Around £130 billion in adult education funding will be required to prevent future skills gaps, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) has said.
Speaking in front of today’s House of Commons Education Select Committee, Matthew Percival, director of people and skills at the CBI, said that individuals, business and the government would need to supply that investment.
He said: “We think that the amount of money that will be needed from individuals, from businesses and government - with businesses paying the largest share - will be £130 billion over the next 10 years to prevent new skills gaps from emerging.”
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Iain Murray, senior policy officer at the Trade Union Congress said that to get back to where funding for adult education was at the start of the decade, £3 billion needed to be injected.
He said: “If we want to get back to where we were at the beginning of this decade, we are looking at the region of £3 billion into the adult skills budget. Studies have highlighted that the national skills fund has only recovered about 10 per cent of that. We need to deliver a huge boost in people’s ability to access skills.”
Participation in adult education has plummeted over the past decade. Tes analysis found that the number of learners taking part in evening classes has declined by around 50 per cent, and a Learning and Work Institute survey in 2019 warned that just one-third of adults said that they had participated in learning during the previous years.
In July this year, the Learning and Work Institute also warned of a looming unemployment crisis as a direct result of the coronavirus pandemic, and urged the government to invest in reskilling and upskilling adults across the country.
Individualised learning accounts
The committee discussed the possibility of individualised learning accounts (ILAs) to boost retraining and upskilling.
Mr Percival suggested that ILAs could be used as a vehicle for investment from individuals, employers and the government.
He said: “The way that we would see this work in practice is using it as a vehicle to encourage investment from government, businesses and individuals, and encouraging people to contribute to it.
“But the government part of that investment is focused particularly at those people who are most disadvantaged and who have the greatest need. I think one of the things you would do to try and fix the problems with the UK’s previous iteration of individual learning accounts is by binding it to needing an employer to sign off on the drawdown of those funds, and particularly where there’s public money involved. So that you’re guaranteeing it has a labour market outcome.”
