Shortly after the shock of the EU referendum, Nick Boles, then skills minister, published Lord Sainsbury’s review of technical education, alongside a Post-16 Skills Plan to implement it. It was a brief distraction from the political changes that were to come - changes that included a new prime minister, a new chancellor, a new Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and a revamped Department for Education. And, perhaps least surprising of all, a new skills minister.
But what of the “two for one” offer now? Is it worth salvaging from the wreckage of the last regime? Can it achieve what it set out to do against the new backdrop of Brexit?
As Lord Sainsbury rightly notes, England’s technical education system is “over-complex and fails to provide the skills most needed for the 21st century”. He describes the “serious shortage of technicians in industry and over 400,000 16- to 24-year-olds unemployed” as damning evidence of current and historic failure. He’s right that “successive UK governments have spent much of the last 50 years tinkering” and have created an “almost continuous agenda of reform”.
But it’s also true that every reformer and reviewer wants their reforms to be the last. In 1944, Butler hoped his plan for a technical route would be fully implemented. Likewise, David Blunkett’s Learning and Skills Council. Or Mike Tomlinson’s 14-19 Diplomas. Kennedy, Fryer, Foster, Leitch, anyone? Robbins, Crosland, Samuelson, Forster, even Adam Smith? What chance, then, for the vision of Sainsbury and Boles?
There are many shortcomings and omissions in the Sainsbury review that suggest more work will need to be done. The choice of academic or technical routes at 16 is too binary. Much technical and professional learning at higher levels still takes place alongside or intertwined with the academic in universities, but higher education is barely acknowledged at all.
It might save a lot of time and effort if we leave the review and Skills Plan stacked up on the shelves
His desire for simplification is laudable, but Lord Sainsbury’s recommendations end up overly simplistic. Fifteen sectors are artificially and clumsily constructed.
The review spends too much time on the easiest issues and not nearly enough on areas that might make a difference to our post-Brexit prospects. Skill shortages in key sectors? National colleges can deal with them. And the rest? Workplace training, productivity, devolution? Barely a peep. Adults get a couple of paragraphs suggesting they can do the same as young people but part-time.
There is very little about demand (or the lack of it) or of how new technical skills might be utilised. Nothing about the sectors and firms that do too little training. Little about incentives or funding for colleges or employers or about the distorting effects of large numbers of graduates. It assumes that it’s only the supply side that needs sorting out. Worse still, it diverts more resource and attention to 16-18 at the exclusion of too much else. Ultimately, there is little evidence that Sainsbury will solve the shortage of advanced technical skills or youth unemployment.
It’s more than a little ironic that Lord Sainsbury can’t find room for retail or food manufacturing in his 15 sectors. By definition they must lie “outside the scope of technical education”, even though this is a major UK sector.
Too many recommendations are similarly half-baked. We are going to need more than a few little twists if we’re going to redesign England’s skills system. So it might save a lot of time and effort if we leave the Sainsbury review and the Skills Plan stacked up on the shelves.
Andy Westwood is associate vice-president for public affairs at the University of Manchester, professor of politics at Winchester University and a former government special adviser @AndyWWestwood
