The following press notice is issued by the Economic and Social Research Council's Research Centre on Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance based at Oxford and Cardiff Universities. Please address any enquiries to the contact tel nos/addresses at the end of the notice. Info on SKOPE can be seen on the organisation's web site: www.skope.ox.ac.uk.
Skills policy approaching a turning point?
In an issues paper for ESRC SKOPE, Ewart Keep and Ken Mayhew commenting on the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills’ latest white paper Skills for Growth (2009), find the green shoots of a new approach to skills policy. They say that the white paper shows ‘a strong line of continuity’, however, it also ‘admits more fully than previously that there is no automatic relationship between skills and productivity’. Keep and Mayhew say that ‘while the Government has as yet not moved beyond the setting of targets for the supply of skills it is for the first time allowing its own UK Commission on Employment and Skills to identify the limitation of a supply-based policy and to think what needs to be done to stimulate demand’.
The white paper describes a high performing highly skilled, highly qualified economy with policies in place to provide the relevant throughput of higher education and apprentice training places. Meanwhile, academics and now UKCES are warning that the demand for higher skills, at degree, technician and craft levels are too low in an economy that has too few high performance workplaces. In other words, that the UK’s problem is not too few well qualified people but too few employers who want to employ them.
Since the mid-1980s, education and skills policy has concentrated on targets derived from comparisons with other advanced economies. There are some signs of policy change, particularly in Scotland with their skills utilisation programme, and the UKCES is critically examining and not simply acting as a conduit for the policy status quo. The Government wants to create a new ‘technician class’ and to expand apprenticeships but the economy appears to have little need for such skills outside manufacturing, construction and science. The white paper’ rhetoric is ‘demand-led and market-driven’ but the mechanisms the Government relies on are still skills funding through the Skills Funding Agency and Regional Development Agencies. Indeed, the sector skills councils, ‘which have been largely used to provide a demand-led veneer to supply-led policies’ are threatened with a broadening and reduction in number from 25 to ten or so rather than working with specific sectors as they have in New Zealand (a far smaller economy with 80 sector bodies) with great success.
Keep and Mayhew argue that new demand side policy is needed, not to retrench supply policies to lower levels of skills demand but to work with employers to raise demand to match aspirations. They say that it will not be easy to find the right answers but that ‘a period of reflection and small scale experimentation would have merit’. The UKCES, which for the first time since the Manpower Services Commission provides at least semi-independent and substantial influence on official thinking and policy formation, could play a crucial role.
Notes for Editors: SKOPE Issues Paper No 21 ‘Some Comments on Skills for Growth’ has been written by Ewart Keep, deputy director of SKOPE and of Cardiff University and Ken Mayhew, director of SKOPE and of Pembroke College, Oxford.
The paper is published on SKOPE’s web site: www.skope.ox.ac.uk or is available from the SKOPE Secretary, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Glamorgan Building, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3WT.
For further information contact: Ewart Keep, SKOPE Deputy Director, tel (0)2920 870396 and e-mail KeepEJ@cardiff.ac.uk; Ken Mayhew, SKOPE Director, tel (0)1865 276434, mob 07967355753 and e-mail ken.mayhew@pmb.ox.ac; and John Stevens, press coordinator and associate fellow, tel (0)1732 362895 and e-mail john.r.stevens@talk21.com.
