Higher education, careers and the skills agenda after Leitch (Winter 07/08)
Summary
Stephen McNair, Director of the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE) Centre for Research into the Older Workforce, discusses the implications of the Leitch Review of Skills and the issues associated with a 'demand led system' of education and training. The article is a summary of the presentation he gave at the Higher Education Careers Services Unit (HECSU)/Higher Education Academy (HEA) conference on 12 June 2007.
Full article
The labour market is changing. It is ageing, as birthrates fall and life expectancy rises (the average age of some occupational groups is now well over 50!). Young people are taking longer to become established in the labour market, with gap years, and trial jobs. The centre of gravity of the workforce is moving from (traditionally male) manual skills to (more commonly female) service sector and knowledge based jobs (although there will remain a baseline demand for practical skills – and high levels of retirement mean that demand for replacement workers remains strong in some areas despite overall decline in the workforce numbers). The market is becoming increasingly international: although a majority of people never move more than a hundred miles form where they grew up, far more people are moving between regions, countries and continents. And the market is complex: behind the broad patterns of labour market behaviour large and small firms are very different, as are occupational sectors. Some sectors are likely to remain low skilled, while the skill base of others is shifting. Styles of management are also changing: as the Skills at Work survey reported last year, task discretion at work matters a lot to people, and in the UK (unlike many other countries) it has been falling in both public and private sectors [1].
Attitudes to work are also changing: most people in the workforce like work (though not always their present jobs) and the proportion increases with age. However, at all ages they want better work-life balance, and employers, increasingly conscious of the shortage of real talent, are slowly responding.
It is against this background that the Government commissioned Lord Leitch to prepare a report on the future skill needs of the economy [2]. The report, published last December, presented an alarming picture. Leitch argued, on the basis of comparative data on qualifications, not only that the UK was well behind its economic competitors in workforce skills, but is slipping further down. The only reason our competitive shortfall is not more evident, he suggests, is that we work longer (but less productive) hours to keep up, itself a cause of stress, ill health and poor quality of life.
In Leitch’s view, continuing on our present course will lead to declining competitiveness and growing skills shortages. Work, and especially skilled work, would move overseas, rising unemployment would generate social tensions, especially as more skilled migrant groups are sucked in to fill gaps left by underqualified native British workers. With this decline would go shrinking tax revenues, leading to cutbacks in public services, generating further tensions and spiralling economic and social decline.
By contrast, addressing the skills shortfall would lead to improved economic performance (£80b additional growth if Leitch’s ambitious targets were achieved), higher inward investment, more jobs, and more rewarding jobs. Successful tackling of illiteracy and innumeracy would lead to declines in crime and poor health. The result would be a happier and healthier population with higher standards of living, and better products and services available to a more prosperous population.
Leitch suggests that current methods for tackling skills problems are inadequate: they are too slow, and too loosely linked to the real needs of the current labour market. Government planning for skills has failed, and channelling public funding through education and training providers simply encourages them to provide what suits them rather than what the end users – employers and individuals – need and want. The result is a general lack of confidence that training can make a difference, which in turn feeds low levels of training, and low skills.
His solution is to move towards a “demand led system” of education and training. Employers would be more closely engaged in the design of training and qualifications, and would have access to impartial brokerage (through “Train to Gain”) to help them find the right solutions for their particular needs. Individuals would be given more power to buy what they believe they need (through individual learning accounts), making informed choices with the support of a universal adult careers service.
Although this seems eminently sensible, there are problems with such a radical transformation of a large and complex system (despite its shortcomings, annual expenditure on public and privately funded further education and higher education runs into tens of billions). We cannot afford to fundamentally destabilise existing institutions by sudden change, but transitional measures risk major complexity and unintended consequences. Already we see a positive initiative, the provision of impartial skills brokerage to employers through the Train to Gain scheme, subverted by the requirement that brokers help achieve a target of level 2 qualifications, which is the Government’s aim (supported by Leitch) not employers’. A system where the customers’ needs are mediated by Government is not customer led at all!
But the problems go deeper than “mere” implementation. One key issue is the definition of the customer. Anyone who works in careers guidance knows that “employer” is a slippery concept. Few people want to be “employers”: most business people are driven by a passion to make widgets, or to make money. Those who represent employers in policy discussions tend to be some distance from doing the job, and the line managers who have to get it done. My personal observation of employer advisory committees in higher education is that participants are there for a variety of purposes: talent spotting (of students or staff), filling their own CVs, demonstrating corporate social responsibility, gathering intelligence about competitors or sometimes being gracefully phased into retirement. They rarely have a clear view of the practical needs of the whole of their own business, let alone of the whole sector. Even when grouped together into sector bodies, the identification of skills needs tends to become a specialised function for researchers and consultants, while individual employers regularly disown the qualifications and strategies which have been devised or approved by their representatives, and the line managers who have to manage the work processes, are rarely involved directly.
A further problem is Leitch’s dependence on formal qualifications, both to measure the problem and provide the solution. However, the fact that the UK has one of the strongest economise in the OECD member states, despite its shortfall in qualifications, suggests that we have misunderstood the relationship between qualifications and performance at work. Either skills have no impact on economic performance (which seems unlikely), or qualifications do not properly measure skills, particularly perhaps for the older workers who have the lowest levels of qualifications but the most experience. This is not surprising: we know that skills decay if not practiced, and that the content of qualifications becomes out of date. The competence of a worker who acquired a vocational qualification 30 years ago and has worked for a good employer ever since is entirely different from someone who acquired the same qualification at the same time but has never worked in the industry, yet Leitch treats both equally in the measurement of our skills base, and Government policy will not support acquiring a second qualification at the same level, however long ago the first was acquired. In an ageing workforce this is perverse. There is also a growing body of evidence about other ways of developing skills. The Skills at Work report published earlier this year by the SKOPE consortium, and recent (not yet published) work by Alan Felstead on the NIACE annual Adult Learners Survey both suggest strongly that an individual’s capacity to do a job is more closely related to the way work is organised, and support between co-workers, than the formal qualifications held by workers. Perhaps employers are right to be sceptical of the value of qualifications, other than those which provide the generic underpinning for continuing learning (ironically, a feature of traditional “academic” qualifications, from GCSE English and Maths to first degrees). This evidence suggests that most of the learning which makes people productive happens in the course of work, not in classrooms, it is created by learning not teaching, maintained by practice, decays with neglect and is destroyed by bad management.
What does this mean for careers practitioners in higher education. Firstly, it is clear that much of what Leitch has proposed is going to be implemented, and, unlike some previous skills initiatives, higher education will probably be involved. This is right, since many of the skills of the future economy are the high level and intellectual skills which universities exist to develop. However, past experience of this kind of policy initiative suggests that implementation will be narrower than intended, and that the bureaucracies necessary to change large systems will themselves create perverse incentives, for those working in them and for the providing institutions. Some further education principals already report having to divert resources from good long term working relationships with local and regional employers to meet the requirements of funding systems designed in the wake of Leitch, to make them responsive to those same employers. Once again, it appears that the real customer is the Government, not the employer.
Higher education also ought to play to its strengths. Firstly by making sure that our students understand what is happening in the labour market, what employers are looking for, and the importance of learning at and through work, not just learning in preparation for it. Secondly to make sure that the knowledge about skills, economic and social trends and scenarios which is gathered and stored in higher education is being brought to bear on informing us and our clients. It is not uncommon for economic development units, or regional skills observatories, based in a university, to have little contact with the careers services of that institution. Thirdly, as part of higher education we have a responsibility to provide a critical view of developments in the world outside. Unlike other educational institutions, universities have always had a constitutional independence of the State, to ensure that it can provide an impartial and informed view of issues independent of the short term fashions and interests of politicians. Academic freedom must be earned to be justified. The careers service is closer to the outside world, and less able to take a lofty academic view, and it is inevitable, and proper, that we should be engaged in the transformation of education and training which the Government is seeking to implement, but this should not be an uncritical engagement. The long term public interest is best served if our graduates go out with an informed ability to challenge the world, not merely conform to it, and if we, as professionals, are contributing our understanding of the real working of the labour market to the public debate. We should not try to avoid Leitch, but neither should we become the slaves of an implementation plan.
References
1. Felstead A. et al. Skills at Work 1986-2006, SKOPE, ESRC Centre on Skills Knowledge and Organisational Performance.
2. Leitch. 2006. Proepsrity for all in the global economy: world class skills, London, HMSO
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