What the UK can learn from Scotland’s tertiary pathfinder experiments

It is commonly believed that, if we only had accurate up-to-date data on what skills employers were looking for, we could solve most of Britain’s productivity and social mobility problems in one fell swoop.

There’s a kind of big state approach to collecting and sharing that knowledge we could follow – all kinds of architectures and data collections we could dream up to ensure that every course offered in every educational establishment was laser-focused on a particular industry demand.

To do this at the level of fidelity and timeliness needed would be either expensive, or impossible, or both. Remember, right now, we can’t even accurately tell you how many people are currently working in the UK. And even if we did have this up-to-the moment, detailed, reliable data on employer needs: would the sector be able to use it? And would learners see any benefit?

Pathways and pathfinders

On the other hand nine projects, funded at a total of just £500,000 by the Scottish Funding Council, offer a glimpse of a set of approaches that are making a real difference to education and employment. It’s the opposite of big and flashy – building on existing structures and using small amounts of money to facilitate data sharing and collaboration. And it might just be a glimpse of the future.

The key components are what the Regional Tertiary Pathfinder programme calls Regional Delivery Boards – the pathfinder iteration saw two established, one covering Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire (north east Scotland), the other covering Dumfries and Galloway plus the Borders (south of Scotland).

If you are in England, you might be thinking these are pretty much the same as the Employer Representative Bodies that develop Local Skills Improvement Plans (LSIPs). And you’d be wrong. The LSIP approach simply brings together employers to state their needs and then invites providers (just FE colleges and private training providers, obviously) to meet them. Ewart Keep, in one of the vast numbers of reports published around the programme, describes the LSIP approach as:

the employer is viewed as a customer (more or less demanding but detached from the actual process of skill production) within a marketized, one-way street, relationship with a range of suppliers

In contrast, the Regional Delivery Boards encompass providers at all levels (from schools through to universities) and treat employers and industry bodies as partners in designing and delivering not only the provision directly linked to that particular momentary skills need, but in helping to shape a whole skills ecosystem.

It is, after all, not really worth designing an undergraduate level energy transition course (for example) aimed at a locality if people in that area are not going to have the qualifications and experience required to benefit from it, and if there is no local aspiration to work in that field. Every individual project supported by the board will be taking into account employer demand as one factor, alongside a consideration of wider skills pathways, of learner demand, and of the wider endeavour of offering people good quality and stable employment.

I’ve always been a fan of small projects that use low levels of funding in carefully targeted ways to make transformative changes and build capacity. I’ve spent large parts of my adult life setting them up. It does not take a lot of money, in the grand scheme of things, to bring about lasting change. Especially if you build on existing interests, existing partnerships, and even existing plans.

Building on the past

There’s various models of change and innovation available, but the one I’ve always known to work draws on Eric Von Hippel’s lead user theory which can be summarised as: smart people on the ground doing the work are already inventing ways of getting stuff done – find these people, listen to them, and make the changes they suggest to enable others to do the same. The strength of the Regional Tertiary Pathfinders model is that it explicitly builds on existing work, existing relationships, and even existing projects – offering legitimacy and political backing as much as money to supercharge the good work that is already happening.

You sometimes come across agencies and individuals that want to start from scratch, designing the perfect system that will replace everything that has gone before. While this is undeniably fun, it ignores the fact that the same people and the same groups that have been working on similar projects before will be unimpressed with branding and a tidy new organogram being presented as a way to solve the problems they’ve been working on for years. You could call it “producer interest” – I much prefer the term “people who are actually going to do the work to solve the problem” interest.

It doesn’t matter how good you are on PowerPoint, those new boxes are going to be populated by existing domain experts – it would probably save a lot of time if we started listening to them.

What about the data?

One of the impressive facets of both the Regional Delivery Boards and the projects they support is what I might term a pragmatism about data. It actually turns out that data on employer needs is just one of the wells that need to be drawn on, of arguably equal importance is data on the needs of the kinds of students who may want to take the new course you are designing.

It surprises many to learn just how many (technical, legal, procedural) barriers exist around sharing data across educational phases. Schools will have detailed data on their pupils, not just on attainment and personal characteristics, but on career intentions too. But it is rare to see such detailed information shared with colleges, and by the time you get to university or employment a pupil is flattened out to a list of grades and a very generic reference.

Likewise, different parts of the system will be getting different kinds of information from employers and industry bodies. While an individual employer may be reasonably expected to understand their own immediate skills needs, to get a fuller or longer term picture you need more than one data point. The various employers, bodies, and providers involved all had light to shed – on a global, regional, and local level.

In order to ensure that skills pipelines are unclogged working in the way they might be needed you need to bring all of these data sources together, and it is to the credit of the two boards that this has been able to happen.

Designing and delivering courses

Any provider worth bothering with will be drawing on all kinds of information in designing new courses and reviewing old ones. There’s a landscape of professional bodies, subject interest groups, QAA benchmarks, and comparators that can help academics and quality assurance staff decide what needs to be covered in a course. This intelligence is married with an institutional insight into its own purpose and mission, and the missions of other local providers.

Employer engagement can and does happen at the design, delivery, and review phases of courses – each of these allows for direct input into the curriculum mediated by the kinds of wider understanding detailed above. What we are also starting to see is partnerships between providers across phases feeding these processes in a similar way – schools, local authorities, and FE colleges, are all components of the skills pipeline and have a key role both in directly preparing students for admission, and in raising awareness and aspiration more widely.

This nicely illustrates a central strength of the regional tertiary pathfinder approach, an emphasis on the wider needs of the learner. Rather than seeing learners, Gradgrind-like, as vessels to be filled with the correct skills there is a recognition of “meta-skills” and graduate applicants: a genuine consideration of the careers and lives of learners rather than just thinking about the immediate employer or industry need. Again to quote Ewart Keep:

There are a number of professions and occupations where we know that labour shortages in part (sometimes a growing proportion) spring not from a shortage of individuals qualified to undertake the work, but from the fact that those that are qualified and have entered the workforce are now choosing to leave the occupation because individuals are concluding that the pay and/or working conditions and stress levels are unacceptable

Courses more closely aligned to employers needs are certainly useful in addressing skills needs – they are not a means of attracting young people to work in unlivable jobs.

Beyond the programme, beyond Scotland

The initiatives that the Regional Pathfinder Programme have fostered and nurtured are already becoming “business as usual”, though how the funding council can support and grow this activity remains an open question. The project coordinators that did so much to drive success were largely funded by the small SFC grants – whether such dedicated project delivery roles would exist without this small amount of funding is not clear. Likewise, the attention that SFC involvement (and, frankly, SFC oversight) drove at a senior level is difficult to sustain. As of yet we don’t know how or in what form the programme will continue – but given the small amount of funding involved and the scope to spread the lessons learned so far to other areas it would feel very short-sighted to abandon the approach.

In other nations of the UK skills planning cleaves much closer to the employer-as-purchaser model that relies on the optimistic idea that employers are engaged in long-term skills planning that can be aggregated and delivered. The results from Scotland should inform England’s long-awaited reform of the LSIP process – and hopefully put a human face on what frequently feels like an impersonal and deterministic skills strategy that understands neither the people who have the skills, the institutions that develop them, and the the employers that react to a rapidly changing world.