The blind (politicians) telling the deaf (employers)

The decision by the last Government to integrate Local Enterprise Partnership functions into local democratic institutions can only be understood in the context of a belief that private sector employers cannot be trusted to invest in the skills they need while politicians and officials can. This belief appears based on studies which quote?headlines from the Department of ?Education Employer Skills Surveys, which provides comparable data from 2011 to 2017 and, more recently, to 2022.

The detail, however, shows very different patterns, including a sea-change after 2017. The problem is in the public sector and is about to be compounded by the Skills England reliance on those who caused it. ???

The headline 10% fall (almost all since Covid) in spend on training since 2011 is almost entirely in the Public Administration and Education sectors. From 2011 - 2017 spend on training by the Public administration sector fell by nearly 30%. That by the education sector dropped by a quarter. Most other sectors increased spend by 10% or more.?

Then came Brexit and Covid.

Despite the expansion of the Civil Service to cope, spend on training in the public administration sector fell by another 20%, with spend per employee falling by 26%. That was a bigger fall than any other sectors save for Hotel and Retail. By contrast spend per employee in Financial Services has risen by a third since 2017.

We can speculate as to the causes of the decline in public sector training before 2017. The most obvious is the effect of outsourcing. If so, the failure to retain, develop and maintain the in-house skills necessary to get value for money would help explain why so many such contracts fail to do so. And it does not augur well for improvement under the current government unless and until those skills are rebuilt.

The decline since 2017 is much easier to explain. Those working mainly at home (as opposed to “from” home or “hybrid”) rarely receive any training, other than on-line. The public administration sector has been slower than almost any other sector in returning to “hybrid” work practice. By contrast the Financial Services sector has invested heavily in training staff to cope with a changed world. ???

The fall in spend by the education sector is less easily explained, other than by changes in teacher training. It may, however, explain why so many schools, colleges and universities have problems in exploiting new educational techniques and technology to better educate pupils and students so that they too can acquire new skills.

Over 40 years ago Donald Michie, one of the fathers of machine learning (aka Generative AI), believed that one of its prime uses should be “knowledge refining” including to improve policy formation and implementation, from analysing the provenance of the evidence base and modelling how it would achieve its objectives to monitoring performance. ?

He asked me to predict its effects on the world of education . You can use the link to see how right and how wrong I was, but the effects of our failure to use AI to improve policy formation and scrutiny have become all too apparent. ?

If we are to improve the relevance of UK skills policy to meet our current and emerging needs we have not only to re-train and re-deploy teachers and trainers to re-train the work force in general, we have to re-skilling central and local government, from policy analysts through programme planners and procurement specialists, to those at the coal face of delivery.

And that retraining has to recognise the limitations of learning from home or on-line as opposed to hybrid learning with physical inter-active peer group networking sessions between on-line components. ??

Until we have done so at the top, we also run the increased risk of failing to adequately scrutinise policies worked up by those working at home during Covid (and after), whose misreading of data, perhaps influenced by the prejudices and vested interests of who-ever commissioned their studies, was not exposed to early and robust peer review, whether round the water cooler or in the bar. ??????

In the mean time I recommend looking at the detail of the latest Employer Skills Survey and the statistical ?database behind it. Analyses by size of employer, as well as by sector and location indicate that it would have been better to address the flaws in the LEPs than to move back to the seventies. ???

If fear that without much greater clarity of thought we are about to waste another generation and another decade - with officials and experts, with little or no experience of manpower planning, ignoring the needs of large employers who wish to train to international standards within global career paths, let alone small businesses who employ most of those on the margins of welfare and work.