It turns out that the people that advocate for workers rights might also be good at advocating for worker reskilling.
One part of the many-faceted Lifelong Learning Entitlement skills revolution dream concerns upskilling and reskilling our existing workforce. If the idea of a career doing a single thing in the same way from the moment you left education to the moment you retired ever was a thing it is clearly not a thing now: and a big part of what we still sometimes call “employability” is the idea that you can keep learning as you work.
The provision of courses, and fee and maintenance loans to support attendance, is one part of the government answer to this challenge – but we know from the various trials that untried short vocationally-focused courses are a difficult sell. The cultural expectation has been that employers fund training and development but in a landscape of portfolio careers, SMEs, and sole traders this is very clearly no longer the default (and the UK’s larger employers have historically been pretty poor at this stuff anyway without union intervention).
What is missing here is careers advice and guidance – and while the young benefit from focused school- and university-centred offers, in later life this kind of support is often either an expensive add-on (the career coach) or linked to the more remedial approach offered by job centres to the newly unemployed. One of the few times most employees do get targeted career support is during large layoffs, when elements of training and personal development are offered to the newly redundant as a kind of sweetener.
In other words, if we are targeting people mid-career we don’t really have an established way of doing that, and that is not going to help connect people to short higher-level courses (or longer qualifications for that matter) that could benefit them.
It is expected that chancellor John Healey will shortly announce that the government will reinstate the Union Learning Fund: something that addresses exactly this gap. It was set up by the first Blair administration in 1998, with a remit to “develop the capacity of trade unions and Union Learning Representatives to work with employers, employees, and learning providers to encourage greater take up of learning”.
It was a small (about £10m to £15m) fund that didn’t cover the cost of the courses themselves, but the network of peer support and amplification of the worker voice that ensured people knew about and got onto useful courses, and got the maximum benefit from them. It persisted (latterly run by an arm of the Trades Union Congress called Unionlearn, but always available to any union affiliated or not) right through to October 2020, when one Gavin Williamson realised he was funding something that said “union” in the title and cut it. Despite press coverage and protest, and despite evidence presented that union learning was a huge and measurable benefit to productivity and the skills of workers, the fund ended in 2021.
The argument presented by ministers for this decision was that investment in other areas of skills provision was a greater priority. It is a nice example of the kind of “skills thinking” rife among politicians, where basic skills provision of the sort that can support NEETs back into work or education and targeted upskilling for existing staff are seen in competition rather than as components of a truly lifelong learning culture.
We’ve yet to hear what the parameters of the reinstated fund will be – and whether it will come with caveats or restrictions (Healey could still profoundly miss the mark by restricting it to "AI skills" or some such nonsense) – but as a small investment supporting the development of the higher level skills employers say they need it is a very encouraging step in the right direction.