Category: Skills England

Skills England has a new way to talk about skills, and the sector needs to listen
Although on one level tertiary education policy has never been more concerned with skills, we’ve never really had a proper understanding of what skills actually are or how they fit together with either jobs or courses.

While – as a select and very well-informed group of attendees at The Festival of Higher Education were delighted to learn – there are any number of conceptualisations of what a skill (or a group of skills) might be, matching skills needs to jobs or to courses has never been easy to do in a reliable way.

To be a bit less abstract, if we want anyone to train our future workforce we need to know what we want them to be trained in. And, not only do we not know that because we can’t predict the future – we also don’t know that because we simply do not have the vocabulary or frameworks of understanding we need to pose the right questions. Employers and industries cannot talk to course providers and prospective employees about this stuff because each of these groups has spoken a different language.

Until today!

Into this ontological hellscape comes Skills England. The release of the UK Standard Skills Classification (UK-SSC) – alongside a wonderfully whizzy UK Skills Explorer tool – is, in a quiet way, the most significant thing to happen to the skills landscape in a generation: not least because, for the first time we are able to see it.

Before this, the skills landscape was, (at best) uneven. SOC codes helped us understand occupational requirements for jobs, SIC codes helped us understand the kind of work that goes on in particular industries, and HECoS codes gave us an understanding of what areas particular courses of study cover. All of this was useful, but none of it really linked together and – as you’ve probably spotted – none of it talked about actual skills.

So what is a “skill”? Well, it might be “a capability enabling the competent performance of a job-related activity”: an occupational skill. Or it could be a more generic competence, “a fundamental ability that contributes to the capability to carry out tasks associated with a specific job”: a core skill.

Skills England has identified 3,343 occupational skills (within 22 domains, 106 areas, and 606 groups). Occupational skills combine with knowledge (4,926 of these are defined) and core skills (just 13) to give someone the capability to do one or more of 21,963 identified occupational tasks.

So what?

The existence of these definitions should make it a lot easier to translate employer and industry needs, into opportunities that strategic government support, and an offer of courses that satisfies these needs.

Let’s give an example. Imagine the government decides that any future transition away from carbon-based power requires batteries and electrical components, and notices that we have quite a lot of the rare-earth metals and other minerals that we need to make these somewhere under the ground in the UK. We need to get them out, and we need to train the people that can do that. And we currently only have one school of mining with a little over a hundred students.

Because we can map the UK-SSC to Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes, we can very easily run up a list of the key skills we need to train people in.

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That way, when we get to specifying what the new mining schools we are going to open actually need to teach, and we get to working with industry to decide what skills they need to do all this mining we have an agreed list. A starting point, sure, but one that saves a lot of time.

You will note that this is not just training people how to dig stuff up. There are research jobs, planning jobs, management jobs, and a fair few design jobs that need to be done. The bar chart aspect here gives us an indication as to how important each skill is to employers in this industry.

From specification to commission

So if we know what skills we need, how do we get people training in them? Or do we have people training in them already?

UK-SSC also maps to HECoS codes, which are the language we use in higher education to think about subject areas. So, to continue our example, let’s think about analysing mineral deposits – helping us figure out where to start digging holes.

“Analyse mineral deposits (S.0091)” is within the “researching & analysing” domain, and the “conducting scientific surveys and research” area. And we can use one of the mappings developed by Skills England to check out whether we have any courses in related subjects currently being offered in the UK higher education sector that might help.

I’m sorry to say I’ve been messing around with the data behind Discover Uni again. This maps individual courses to HECoS codes – so it lets us see how many courses are in subject areas linked to the skill we are interested in.

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Setting the filters appropriately and scrolling down we can see that we are not well-served with educational opportunities in this space. There are 19 subject areas associated with this skill, and only a few have courses that are being tagged with them. Notably there are 14 courses in environmental geosciences, 8 in geology, and 3 in archeological sciences. Nobody (not even the Camborne School of Mines!) is tagging themselves with the specific engineering-related disciplines of minerals processing or quarrying.

This neatly demonstrates that a linking vocabulary can only take us too far if subject coding (or any other kind of data collection) is done in a less-than-complete way. Using this very basic desk analysis we can see that there is probably a case for more specialist mining provision – and based on that we can suggest that there may be a cause for government investment. But it could equally demonstrate that tagging courses with HECoS code to power a course comparison website that hardly anyone looks at is not a way of generating a comprehensive picture of what is on offer.

And this is just a starting point. We can drill down from these occupational skills into job tasks, knowledge concepts, and core skills from here – all of which would help us specify what we need to train people to do in detail fine enough to design and run a suitable course for them.

So how has this been done?

If you are imagining a bunch of very diligent and smart people at Skills England and the University of Warwick taking a bunch of pre-existing information and pulling together this vocabulary you are probably most of the way there. Starting from six existing sources a combination of expert input and large language models refined and deduplicated entries within:
- A list of skills generated by (Skills England predecessor) the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education
- A list developed by the the Association of Graduate Careers Advisory Services
- A list from the National Careers Service
- A list from the Workforce Foresighting Hub in Innovate UK
- And two international comparators – the European Skills, Competences, Qualifications, and Occupations (ESCO) level 4 skills, and the (US based) O*NET detailed work activities.
A similar approach generated and tested all of the mappings and hierarchies that have been made available to download and play with.

And core skills?

As above there are just 13 of these, but these are assigned levels of proficiency in language that feels a lot like grade descriptors (note, these are not FHEQ levels but I bet somebody, somewhere, is thinking about a mapping).

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Each of these core skills also maps, to a greater or lesser extent, to each of the occupational skills – so our old friend “Analyse mineral deposits (S.0091)” requires level 4 “learning and investigating”, level 3 “planning and organising”, and level 2 “listening”.

You can’t help but think that forward-looking course leaders will be incorporating these definitions into their learning outcomes in the years to come. Proficiency levels may also be coming to the occupational skills definitions, and there’s even an idea of creating basic curricula for benchmarking and general use.

Skills for the future

There’s an old XKCD cartoon about standards that has become a meme – and it highlights that just because someone has combined everyone’s needs into a single standard there is nothing to say anyone will actually use that one rather than whatever language they’ve been speaking for years.

The UK-SSC attempts to avoid this in two ways. Firstly it maps to other vocabularies that people are already using in linked areas, and does so by design. And secondly it bears the imprinteur of the government, suggesting that at least one influential body will be using it every time it talks about skills.

And there’s another aspect that helps drive adoption. It will iterate – based on job vacancy data, workforce foresight, feedback from employers, even via public community forums (Stack Exchange, Discord!). And the links to other vocabularies will iterate too. The plan is that this will happen on a five year cycle, but with a first update next year.

Make no mistake, this is a major intervention in the skills landscape – and it has been done diligently and thoughtfully. If your job involves anything from designing courses to working with employers and local skills improvement plans, if you are a professional body, or working on subject benchmark statements, you need to get on board.
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November 28, 2025
Labour takes steps to bring higher education and local skills closer together

The post-16 white paper promised to strengthen statutory guidance on local skills improvement plans (LSIPs), including “clearer expectations on higher education providers to engage” and a move to make the plans cover skills all the way up to level 8.

This greater roles for universities in LSIPs was gestured at in Skills England’s ministerial guidance, and even announced by Labour in opposition.

Now, the revised guidance has been published – and the push for higher education providers to play a more central role has indeed materialised.

This is a local shop

LSIPs were introduced in the Skills and Post-16 Education Act under the last government as employer-owned priorities and actions around skills needs and the provision of technical education in a designated local area of England. Some 38 different plans were approved by the Secretary of State in summer 2023, with annual progress reports following – you can find them all on this page if you don’t mind navigating through some confusingly designed websites.

That legislation also introduced mechanisms to assess how well education providers were contributing to the plans – for example, accountability agreements for further education colleges. For higher education institutions, the only mention of accountability in the old guidance was an enjoinder to make a note of activity related to LSIP priorities in strategic plans. The previous government framing around LSIPs was notably quiet on the role of higher education, as we’ve noted before – which is not to say that many HE institutions didn’t get involved, to greater or lesser extents (the progress reports linked above demonstrate this, though in a non-systematic way).

LSIPs cover a three-year period, so a new round in summer 2026 is Labour’s big chance to reshape them in its preferred fashion. Today’s guidance is to be used for an LSIP draft submitted by the end of March, and – pending government approval – the new plans will be published in or around June next year.

The areas covered by LSIPs, and the corresponding employer representative bodies (ERBs), have also been shifting – today we get the latest areas confirmed, now sensibly contiguous with local authority areas. An additional wrinkle that Labour announced in last year’s devolution white paper is for so-called strategic authorities (“mayoral and non-mayoral combined authorities, combined county authorities, and the Greater London Authority”) to take joint ownership of LSIPs, along with ERBs. Eventually everywhere will be in a strategic authority – one day – but today’s guidance is in many places split depending on whether the LSIP is or is not in a more devolved part of England.

Best laid plans

LSIPs are a complicated undertaking at the best of times – as the government puts it, they “unite employers, strategic authorities, higher education, further education and independent training providers and wider stakeholders in solving skills challenges together.” Their effectiveness in really driving change remains unproven but – in theory – they respond to calls for a skills system that is planned at a local rather than central government level (or one that is not planned at all).

The new guidance confirms just quite how complex an endeavour putting a plan together has become. New LSIPs will need to join up with the industrial strategy and its sector plans, “as far as they relate to industries within the local area.” This will also create synergies (or cross-purposes) with the new local growth plans for mayoral authorities announced at the spending review, which focus on economic development, and the Local Get Britain Working Plans (GBWPs) which are supposed to be looking at “broader causes of economic inactivity.”

The guidance references a need for a read-across to the clean energy jobs plan (the LSIPs legislation placed a requirement on the plans to consider the environment), but this presumably will equally apply all the other forthcoming workforce strategies – now renamed as jobs plans, keep up – that different sectors are being obliged to come up with for purposes of linking migration and skills.

And in perhaps the most notable shift of all, the new Labour version of the LSIP is instructed to pay heed to the post-16 white paper, and specifically the new prime ministerial targets for participation in higher-level learning. This is even presented as the first bullet point in the list of what the Secretary of State will take into account in the approval process. Reading between the lines, it looks like the government will be wanting plans which are relatively bullish on the growth of provision, including – but not only – at levels 4 and 5.

Skills England is tasked with monitoring and oversight, as well as providing copious data to inform the plans’ development.

Get HE in

As set out in the new guidance at least, each LSIP will function as a little microcosm of the more coherent and cooperative education and skills landscape that Labour is swinging for in its white paper vision. Whether the plans can really drive these reforms, or simply reflect their framing, is another question – but there’s similar language about asking both further and higher education providers to lean in and

work together in support of the ambitions set out in their respective LSIP, creating a more coherent post-16 education system with better pathways and opportunities to progress from entry up to higher level skills, enabled by the Lifelong Learning Entitlement.

As mentioned, LSIPs will now be required to run the full gamut of technical education from entry level up to level 8, having previously been limited to level 6 provision as a cut-off. Asking employers and local areas to think about postgraduate-level skills needs is a bit of a watershed moment, even if the government itself seems to have only limited appetite for much policy change, and it will be fascinating to see what comes of it.

Perhaps it’s the paucity of much proper government support for the higher education sector in recent years which leads me to celebrate this, but the language in the guidance around higher education’s fit within local systems feels spot on, in terms of how the sector would like itself to be understood:

Higher education providers (HEPs) are focal points for higher level technical skills, research and innovation. The differences in mission, specialisms and strategic objectives between different types of institutions mean that HEPs can add unique value to local skill systems in a variety of ways, including through industry partnerships, research-led innovation, and national and international development initiatives; as well as feeding in higher education specific intelligence, such as graduate outcomes or skills pipeline data, to complement and add to further education and employer data.

What getting stuck in looks like

Both HE and FE providers will be expected to play a role in LSIP governance. Core elements of the new plans will need to include details of how both types of providers have been engaged in shaping the priorities and actions, as well as identifying challenges, and set out how they will support implementation and review progress.

The potential actions included within LSIPs are varied, but it’s anticipated that they will speak to both improving the local skills “offer” – including changes that higher and further education providers can make to better align provision with the skills needs of the area and to simplify access – and to raise awareness of existing provision, helping both employers and learners to better understand what’s available.

On the latter, there’s a nice moment where the guidance makes a genuinely sensible suggestion:

Where engagement between higher education providers and LSIPs has not previously taken place, ERBs (and Strategic Authorities) may find engaging with the heads of careers and employability (who tend to work on skills development and measuring skills impact) a useful starting point.

Higher education institutions will be “expected” (more on that later) to help ERBs and local government structures help map higher technical skills needs, share information about what they currently offer, and reflect on how their provision can be more responsive. And help with evaluation, and use their subject expertise and industry links to help develop the technical skills of staff elsewhere. And employ their national and international reach to gather best practice. It’s almost as if universities are teeming hives of resource and capable people, rather than ivory towers intent on remaining aloof from their local areas.

Plus there’s an expectation for collaboration with further education and with other higher education providers to, “where appropriate”,

create a more strategically planned response to skills needs, leading to improved local and regional coverage and coordination.

It all sounds very nice if it works – and it all helps to flesh out the how of the white paper’s grand but largely un-operationalised ideas.

Who’s accountable then?

In its promises to give universities a “seat at the table” in LSIPs, it sounded like there was the possibility of Labour introducing a degree of accountability for higher education institutions, in the same way that applies to further education colleges (both through accountability agreements with DfE, and in a growing emphasis on local skills in Ofsted inspections). Research from the Association of Colleges has previously highlighted universities’ lack of formal accountability within the LSIP system as a mild bone of contention among stakeholders.

This hasn’t happened – as far as accountability applies to higher education institutions’ role in the plans, it will remain limited to an expectation that activity is recorded in strategic or business plans, as was previously the case. There is now also encouragement for HEIs to “publicly communicate their role in the LSIP in other ways.” What we do get much more of is an emphasis on those responsible for the plans to seek out and involve the higher education sector.

We therefore run up against the same issues that dog Labour’s HE agenda elsewhere – there might be an attractive vision of collaboration and coherence, which all things being equal the sector would be well-disposed towards, but at a time of maximum turmoil and with incentives pointing in other directions, can it really gel? Otherwise put: is dedicating enormous resource, goodwill and strategic direction to local needs a prudent choice for institutions battling to survive, or would they be better off focusing on recruiting every single last international student they can get their hands on for the rest of the Parliament? To which we might also add that the retrenchment in higher education civic work that seems to be taking place in some areas has likely already damaged some of the required structures and led to the loss of needed expertise.

It’s a similar story elsewhere in the system: local government structures have never been more stretched, devolution-related reforms are still in their infancy, and while employer groupings may be well-placed to say what skills they would like more of, are they really effective stewards of fiendishly complicated local projects involving multiple actors and spotty data?

A set of 39 well thought through and carefully monitored LSIPs at the heart of a responsive ecosystem of employers, HE and FE, and local government – each with one eye on the industrial strategy, and another on an area’s own specific character – would do wonders for Labour’s education and skills agenda. But the conditions need to be in place for it to emerge, and right now it feels like quite the reach.

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November 19, 2025
A joined up post-16 system requires system-level thinking combined with local action

There have been so many conversations and speculations and recommendations aired about the forthcoming post-16 skills and education white paper that you’d be forgiven for thinking it already had been published months ago.

But no, it’s expected this week some time – possibly as early as Monday – and so for everyone’s sanity it’s worth rehearsing some of the framing drivers and intentions behind it, clearing the deck before the thing finally arrives and we start digesting the policy detail.

The policy ambition is clear: a coherent and coordinated post-16 “tertiary” sector in England, that offers viable pathways to young people and adult learners through the various levels of education and into employment, contributing to economic growth through providing the skilled individuals the country needs.

The political challenge is also real: with Reform snapping at Labour’s heels, the belief that the UK can “grow its own” skills, and offer opportunity and the prospect of economic security to its young people across the country must become embedded in the national psyche if the government is to see off the threat.

The politics and policy combine in the Prime Minister’s announcement at Labour Party Conference of an eye-catching new target for two thirds of young people to participate in some form of higher-level learning. That positions next week’s white paper as a longer term systemic shift rather than, say, a strategy for tackling youth unemployment in this parliament – though it’s clear there is also an ambition for the two to go hand in hand, with skills policy now sitting across both DfE and DWP.

Insert tab a into slot b

The aspiration to achieve a more joined up and functioning system is laudable – in the best of all possible worlds steering a middle course between the worst excesses and predatory behaviours of the free market, and an overly controlling hand from Whitehall. But the more you try to unpick what’s happening right now, the more you see how fragmented the current “system” is, with incentives and accountabilities all over the place. That’s why you can have brilliant FE and HE institutions delivering life-changing education opportunities, at the same time as the system as a whole seems to be grinding its gears.

Last week, a report from the Association of Colleges and Universities UK Delivering a joined-up post-16 skills system showcased some of the really great regional collaborations already in place between FE colleges and universities, and also set out some of the barriers to collaboration including financial pressures causing different providers to chase the same students in the same subjects rather than strategically differentiating their offer; and different regulatory and student finance systems for different kinds of learners and qualifications creating complexity in the system.

But it’s not only about the willingness and capability of different kinds of provider to coordinate with each other. It’s about the perennial urge of policymakers to tinker with qualifications and set up new kinds of provider creating additional complexity – and the complicating role of private training and HE provision operating “close to market” which can have a distorting effect on what “public” institutions are able to offer. It’s about the lack of join-up even within government departments, never mind across them. It’s also about the pervasiveness of the cultural dichotomy (and hierarchy) between perceptions of white-collar/professional and blue-collar/manual work, and the ill-informed class distinctions and capability-based assumptions underpinning them.

Some of this fragmentation can be addressed through system-wide harmonisation – such as the intent through the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE) to implement one system of funding for all level 4–6 courses, and bringing all courses in that group under the regulatory purview of the Office for Students. AoC and UUK have also identified a number of areas where potential overlaps could be resolved through system-wide coordination: between OfS, Skills England, and mayoral strategic authorities; between the LLE and the Growth and Skills Levy; and between local skills improvement plans and the (national) industrial strategy. It would be odd indeed if the white paper did not make provision for this kind of coordination.

But even with efforts to coordinate and harmonise, in any system there is naturally occurring variation – in how employers in different industries are thinking about, reporting, and investing in skills, and at what levels, in the expectations and tolerance of different prospective students for study load, learning environment, scale of the costs of learning, and support needs, and in the relationship between a place, its economy and its people. The implications of those variations are best understood by the people who are closest to the problem.

The future is emergent

Complex systems have emergent properties, ie the stuff that happens because lots of actors responded to the world as they saw it but that could not necessarily have been predicted. Policy is always generating unforeseen outcomes. And it doesn’t matter how many data wonks and uber-brains you have in the Civil Service, they’ll still not be able to plot every possible outcome as any given policy intervention works its way through the system.

So for a system to work you need good quality feedback loops in which insight arrives in a timely way on the desks of responsible actors who have the capability, opportunity and motivation to adapt in light of them. In the post-16 system that’s about education and civic leaders being really good at listening to their students, their communities and to employers – and investing in quality in civic leadership (and identifying and ejecting bad apples) should be one of the ways that a post-16 skills system can be made to work.

But good leaders need to be afforded the opportunity to decide what their response will be to the specifics of the needs they have identified and be trusted, to some degree, to act in the public interest. So from a Whitehall perspective the question the white paper needs to answer is not only how the different bits of the system ought to join up, but whether the people who are instrumental in making it work themselves have the skills, information and flexibility to take action when it inevitably doesn’t.

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October 13, 2025
Higher education and the industrial strategy priority areas
There have been industrial strategies before, but the extent to which they have shaped the provision of higher education is questionable.

Past exercises of selecting scientific or technological priorities have undoubtedly had effects on the national research ecosystem, though constant chopping and changing of policy over the last decade and more has hindered this from reaching its fullest extent. But in terms of influencing what educational provision exists, and what qualifications are achieved – and where – it would not be unduly controversial to say that industrial strategy and the longer-term graduate pipeline have never really meshed.

Could this time be different? This government has certainly wanted to present its different policy agendas – on industrial strategy and skills, but also on migration, and devolution – as complementary and cohesive. And there are plenty of reasons to think that the industrial strategy will be Labour’s key reforming principle for higher education and its position within the wider tertiary sphere.

How HE shows up

Let’s begin with what has already emerged. Government guidance to the Office for Students has set out the fact that high cost subject funding in England (via the Strategic Priorities Grant, or SPG) will be refocused towards the industrial strategy from 2026–27 – a review is underway behind the scenes.

And even in the current year, the (rather meagre) £84m in SPG capital funding available in England includes £72.75m in a bidding process, where one of the two criteria to assess bids will be the extent to which the project supports Skills England’s priorities, or local economic needs. Skills England’s priority areas are the eight industrial strategy “growth-driving sectors” (which we are now expected to refer to as the IS-8) plus health and social care as well as construction.

Whether these two pots of money remain significant enough to really drive changes to HE provision – as opposed to rhetorical game-playing where the words “industrial” and “strategy” get appended to everything that institutions were already planning to do – remains an open question. The size of both recurrent and capital SPG in future years remains to be seen, but you wouldn’t bet on substantial increases.

If this were the end of it, you might think the industrial strategy’s impact on higher education would remain restricted to research and innovation – with lip service to government priorities in how the (shrinking) state contribution to teaching gets doled out. But with today’s publication of the industrial strategy in full, various other agendas begin to come into focus.

First up, the Lifelong Learning Entitlement. A more substantive announcement on the policy and legislative details is still pending, but there’s a rather significant detail in today’s strategy:

From January 2027 we will launch the Lifelong Learning Entitlement which will enable individuals to learn, upskill and retrain across their working lives. The first modular courses for approval will support progression into the IS-8.

It’s been on the cards for a while – since being re-written under Labour, the current LLE policy paper has anticipated that Skills England and the government’s skills priorities would form an important part of the LLE’s development – but here we get confirmation that the module approval process will be guided by the industrial strategy priority areas. The professional services sector plan also references a role for the LLE in helping learners take up courses relevant to that specific sector.

And it’s a similar story for the LLE’s awkward doppelganger, the growth and skills levy, which will allow employers to spend levy contributions on short courses rather than apprenticeships.

These levy reforms, which were a key pillar of Labour’s approach to skills while it was in opposition, have gone a bit quiet since, with changes at lower and foundation levels prioritised. The fact that the spending review gave the defunding of most level 7 apprenticeships as an example of DfE savings and efficiencies, rather than a way of freeing up cash for short courses, was a little ominous.

But the industrial strategy policy paper makes a link with the IS-8 sectors, giving examples of short courses in digital, AI, and engineering. April 2026 is floated as the date for rollout, though there is more to be done in development:

We will work with Skills England to determine the courses which will be prioritised in the first wave of rollout and subsequent waves, and how those sit alongside apprenticeships and other training routes. We will work with Skills England to introduce these short courses and consider how to prioritise investment across the programme.

Universities with expertise in professional and executive education – and those who are rethinking apprenticeship provision in light of changes to level 7 – will be keeping a careful eye on how this comes together.

Finally, the forthcoming post-16 education and skills strategy, including its plans for reforming the higher education sector, is described within one of the sector plans as setting out a framework “for how the skills system will support growth-driving sectors” – that is, the IS-8.

So, while all the details may not have come into focus yet, there’s a strong case to be made for the industrial strategy playing a key role in all kinds of areas crucial to higher education: the LLE, levy-funded short courses, high-cost subject funding in HE – plus such capital funding as still exists – and potentially the post-16 strategy as whole. It’s therefore worth the sector looking in detail at what the government, and Skills England, have said so far about the eight specific industrial strategy areas, in terms of skills needs, priority industries, and place.

New frontiers

The industrial strategy green paper in the autumn identified eight high-level sectors:
- Advanced manufacturing
- Clean energy industries
- Creative industries
- Defence
- Digital and technologies
- Financial services
- Life sciences
- Professional and business services.
These were the areas where the government saw the greatest potential for growth – the “picking of winners” that has characterised industrial strategies over the years. The eight that were chosen were less STEM-heavy than previous iterations of the strategy.

Over the consultation period that followed, the government sought input on what subsectors should feature in the finalised plan, and in what places – “all economic activity occurs somewhere,” as the technical annex puts it. These subsectors have now been rebranded as “frontier industries” within each sector – “those parts of each sector that best met the Industrial Strategy’s goal of long-term, sustainable, regionally balanced, and resilient growth.”

There’s much more in the annex on what respondents said, and how the frontier industries were identified – but at the end of the day, it’s more picking of winners, and plenty of areas will feel they have been unfairly overlooked. The results of the process can be seen on page 22 – for example, for the creative industries, the chosen “frontier” areas are advertising and marketing, film and TV, music, performing and visual arts, and video games.

Data definition fans will also be keen to see that this has all been mapped to Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes, to the extent that it is possible to do so. The technical annex highlights further revisions and improvements to occupational classifications in the future.

What’s the plan?

For each of the IS-8, there is a sector plan going deeper into what’s being proposed. We get five of them today – the financial services one is due on 15 July, the defence sector plan (also badged as the defence industrial strategy) is forthcoming, as is the life sciences plan.

Each of the published sector plans has a helpful map, usually towards the end, which tracks the specific frontier industries onto the city regions and clusters which the government has identified. For example, advanced manufacturing has ten areas selected – see page 55 on. So in the northeast England region, the focus is on automotive, batteries, and space, whereas in Wrexham and Flintshire, it’s concentrated on aerospace, automotive, advanced materials, and agri-tech. Each identified geographical area has its own specific strengths – or areas for potential growth – picked for it by the government.

Six city regions are identified for professional and business services (page 55). For the creative industries (pages 61 to 62), Dundee is spotlighted for video games and design, while for Greater Manchester it’s film and TV, music, advertising, and market research. And so on.

Each sector plan also has some more specifics on workforce and skills planning. These largely draw together things we already knew were in train – so for the creative industries for example, this encompasses everything from the ongoing curriculum and assessment review to a refreshed creative careers service.

Earlier this month, Skills England published sector skills needs assessments for each of the IS-8, along with construction and health. The new skills quango was clear – perhaps concerningly so – that at the time of writing it wasn’t privy to what exactly the industrial strategy would stipulate in each area. But the data analysis and accounts of employer engagement for each sector give us an indication of what kind of interventions might be welcomed in each.

For one thing, in many of the sectors it’s clear that there are higher-level skills needs. Clean energy industries, the quango found, will need more civil, mechanical, electrical, chemical, and environmental engineers – roles which require qualifications at level 6 and above – as well as managerial roles from levels 3 to 8. The creative industries stakeholder engagement saw a demand for more mid-career training, with the current training system “felt to overemphasise entry-level positions.” Life sciences is another “highly qualified sector.” For professional and business services, we get a direct rejection of DfE’s focus on foundation-level apprenticeships, which “do not align with the roles employers want to recruit or develop.”

In more or less all of the Skills England assessments, employers are said to want more flexible and modular training – a reiteration of the oft-expressed desire for more freedom to spend the levy on shorter courses rather than apprenticeships. The needs of the current workforce, as opposed to the pipeline, are prominent.

The upshot

It’s clear that higher education provision is vital to the success of many if not most of the industrial strategy frontier industries – but the immediate interventions and funding announcements packaged up within the industrial strategy are largely focused at lower levels. It’s well rehearsed by this point that the higher education sector’s ongoing financial turmoil is risking the loss of expertise and capacity in subject areas which the government surely wants to prioritise.

The strategy makes specific calls about what industries should be supported and in which places – but it doesn’t appear that this mapping has extended to thinking about what provision is available currently in each, and what is at risk. This might be a job for the sector in making its case.

We can see indications in the policy document, and in the background work that Skills England has been conducting, that the government will press ahead with its plans for short courses for upskilling and reskilling, whether through the levy or the LLE. Unpicking that tangle – the question of which courses are funded by which means, and why, and how to make employer or learner demand actually crystallise – is another area for universities and colleges to be coming up with concrete proposals for. Having specific industries linked to specific places should be an enormously helpful starting point.

The specificity on offer in the finalised plan ought to be a clear indication that, for higher education institutions, demonstrating a link to the industrial strategy in one’s provision will not just be a case of talking up the volume of one’s life sciences provision, for example, and its international renown. There’s a need for – and now scope to provide – much more granular detail.

The ambitions of the strategy, were they to be realised, include a recipe for a more differentiated sector, with concrete choices made around engagement with key local industries and contribution to their associated workforce pipelines. A read-across can be made to UKRI chief executive Ottoline Leyser’s comments last week about the future shape of the research landscape, with the need for “consolidation” and playing to one’s local strengths – you could make the same argument for educational provision.

There’s a question about how much such change in the landscape of provision would be either desirable or practical, given the sector’s closely guarded autonomy, the fact that graduates are mobile and may change plans, the transferability of many if not most higher level skills, and the extremely short lifespan that previous industrial strategies have had. Another issue is how those institutions which do not find themselves in, near, or otherwise connected to the anointed clusters and growth regions should respond.

But it remains a crucial agenda for higher education, even if a large-scale reorganisation of provision is problematic to pull off at a time of great financial strain. Some tweaks to how the Strategic Priorities Grant works in England are unlikely to make much headway by themselves, and it remains to be seen to what extent the devolved nations are up for steering their university sectors to better align with Westminster’s chosen priorities. For higher education, the question remains whether the government actually has the levers in place to incentivise this shift to happen – to say nothing of the political appetite to invest time and resources – or whether the subject choices of UK 17 year olds and international postgrads will continue to be the main determinant of the sector’s size and shape.
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June 23, 2025
What the UK can learn from Scotland’s tertiary pathfinder experiments

It is commonly believed that, if we only had accurate up-to-date data on what skills employers were looking for, we could solve most of Britain’s productivity and social mobility problems in one fell swoop.

There’s a kind of big state approach to collecting and sharing that knowledge we could follow – all kinds of architectures and data collections we could dream up to ensure that every course offered in every educational establishment was laser-focused on a particular industry demand.

To do this at the level of fidelity and timeliness needed would be either expensive, or impossible, or both. Remember, right now, we can’t even accurately tell you how many people are currently working in the UK. And even if we did have this up-to-the moment, detailed, reliable data on employer needs: would the sector be able to use it? And would learners see any benefit?

Pathways and pathfinders

On the other hand nine projects, funded at a total of just £500,000 by the Scottish Funding Council, offer a glimpse of a set of approaches that are making a real difference to education and employment. It’s the opposite of big and flashy – building on existing structures and using small amounts of money to facilitate data sharing and collaboration. And it might just be a glimpse of the future.

The key components are what the Regional Tertiary Pathfinder programme calls Regional Delivery Boards – the pathfinder iteration saw two established, one covering Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire (north east Scotland), the other covering Dumfries and Galloway plus the Borders (south of Scotland).

If you are in England, you might be thinking these are pretty much the same as the Employer Representative Bodies that develop Local Skills Improvement Plans (LSIPs). And you’d be wrong. The LSIP approach simply brings together employers to state their needs and then invites providers (just FE colleges and private training providers, obviously) to meet them. Ewart Keep, in one of the vast numbers of reports published around the programme, describes the LSIP approach as:

the employer is viewed as a customer (more or less demanding but detached from the actual process of skill production) within a marketized, one-way street, relationship with a range of suppliers

In contrast, the Regional Delivery Boards encompass providers at all levels (from schools through to universities) and treat employers and industry bodies as partners in designing and delivering not only the provision directly linked to that particular momentary skills need, but in helping to shape a whole skills ecosystem.

It is, after all, not really worth designing an undergraduate level energy transition course (for example) aimed at a locality if people in that area are not going to have the qualifications and experience required to benefit from it, and if there is no local aspiration to work in that field. Every individual project supported by the board will be taking into account employer demand as one factor, alongside a consideration of wider skills pathways, of learner demand, and of the wider endeavour of offering people good quality and stable employment.

I’ve always been a fan of small projects that use low levels of funding in carefully targeted ways to make transformative changes and build capacity. I’ve spent large parts of my adult life setting them up. It does not take a lot of money, in the grand scheme of things, to bring about lasting change. Especially if you build on existing interests, existing partnerships, and even existing plans.

Building on the past

There’s various models of change and innovation available, but the one I’ve always known to work draws on Eric Von Hippel’s lead user theory which can be summarised as: smart people on the ground doing the work are already inventing ways of getting stuff done – find these people, listen to them, and make the changes they suggest to enable others to do the same. The strength of the Regional Tertiary Pathfinders model is that it explicitly builds on existing work, existing relationships, and even existing projects – offering legitimacy and political backing as much as money to supercharge the good work that is already happening.

You sometimes come across agencies and individuals that want to start from scratch, designing the perfect system that will replace everything that has gone before. While this is undeniably fun, it ignores the fact that the same people and the same groups that have been working on similar projects before will be unimpressed with branding and a tidy new organogram being presented as a way to solve the problems they’ve been working on for years. You could call it “producer interest” – I much prefer the term “people who are actually going to do the work to solve the problem” interest.

It doesn’t matter how good you are on PowerPoint, those new boxes are going to be populated by existing domain experts – it would probably save a lot of time if we started listening to them.

What about the data?

One of the impressive facets of both the Regional Delivery Boards and the projects they support is what I might term a pragmatism about data. It actually turns out that data on employer needs is just one of the wells that need to be drawn on, of arguably equal importance is data on the needs of the kinds of students who may want to take the new course you are designing.

It surprises many to learn just how many (technical, legal, procedural) barriers exist around sharing data across educational phases. Schools will have detailed data on their pupils, not just on attainment and personal characteristics, but on career intentions too. But it is rare to see such detailed information shared with colleges, and by the time you get to university or employment a pupil is flattened out to a list of grades and a very generic reference.

Likewise, different parts of the system will be getting different kinds of information from employers and industry bodies. While an individual employer may be reasonably expected to understand their own immediate skills needs, to get a fuller or longer term picture you need more than one data point. The various employers, bodies, and providers involved all had light to shed – on a global, regional, and local level.

In order to ensure that skills pipelines are unclogged working in the way they might be needed you need to bring all of these data sources together, and it is to the credit of the two boards that this has been able to happen.

Designing and delivering courses

Any provider worth bothering with will be drawing on all kinds of information in designing new courses and reviewing old ones. There’s a landscape of professional bodies, subject interest groups, QAA benchmarks, and comparators that can help academics and quality assurance staff decide what needs to be covered in a course. This intelligence is married with an institutional insight into its own purpose and mission, and the missions of other local providers.

Employer engagement can and does happen at the design, delivery, and review phases of courses – each of these allows for direct input into the curriculum mediated by the kinds of wider understanding detailed above. What we are also starting to see is partnerships between providers across phases feeding these processes in a similar way – schools, local authorities, and FE colleges, are all components of the skills pipeline and have a key role both in directly preparing students for admission, and in raising awareness and aspiration more widely.

This nicely illustrates a central strength of the regional tertiary pathfinder approach, an emphasis on the wider needs of the learner. Rather than seeing learners, Gradgrind-like, as vessels to be filled with the correct skills there is a recognition of “meta-skills” and graduate applicants: a genuine consideration of the careers and lives of learners rather than just thinking about the immediate employer or industry need. Again to quote Ewart Keep:

There are a number of professions and occupations where we know that labour shortages in part (sometimes a growing proportion) spring not from a shortage of individuals qualified to undertake the work, but from the fact that those that are qualified and have entered the workforce are now choosing to leave the occupation because individuals are concluding that the pay and/or working conditions and stress levels are unacceptable

Courses more closely aligned to employers needs are certainly useful in addressing skills needs – they are not a means of attracting young people to work in unlivable jobs.

Beyond the programme, beyond Scotland

The initiatives that the Regional Pathfinder Programme have fostered and nurtured are already becoming “business as usual”, though how the funding council can support and grow this activity remains an open question. The project coordinators that did so much to drive success were largely funded by the small SFC grants – whether such dedicated project delivery roles would exist without this small amount of funding is not clear. Likewise, the attention that SFC involvement (and, frankly, SFC oversight) drove at a senior level is difficult to sustain. As of yet we don’t know how or in what form the programme will continue – but given the small amount of funding involved and the scope to spread the lessons learned so far to other areas it would feel very short-sighted to abandon the approach.

In other nations of the UK skills planning cleaves much closer to the employer-as-purchaser model that relies on the optimistic idea that employers are engaged in long-term skills planning that can be aggregated and delivered. The results from Scotland should inform England’s long-awaited reform of the LSIP process – and hopefully put a human face on what frequently feels like an impersonal and deterministic skills strategy that understands neither the people who have the skills, the institutions that develop them, and the the employers that react to a rapidly changing world.

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March 24, 2025
Higher education institutions have invested time, effort and money in level 7 apprenticeships

Many readers might have had an experience along the following lines. You’re on a call, in a meeting, at an event – and someone just happens to let slip that they are doing a postgraduate apprenticeship through their work.

Questions bubble up: isn’t this person someone in a position to fund their own studies? Or perhaps: don’t they already have a master’s degree? You might even be thinking: your manager really lets you duck out of work for training so often?

Now this is pure anecdote – and forgive me if it’s not quite as frequent as I’m assuming – but it’s proved to be a pretty powerful one as debates over apprenticeships have percolated in the press and in the back of policymakers’ minds for the last few years. Allied with controversies over supposed “MBA apprenticeships” (or more recently, MBA top-ups and management training for senior executives), it’s led fairly directly to where we are now.

The government has announced that “a significant number” of level 7 apprenticeships will be removed from levy eligibility in England. The accompanying enjoinder for employers to fund them by other means (if they so choose) is likely the death knell for most of the affected courses, given that without the incentive of levy spending they will largely look like ungainly, over-regulated and rather long bits of exec ed.

Now we still don’t know exactly what decision the government is going to take. And Labour’s moves here do have other motivations – the policy intention is to stop employers spending their allowances on (older, already qualified) existing staff, and therefore give them a free hand to take on younger apprentices at lower levels, including with so-called “foundation apprenticeships”, though there is zero detail on how this shift in employer training priorities is expected to come about.

But still – if this was the only priority, money could have come from elsewhere. The fact remains that level 7 apprenticeships have various black marks hanging over them, whether or not justified, which have made them a safe target to go after. Is it really a good use of taxpayers’ money to fund long and expensive courses of what is overwhelmingly in-work training?

Whose fund is it anyway?

A big part of the issue, however, is this sense that the levy is really “taxpayers’ money”. It isn’t – it’s half a per cent of an employer’s annual pay bill, assuming said pay bill is £3m or more. Alison Wolf’s recent report for the Social Market Foundation vividly spells out the issue here – employers have become hyper-aware of what they “owe” and are incentivised to spend it as fast as they can, a perverse incentive of the current system which has made level 7 programmes more attractive than policymakers assumed.

Much of Labour’s current skills policies have their genesis in a period when employers were not successfully deploying their own levy contributions, and there was a question of how better to direct underspends. This is very much not where we are now. And there are many employers who are not well set-up to pivot to entry-level apprenticeships (think solicitors, for example), or who are stressing their own workforce’s need for higher-level upskilling and pursuing productivity gains rather than a larger headcount.

It could be that the non-apprenticeship part of the growth and skills levy will help square this circle – employers will be able to invest in shorter, possibly more useful workforce training this way, rather than running headlong towards level 7 programmes as the only game in town. The problem is that the government has gone very quiet about this, and we have no sense of what kind of courses will be in scope here.

And much like with the employer national insurance rise, it doesn’t seem to have been thought through how publicly-funded bodies are meant to respond here – NHS trusts and local councils being big users of the apprenticeship levy, by dint of their size. If the government doesn’t want them spending their levy funds on this type of provision, is it asking them to spend cash from elsewhere in their budgets?

Caught in the middle

Stuck between employers’ wishes and government’s aims (or the imagined taxpayer investment) are those education and training providers who have poured resources into making higher-level apprenticeships work. And when we’re talking about level 7 qualifications, it’s universities that have done a lot of the running.

If you had said a decade ago that many if not most universities would be founding and scaling up teams dedicated to reaching out to employers, thinking about training needs, even coordinating levy transfers across partners and supply chains (as the Edge Foundation’s recent research found) – well, it would have sounded like something dreamed up by a think tank, a laudable ambition unlikely to ever come true. And yet, here we are.

The Department for Education and Skills England may decide to limit only a couple of standards – as the chart below shows, simply scrapping the Accountancy and Taxation Professional and Senior Leader standards would dramatically change the landscape (though we’d likely be back in the same position in a few years having a similar conversation about the Senior People Professional and Systems Thinking Practitioner ones).

But once the government starts taking a pick-and-mix approach to standards (as opposed to letting a properly independent arms-length body do so), it opens the door to it happening again and again. If there is a substantial defunding of level 7 apprenticeship standards, expect the next few years to see targets on the back of others, even at level 6 – and an accompanying disincentive for universities to keep pressing ahead seeking out partnerships with employers.

The removal from levy eligibility of standards that currently have a high uptake will have an immediate impact on those providers invested in them. Below, DK has charted apprenticeship starts by higher education institution (and a few other public bodies as they are lumped together in the DfE data, though as you may have noticed above some for-profit universities appear in the private sector category instead).

The default view in this chart shows level 7 starts in 2023–24, broken down by standards, so that you can plumb the impact on different providers of different approaches to defunding. And if you’re getting nervous about what else Skills England might fancy doing once it’s finally got the level 7 announcement out of the way, you can look at provision at other levels too.

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February 10, 2025
A blanket removal of funding for level 7 apprenticeships will damage government plans to boost infrastructure

Level 7 apprenticeship growth has been one of the higher education success stories of recent years.

Our technical education system is weak by international standards, yet high level technical skills will be vital to the urban planning and infrastructure improvement ambitions of our current government, while at the same time boosting social mobility by allowing those who can’t afford to study on a traditional course at university the opportunity to gain a postgraduate qualification.

It therefore would appear counterintuitive that the government has been hinting that many if not all level 7 apprenticeships could have their eligibility for levy funding removed, couched in language of prioritising spending on growing lower level and new “foundation” apprenticeships.

This proposed redistribution fails to acknowledge that progression benefits apprentices at all levels, as those moving into senior roles create new vacancies or advancement opportunities via the positions they vacate.

Build baby build?

Nowhere is this clearer than in the built environment sector. The UK’s housing crisis is the pivotal issue that this government has promised to tackle. Their promise to build 1.5 million new homes by 2030 is ambitious – it has been labelled unachievable by the CEO of the UK’s largest housebuilding company because of skills shortages, and most councils are reporting that it won’t be possible to achieve.

If such a goal is to be accomplished, it will demand highly skilled professionals to streamline planning processes, deliver housing projects, and support regional infrastructure development.

At my institution, London South Bank University (LSBU), 70 per cent of our level 7 apprentices are on the chartered town planner standard. On a day-to-day basis they address planning bottlenecks and ensure that housing and infrastructure projects meet the various regulatory and environmental standards. Only last month the first level 7 chartered town planner apprentices in England graduated successfully from LSBU having joined their employer with no prior experience in the planning sector aged 18 after completing school.

Over half of the employers we work with at LSBU on level 7 apprenticeships are local authorities. Our apprentices enable councils to deliver projects in the wake of increased demand and reintroduced mandatory housing targets. The suggestion that, as employers, local authorities should step in and pay for the level 7 apprenticeships themselves is fanciful. The legacy of austerity has left one in four councils expecting to apply for an emergency government bailout in the next two years. If the Treasury decides to remove levy funding, employers will not be able to fill the gap.

If the UK hopes to comply with the Future Homes Standard and the National Retrofit Strategy V2, more highly trained architects are required. The profession is in high demand but short supply – it had been on the Shortage Occupation List until the previous government abolished the list last April.

Level 7 architect apprentices, of which LSBU currently train 78, design energy-efficient buildings and support urban regeneration. They contribute to both public housing schemes and private sector developments by driving innovation in sustainable construction and are already supporting the government’s ambition to retrofit five million homes by 2029.

Growth ambitions

In addition to their clear role in developing infrastructure, level 7 apprenticeships are vital for social mobility. They open doors for individuals from underrepresented groups, in part because apprentices earn whilst they learn and aren’t put off by the prospect of incurring student debt. A true leveller of the playing field, they provide excellent career progression opportunities and higher earnings potential. A greater proportion of our level 7 apprentices are from black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds (55 per cent) and are female (52 per cent) than those studying apprenticeships at lower levels.

Most of our level 7 apprentices are under the age of 25, so the characterisation that they are simply the reserve of older learners is unfounded. For example, at LSBU, we provide tailored pathways for young learners to embark on higher level apprenticeships in regionally relevant sectors from level 2 to level 7 through our unique group model which includes London South Bank Sixth Form (a new technically focused sixth form academy concept) and London South Bank Technical College (the first technical college for a generation).

Level 7 apprenticeships are central to this government’s ambitions around growth, sustainability, and equality of opportunity. Despite recent increases in uptake, they have actually accounted for a slightly smaller proportion of the total apprenticeship budget over the last couple of years.

Every standard addresses unique challenges and supports sector-specific needs. A blanket removal of funding from level 7 apprenticeships will risk planning reforms and housing developments. At the very least, apprenticeships in the ten sectors prioritised by Skills England as growth-driving need to be protected from Treasury cuts.

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February 10, 2025
The Migration Advisory Committee thinks about skills and long term net migration

The Migration Advisory Committee’s annual report for 2023 ended up being one of the publications with most policy influence on the subsequent year.

Though it was released the week after then Home Secretary James Cleverly announced a review of the Graduate route, it clearly reflected ongoing Whitehall discussions and concerns over the post-study work visa, and much of its conclusions ended up being quoted incessantly through the subsequent debate around the MAC review – especially by those in favour of the route’s abolition or restriction:

The graduate route may not be attracting the global talent anticipated, with many students likely entering low-wage roles.

Our concern that the graduate visa would incentivise demand for short Master’s degrees based on the temporary right to work in the UK, rather than primarily on the value of qualification, may well be borne out in the trends that we have observed.

As we have already shown, the rise in student numbers is almost entirely focused on taught Master’s degrees, and the growth has been fastest in less selective and lower cost universities. The rise in the share of dependants is also consistent with this.

Given all that, it’s probably a relief to all concerned that the 2024 edition of the MAC annual report doesn’t go in depth on any international student-related issue, reflecting what feels like a (welcome) period of stasis in visa policy affecting higher education under the new government.

Nevertheless, the MAC has a beefed up role under Labour – additional civil servant resource, plus we now learn that chair Brian Bell’s role will move from two to five days a week – and this time around the questions percolating away are worthy of some long-term thinking, even if they are not going to lead to knee-jerk policy decisions.

Staying or going

The annual review kicks off with consideration of long-term net migration trends, noting that the general election saw all main parties commit to bringing headline figures down.

Thinking ahead, it notes:

In the long run, work routes will have a greater impact on net migration compared to study routes as a greater percentage of those on the work route stay in the UK, whilst students are more likely to emigrate when they finish their course. Put simply, whilst students increase net migration in the year they arrive, they will reduce it by the same amount if and when they leave.

This is a helpful soundbite for the sector, after last month’s ONS figures started to make clear what has been evident for a while – that historic claims around the “vast majority” of international students leaving the UK after completing their courses no longer hold much water. The ONS net migration stats estimated that the proportion of those on student visas who had transitioned to another visa three years after arriving was 48 per cent for those who arrived in year ending June 2021. This was up from nine per cent for those who arrived in June 2019, largely driven by introduction of the Graduate route.

But the detail is still uncertain, as the MAC goes on to acknowledge. It cites recent Migration Observatory modelling (director Madeleine Sumption is now the MAC deputy chair) which estimates that the “stay rate” after eight years is around 26 per cent for those on study visas, compared to 56 per cent for those on work visas. The consequence of this is that – again, according to the Migration Observatory’s heavily caveated modelling – is that student visas contribute to 19 per cent of long-term net migration.

(The modelling also lets you adjust the assumptions around stay rate and annual international student numbers – the baseline is rather simplistically 250,000 new student visas every year from 2024 to 2032, though to be fair recent volatility means that putting a firm prediction on international recruitment is a brave bet in itself.)

All in all the MAC notes that stay rates are “highly uncertain” – but it’s an issue that will continue to inform the wider political debate, especially as the post-pandemic bulge is gradually smoothed out of net numbers. It’s notable in this context that think tank Labour Together – which typically has the ear of the government – has just put out a proposal for a “national migration plan” based on nationally set targets for different routes. Student visas, it says, would only be included in the analysis “to the extent that they have an impact on long-run net migration” through the Graduate and Skilled Worker visa routes.

The skills puzzle

The central piece of this year’s review is driven by the observation that the new government’s intention is “to more closely link migration and skills policy.” Given that starting point, the MAC carefully explores to what extent this can work. It’s of course written in the careful language you would expect of a government-sponsored committee with a Home Office secretariat, but reading between the lines there’s a cautionary note to it all (and not just in the observation that “skills” is an “ambiguous term both conceptually and empirically” – don’t tell Jacqui Smith).

“In theory”, MAC observes, skills shortages lead employers to recruit using the immigration system. “If this were true,” the government can bring down work-related immigration via the reduction of skills shortages.

In practice, there are some complications. Most obviously, skills investments take a long time to translate to the labour market – the last government repeatedly took the quicker route of facilitating international recruitment, especially in the health and care sectors, but also in not insignificant ways in areas like filling teacher vacancies.

The MAC also stresses how employers will not deliberately make choices around whether to hire UK-based workers or those from overseas (speaking to The Times, Brian Bell specifically points to academic recruitment as an area where employers – universities – would not change their hiring practices if the domestic labour force had better qualifications). We are also told that labour demand and supply are not independent (“employers look for what they think they can get, and employees try to match what employers want”), and that skills aside there are other differences between domestic and international recruits.

For the construction industry, this latter point was vividly illustrated by the Financial Times last week, which argued that many businesses in this field prefer “pay-by-the-day” labour and self-employed staff, and hence hire internationally and typically not via skilled worker routes – another consequence of this is that they are unlikely to commit to training apprentices. (The article also cites Brian Bell saying that high net migration leads to “real strains on our ability to manage housing and infrastructure,” in case anyone was thinking the MAC will take a more dovish approach under Labour.)

All in all, bringing about a join-up between the skills and migration systems is a tough ask – or, more cynically, an unrealistic policy goal. It’s clear that the MAC is trying to temper expectations about what can be achieved:

Linking immigration and skills policy is not a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach and it is important to consider the individual circumstances within sectors and occupations, including diagnosing whether shortages are genuinely driven by a lack of skills or are due to poor pay and conditions of certain roles.

And the elephant in the room is pay. In the care sector, the MAC has repeatedly stressed that wages need a significant uplift for other visa-related tinkering to have an impact. It stresses this again here, and makes the point that a large proportion of work visas go to public sector workers.

This is a point for Skills England to take on board as well, you would hope. Its initial report was notably incurious about the role of low pay (especially in the public sector) in driving “skills mismatches”, rather presenting employment more as a simple supply and demand relationship between skills available and skills needed. The MAC annual report has some more persuasive analysis here, showing a lack of correlation between so-called “skills shortage vacancies” (SSVs) and skilled worker visa usage. That is to say, it’s by no means a given that those industries facing skills shortages are the ones more likely to sponsor workers from overseas. There are all kinds of factors at play.

Quad to the rescue

You get the sense that the team of economists who make up the Migration Advisory Committee are being careful about the government’s plans to link up skills and migration in a coherent way (it’s also noted at one point that skills is devolved and immigration is not – another challenge).

What we’re getting to make this all fit together is a new “Quad framework” (I believe this is the first time it’s publicly been referred to in this way). As promised in Labour’s manifesto, the strengthened MAC will be working with the newly launched Industrial Strategy Council, the Department for Work and Pensions, and Skills England – the manifesto in fact promised “skills bodies across the UK”, but this hasn’t been fleshed out yet.

This Quad will cooperate “to address systemic long-term issues that have led to reliance from certain sectors on international recruitment, and where appropriate, to reduce that reliance.” The MAC anticipates that the Quad will help identify priority sectors (following the industrial strategy, when ready) and determine which have a high reliance on migration, after which the MAC will – if it sees fit – recommend policy levers the government might pull, while Skills England will be drawing up workforce and skills plans, of some sort.

It’s all a recipe for an incredibly complicated set of moving parts, and given Skills England’s involvement and the importance of overseas staff and student recruitment, one that the English higher education sector would be wise to keep an eye on and work out how it can contribute to.

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December 18, 2024