Levy. Changes should be controlled, incremental, clearly signposted and implemented with enough notice for providers and employers to plan with confidence.
This is not a call to freeze the system in place. Sectors change, technologies evolve and skills needs shift – and provision must adapt accordingly. It is a call to make change predictable, so that providers and employers can focus their energy on developing new routes into skills, adapting provision to emerging needs and investing in partnerships that endure.
The skills system will not get better through another reset dressed up as reform. The evidence in our report is clear: providers and employers can innovate. The question is whether government can create the conditions that allow that innovation to flourish.
Across our research and Industry and Skills Week discussions, the message was strikingly consistent: stability is not the enemy of agility – it is what makes agility possible. Give providers and employers that stability, and they will not stand still.
