CSIRO staff will have to wait until the new year to find out if they still have a job, as Australia’s premier science research organisation begins consultations to determine how it will divide up to 350 job losses.
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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.
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.
The industrial strategy green paper in the autumn identified eight high-level sectors:
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.
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.
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.
Should the economic fortunes area you grew up in have an impact on your chances of attending university?
There has always been a stubborn connection between 18 year old participation rates and your (UK) region of residence.
Currently UCAS data tells us that 18 year olds living in London are more likely than not to go on to attend university, whereas in the North East just 29.9 per cent will get there.
And in many parts of the UK the proportion of 18 year olds getting to university has stagnated (or even dropped over recent years), as the population of 18 year olds has expanded.
If you are concerned about left-behind parts of the UK, this is something that should concern you. It’s widely acknowledged that graduates are key to levelling up a region, and a surprisingly large number of graduates return to their home area (at least in the short term) after graduation.
The counter argument to that is very often cultural – the idea that going to university changes a person, and dilutes the essence of what makes (frankly) a deprived area a deprived area. Polling from Public First for the UPP Foundation (which is kicking off an inquiry into the state of widening participation in higher education) happily suggests that this is not an attitude prevalent among UK parents.
What does worry parents is the sheer cost of study – both in terms of tuition fees (36 per cent cite this as a top three reason to be concerned about their children attending university) and living costs (31 per cent). The overall level of debt on graduation is the other big one (35 per cent).
But that’s not to say that there are not other reasons – number four in the list is the idea that “they won’t get a better job just because they have been to university” (particularly prevalent in London), number six is “poor value for money” (an East Midlands, North East, and Northern Ireland prevalence). The size of the sample makes the regional splits difficult to draw accurate conclusions from, but the trends are interesting.
Teachers are a primary source of information about higher education – happily UPPF also commissioned Public First to look at what teachers felt were the barriers to participation, and there are (some) regional splits.
The question here focuses on why teachers don’t expect some pupils to go to university – we are looking across all types of schools at the top of secondary education. Here we see that the big barriers are academic – teachers tend to feel that students are unlikely to get the required grades (24 per cent) or to rise to the academic challenge (18 per cent). And this is true across all English regions.
Notably prevalent in the North East and Yorkshire (combining two standard, ILTS1, regions) is the idea that the family will be unable to support a student. In that region this was cited by 13 per cent of teachers – enough to feel concerning, but similar to the proportion that simply don’t want to go to university (again note that the margin of error will be high with small subsamples).
Twenty per cent of teachers in London feel like all of the last class they taught will go on to university – just four per cent of teachers in the North West, North East, and Yorkshire had similar confidence. Indeed 14 per cent of teachers in the North East and Yorkshire felt that only 10 per cent of their class would go on to university. As you might expect, the modal answer for most regions was “about half” of pupils – the North East and Yorkshire is the only exception.
This, then, is what access and participation in the north is up against. Attainment and capacity is an issue everywhere, and one that the access and participation regime in England attempts to address via collaboration between universities and schools – something that also contributes to aspiration.
But aspiration and attainment count for little when parents and teachers are agreeing that for many in the UK’s most deprived areas university study simply is not affordable. And though participation among disadvantaged groups is improving – disadvantaged areas continue to struggle.
Career and technical education can support students’ socioeconomic mobility, but inequitable completion rates for students of color leave some behind.
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Career and technical education programs have grown more popular among prospective students as ways to advance socioeconomic mobility, but they can have inequitable outcomes across student demographics.
A December report from the Urban Institute offers best practices in supporting students of color as they navigate their institution, including in advising, mentoring and orientation programming.
Researchers identified five key themes in equity-minded navigation strategies that can impact student persistence and social capital building, as well as future areas for consideration at other institutions.
The background: The Career and Technical Education CoLab (CTE CoLab) Community of Practice is a group led by the Urban Institute to improve education and employment outcomes for students of color.
In February and May 2024, the Urban Institute invited practitioners from four colleges—Chippewa Valley Technical College in Wisconsin, Diablo Valley College in California, Wake Technical Community College in North Carolina and WSU Tech in Kansas—to virtual roundtables to share ideas and practices. The brief includes insights from the roundtables and related research, as well as an in-person convening in October 2024 with college staff.
“Practitioners and policymakers can learn from this knowledge and experience from the field to consider potential strategies to address student needs and improve outcomes for students of color and other historically marginalized groups,” according to the brief authors.
Strategies for equity: The four colleges shared how they target and support learners with navigation including:
Do you have an academic intervention that might help others improve student success? Tell us about it.
Over the past few months, our Rural Communication Institute (RCI) team (Dr. Jennifer T. Edwards, Dr. Subi Gandhi, and Dr. LaShondra Manning) has been tirelessly providing education and outreach for the rural areas of East Texas. This outreach has been both challenging and rewarding since the pediatric vaccine was approved by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS).
Educating parents about the benefits of the COVID-19 vaccine has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. As a parent, I am always very excited to share health information, but especially this information has been very important for me.
Here’s a workshop that we were very excited to view from the Texas Department of Health and Human Services. This workshop was focused on “What About the Children: Changing the Landscape on Rural Vaccine Coverage”. It focused on health in rural areas, especially for our youngest populations.
Also, we have been fortunate to receive funding for travel for our outreach events, shirts, and giveaways. Here’s a special shout out to the Episcopal Health Foundation in Texas, because they provided so much support for our project.
At first, we partnered with existing vaccination clinics and these were not very well attended, but THEN we decided to venture out on our own and to create our own clinics with the health of the Texas Department of State Health Services. We have been experimenting with the best time and date for our clinics as well all content for the clinics.
We decided a “Summer Fun and Health Clinic” approach has been the best outreach strategy for reaching the community. The mid-day clinics (before 5pm) were not as well attended for some audiences (i.e. – parents), but other times had much better attendance (after 5pm).
Also, we partnered with Agrilife (Mrs. Clarissa Moon) and Above Average Health Care and House Calls. Agrilife provided educational outreach sessions and Above Average Health Care and House Calls offered health checks and interpretations of lab results.
Do you have any suggestions for us? We are so thankful for our partners!
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Check out my book – Retaining College Students Using Technology: A Guidebook for Student Affairs and Academic Affairs Professionals.
Remember to order copies for your team as well!
Thanks for visiting!
Sincerely,
Dr. Jennifer T. Edwards
Professor of Communication
Executive Director of the Texas Social Media Research Institute & Rural Communication Institute
