A new government body – or ‘quango’ – is birthed to solve to the ongoing skills gap, but can Skills England be different from its predecessors?

Will it be the same civil servants, resource constraints, and ambitions but with a different name above the door? For Skills England to gain the confidence of employers, this can’t be the case. Its new responsibilities are largely the same as the Institute for Apprenticeships & Technical Education (IfATE), an existing agency within the Department for Education (DfE), namely being to connect “the skills system, employer engagement and develop high quality provision which qualifies for public money.”

During my nearly four years on the board of IfATE, these three priorities occupied nearly all our time.

But we should be more charitable. Done well, a new agency can galvanise activity. It has the potential to coordinate action across government and local government. By hiring the right people, it can provide the opportunity for innovation outside the central civil service, including injecting new expertise and outside experience. And it can provide a very clear signal to the sector of ministerial priorities, and act as a lightning rod for people wanting to contribute.

As it stands, Skills England aims to:

• bring together central and local government, businesses, training providers, and unions to meet the skills needs of the next decade across all regions;
• provide strategic oversight of the post-16 skills system aligned to the government’s Industrial Strategy; and
• work with the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) to reduce reliance on overseas workers.

The question remains: can Skills England deliver this, and how?

Welcome to the (crowded) neighbourhood.

DfE is not short of acronyms, groups, and quangos. Skills England will inherit the same overlaps that IfATE experienced: with the Office for Students (OfS) and Ofqual, in particular. When it comes to technical education and apprenticeships, keeping relations with Ofqual will be just as important as Skills England. This reads across to the OfS too, particularly for degree apprenticeships and technical provision in university settings. Skills England will need to quickly establish strong partnerships.

DfE agency overlaps are not the only issue: if Skills England is to coordinate skills policy across government, it will need to exercise power across government.

For example, the relationship with MAC in the Home Office will be critical given Skills England needing to reduce reliance of overseas workers – along with the newly merged JobCentre Plus & National Careers Service in the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) – as and when what that means practically becomes clear. Labour so far looks to continue the previous approach of MAC, except for previous government’s plans to raise the minimum salary requirement for spousal visas which have been paused.

As a result, I think an opportunity might have been missed. Rather than being siloed as an education agency, Skills England could have been set up as a cross-government body that recognises every sector of the economy and public service requires skilled people. This would mean making it a Treasury or a Business Department agency.

The Pied Piper of Whitehall

One thing that has always struck me when visiting government departments to talk about skills over the last decade is the volume of skills policy staff in other departments. Many of which seem to be work in a silo, isolated from skills policy in the DfE.

The DWP has a large number of people developing skills policy given their work with the National Careers Service. Treasury has some of the powerful skills policy officials given their grip on the money (never forgets it’s Treasury that rules the roost on the Apprenticeship Levy). The Department for Transport (DfT) has a large team given the importance to the sector. And the Digital Skills Council, hosted by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), is doing great work too. This is repeated in every department and elected mayor.

Therefore, Skills England has an important role here of acting as a pied piper meandering down Whitehall to bring together civil servants working on skills and harnessing their collective strength and expertise. And while ‘England’ is in its name, joining up with the devolved nations is important: it drives many pan-UK employers mad they must deal with four distinct skills system.

Skills and de-Growth of Apprenticeships Levy

The announcement on Skills England also confirms at least one thing that will make it from Labour manifesto to real life: the release of 50% of the Apprenticeship Levy for non-apprenticeship training. While many will celebrate newfound flexibility, caution should be taken. Not because all training should be done via an apprenticeship (it shouldn’t be, and isn’t) or flexibility isn’t needed, but because of two issues the new government will need to address: demand for apprenticeships is massively outstripping supply, and delivering apprenticeships in universities, colleges, and independent training providers is often only just financially viable already. A 50% reduction in ring fenced apprenticeships cash will make both these issues much worse.

To put it into context, when I was at UCAS integrating apprenticeships, we built demand to the point where about 400,000+ people were interested in doing an apprenticeship, but live apprenticeship vacancies were only around 4,000 – 6,000. We’ve barely scratched the surface on the potential for apprenticeships and more money is needed, not less. Indeed, the fact that less than 1% of the Levy is unspent demonstrates the ceiling is being hit.

Skills England will therefore have the tricky job of deciding what the 50% non-ring-fenced money can be used for. The easier option will be taking products off the shelf: qualifications from City & Guilds, BTECs, T levels, or perhaps modular courses from the likes of the Open University and Birkbeck. The more intensive approach (and the right one in my view) would be for Skills England to adopt IfATE’s tried and tested approach in which employers designed and shaped content directly.

Employers need to be the life and soul of Skills England

In a patchwork of 10,000+ qualifications, it was the job of IfATE, and now most likely Skills England, to bring employers together to work out what the content of apprenticeship standards should be. This made sure aspiring apprentices were genuinely prepared for the workplace with the skills, knowledge and character neccesary to succeed.

It wasn’t people in the DfE or IfATE deciding the content or how apprenticeships would be assessed, but rather actual employers giving up hours of their time to shape each of the 800+ apprenticeship standards approved over the last few years under IfATE’s leadership, covering roughly 70% of occupations.

This is what lies at the heart of the huge success of apprenticeships over the last few years: employers sharing their expertise and insight into how qualifications and apprenticeships can effectively prepare people for their career.

So, my advice to Skills England would be:

1. quickly demonstrate how you will exercise power across government;
2. open up the siloes and pockets of skills policy across Whitehall to ensure it will be much greater than the sum of its parts as a unified body;
3. build on the strong employer relations created by IfATE, especially the trailblazing employer groups which have been working away in the background; and
4. engage with the education sector, such as training providers and awarding bodies, to support the design and implementation of Skills England.

Skills England has a monumental task ahead of it if the existing skills gaps are to be filled and productivity increased. We should all hope it succeeds.