The government’s skills bill is “unworkable” and will be “less effective” than it needs to be in all parts of the country, Labour’s shadow education secretary has said.
Speaking at the Learning and Work Institute’s Employment and Skills Convention today, Kate Green said there needed to be a much more “clearly defined and significant” role for local and metropolitan combined authorities.
She said: “[Labour has] been very critical of the over-centralisation that is explicit in the skills bill … I think it’s impossible to prescribe the skills needs for the whole country from an office in Whitehall.
“The skills needs in Greater Manchester, where I’m an MP, are going to be rather different from the skills needs in rural Norfolk or in other parts of the country. We really need to understand different labour markets and the way they’re developing, and that’s going to be understood best at local and regional level.”
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Ms Green said there were inconsistencies in the skills bill around local skills needs and that the government was “seeking to limit the power of local areas”.
“We’ve got an over-rigid system coming from the centre, seeking to limit the power of local areas to determine and work on what is best for them,” she said. “But at the same time, failing to recognise that it’s not always just about locality, that some of the providers are doing things beyond that locality and if the secretary of state’s decision is based narrowly on what he thinks they ought to be doing in their local area, he may be undermining some of what their strengths are.”
Will the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill be effective?
The Skills and Post-16 Education Bill is currently making its way through parliament. In the legislation, the government has introduced “local skills improvement plans”, which will be developed by employers, further education colleges, “other providers and local stakeholders”.
The “local skills improvement plans” will be piloted in trailblazer local areas, exploring an approach where they are led by accredited Chambers of Commerce and other business representative organisations, in collaboration with local providers, and engage employer and provider groups to ensure the most effective models of employer representation are created before wider roll-out.
There is no mention of the metro mayors or combined authorities who currently have responsibility for some skills funding.
At the second reading in the House of Lords in June, speakers raised similar concerns to Labour.
At the time, Baroness Wilcox said: “Councils have direct functions to plan post-16 skills, support young people with specific needs and deliver adult and community earning, and other related functions. Mayoral combined authorities have devolved responsibility for the adult education budget, which they have used to reshape the local further education offer, working with employers, FE providers and constituent local authorities. There is, however, an overt emphasis on an employer-led approach to develop local skills improvement plans alongside training providers in this bill.
“We will seek to amend the bill to empower the metro mayors and combined authorities to co-produce the plans in recognition of the crucial role they have to play.”
A DfE spokesperson said: “The Bill will ensure we can continue to sustainably offer high-quality education and training to as many people as possible, and that the training on offer meets the needs of employers and local communities.
“Our reforms will put employers at the heart of the skills system through enabling the development of employer-representative bodies, such as Chambers of Commerce, who will develop local skills improvement plans. We are also introducing a duty on FE providers to review how well the education or training they are providing meets local needs.
“These reforms will support employers to access the workforce they need, and help to get more people into work locally, so they no longer need to leave their hometowns to find a good job if they don’t want to.”
