In June 2000, the UK National Skills Task Force produced its final report setting out its proposals for a new national skills agenda intended to develop the UK as a high-skill, high-value-added "knowledge economy" in the 21st century.
In June 2000, the UK National Skills Task Force produced its final report, entitled Skills for all: proposals for a national skills agenda. The Task Force was originally set up by the secretary of state for education and employment, David Blunkett, in March 1997, with a remit to assist in developing a "national skills agenda which will ensure that Britain has the skills needed to sustain high levels of employment, compete in the global marketplace, and provide opportunity for all". The Task Force included employer and trade union representatives as well as education and training providers. The final report follows in the wake of three interim reports, and is also the product of an extensive consultation programme with particular sectors of industry and business, key agencies involved in the field of education and training, and members of the academic research community.
Mr Blunkett has already responded to the final report in a document entitled Opportunity for all: skills for the new economy, which sets out what the Labour Party government is doing to address the skill needs of the UK economy. Here, the report is hailed as a "landmark in the development of the national skills agenda ... firmly grounded in extensive and pathbreaking research". Both documents provide a valuable insight into how policy-makers are approaching the issue of building a high-skill "knowledge economy" in the UK.
The UK productivity and skills gaps
The final report reflects ongoing concerns that the UK continues to lag behind its major international competitors, both in terms of its productivity and skill levels. Thus, "the UK still has around 50% fewer people qualified to level 2 than either France or Germany and only half as many people qualified to level 3 as Germany" (for an explanation of these "levels" see Annex E of the final report). One in five UK adults are functionally illiterate, and there are concerns that the economy suffers from major "skill shortages" in the areas such as "basic skills" (literacy and numeracy), generally transferable "key skills", "information technology skills" and critical, "intermediate level skills" (UK9910133F).
A new national skills agenda for a new knowledge economy
To address these problems, the report calls for a "new national skills agenda" that "will lead over the next few years to a step change in the skills of the nation's workforce and ensure that we are better able to deliver the skills required for economic success and social cohesion". This will involve ensuring that "opportunities to attain and maintain skills appropriate for the knowledge economy of tomorrow are available to all our workforce, and not just a high-skilled elite". "Meeting the challenge" will also "depend fundamentally upon the collaborative commitment of all organisations – employers and employer bodies, trade unions, education and training providers – to work together to enable the nation to thrive in the 21st century's knowledge economy".
The proposed "national skills agenda" comprises three core components:
- "an action plan for changes in the curricula, qualifications, apprenticeships, funding and institutions of the post-16 education and training system to produce the required improvements in the skills 'supply side' designed to tackle the priority areas of skills deficiencies";
- "an approach to the continuing management of post-16 education and training, using levers such as funding, planning, labour market information, guidance and others, that shapes both the demand for, and supply of, skills over time so minimising skill shortages and gaps in the future"; and
- "clear and explicit targets for improvements in skill levels, plus measures of our economic performance in managing the match between supply and demand, to raise public confidence, drive progress and monitor success".
In total, the report makes 24 separate policy recommendations. There is support for the government's proposals to introduce two-year foundation degrees into higher education as well as a baccalaureate-style qualification at level 3 by the year 2006. Although the report rejects the use of old-style "manpower planning", it signals a renewed interest in the use of "light-touch mechanisms for planning, funding, monitoring and managing the post-16 education and training system that can help the market work more effectively but also provide early warning of the need for adjustments as employers' skills requirements change over time". A key role is also identified for the Learning and Skills Council in developing a funding regime which will enable funding to "follow the learner" thereby avoiding the "distorting financial incentives" for institutions to lay on certain courses at the expense of individual choice.
Priority areas
Three priority areas are identified as essential to the success of the new "national skills agenda". These are:
- reducing the levels of illiteracy and innumeracy amongst adults and raising the skill levels of those without level 2 qualifications. This will require providing all adults with an entitlement to free education and training to attain their first level 2 qualification, supported by income contingent loans for living, study and travel costs;
- establishing an excellent foundation learning system, to include high-quality vocational and apprenticeship options supported by a public funding entitlement for all young people up to the age of 24 to achieve their first level 3 qualification; and
- a series of measures designed to aid small businesses, widen the availability of learning for the adult workforce and help small firms to introduce modern "flexible working practices" that improve both competitiveness and employer investment in training.
Targets
To help drive progress towards the improvements in skills supply, the report recommends that the government adopts the following "performance measures":
- by 2010, to reduce the proportion of adults with low levels of literacy and numeracy from just over 20% to 10%;
- by 2010, to increase the proportion of 25-year-olds with a level 3 qualification from 41% to 70%; and
- by 2010, to increase the proportion of the adult workforce with a level 2 qualification from 68% to 80%.
The case for a stronger statutory framework
Although all members of the Task Force support its 24 recommendations, there has been disagreement as to whether the UK can best proceed on the basis of a "voluntarist" training system or whether a stronger statutory framework is needed to address the problem of training failure on the part of many employers. "Some members" (including the trade union representatives) argued that "the voluntary system has consistently failed to deliver sufficient, effective training activity to create, in the UK, the necessary skilled workforce to match our competitors." "Other members" stressed the "striking progress" in UK training performance in the 1990s with employers having, in their view, "risen to the challenge of heightened competition and the emerging knowledge economy". Statutory solutions are seen by these members as likely to "produce compliance rather than real commitment" when the real aim must be to get individuals to increase their "take-up of learning opportunities". In their view, "such challenges are far better met by targeted market-based recommendations made in this report, which are concerned with changing the culture and generating a real enthusiasm for learning."
It is significant that this would appear to be the fundamental fault-line dividing employer and trade union opinion in terms of how a high-skill economy can best be pursued in the UK. Moving the UK economy on to a high-skills trajectory, however, may prove far more problematic than either this particular debate, or indeed the recommendations contained in the final report, acknowledge.
Commentary
The final report reflects the "prevailing orthodoxy" or "consensus" that has come to surround education, training and employment policy in the UK since the 1980s (UK9906109F). The central tenets of this are that:
- national economic competitiveness in global markets depends crucially on the skills of the entire workforce;
- faced with pressures of "globalisation" and technological change, governments should focus their energies on supply-side interventions designed to "up-skill" the workforce and enhance international competitiveness by moving towards a high-skill, high-value-added, knowledge economy;
- education must increasingly be realigned with the needs of the economy and business; and
- increasingly, it is individuals who are expected to invest in their own retraining and re-skilling as a way of ensuring their "employability".
Despite sustained criticism (eg "Breaking the consensus", F Coffield, British Educational Research Journal, 1999), this orthodoxy has continued to hold a seductive appeal for policy-makers and politicians, not least of all because it promises a "quick-fix, catch-all" solution to deep-rooted structural weaknesses confronting the UK economy. These include, for example, low levels of spending on research and development, a dysfunctional financial system that prioritises short-term shareholder returns at the expense of long-term investment in UK firms, and the view that the UK is trapped in a "low-skill, low-quality equilibrium". According to the latter view, a range of structural incentives lock many employers into cost-based competitive strategies, and associated systems of work organisation and "low-trust" people management, that demand little by way of skill, creativity or autonomy from their workforce.
The report itself reflects many of the confusions, contradictions and anomalies that are embedded within the "prevailing orthodoxy". It acknowledges, for example, that the links between skills supply and economic performance are "complex" and multi-faceted, but then claims that "there is sufficient evidence" to believe that closing the UK's skills gap can, of itself, deliver the required improvements in productivity and economic growth. One might wonder why then, despite significant improvements in the skill level of those leaving the education system and a massive expansion in the number of graduates, marked improvements in the UK's productivity have not been achieved.
The report also assumes that "global market forces" are already leading many UK employers to shift into "higher value-added product areas" and to "devolve more responsibility to the shop floor or customer interface". However, where such change is thwarted this can be put down to the lack of "basic, key and technical skills" among employees. Again there are problems (see "Creating the knowledge economy", E Keep, Centre for Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance working paper, September 2000):
- first, 80% of the UK workforce is now employed in the service sector, much of which is not internationally tradable and therefore not subject to global market pressures. Here, many firms "segment" the market and seek competitive advantage based on price and bulk purchases;
- second, it flies in the face of mounting research evidence, such as the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey, which suggests that highly routine, low-skill, low-autonomy jobs dominate the UK economy, and that the percentage of UK firms with sophisticated "high-performance workplace" systems may be as low as 2%. Once again this suggests that despite "a substantial rise in the qualifications of the workforce" since 1979, this itself has not been enough to move many firms' market strategies and management approaches. In this context, even if the UK were to achieve the targets specified in the report, there would still be a very real danger that most employers would not be in a position to ensure that these skills were fully utilised; and
- third, it falls into the dangerous trap of assuming that skills supply creates its own demand, when a more appropriate conclusion would be that many more people may simply find themselves "over-educated" for the jobs they actually do than is already the case. Indeed, it is significant that in so far as the "demand side" is addressed in the report at all, this is seen mainly in terms of increasing individual demand for learning. When it comes to the crucial issue of weak employer demand for, and usage of, skills, the problem is viewed narrowly as something which afflicts mainly small firms.
Policies designed to produce a highly skilled and well-educated workforce (whatever that might mean) are, of course, a vital component of any high-skills strategy. By themselves, however, they are not enough to realise the vision of a socially inclusive, high-skill, high-value-added economy. That would require a much broader and more radical set of policy interventions that address not only the skills people hold ("the supply side") but crucially the opportunities for satisfying and rewarding work that employers make available to them ("the demand side"). In the end, "education, education, education", to use Prime Minister Tony Blair's slogan, can only achieve so much. Given the neo-liberal policy climate in the UK, where politicians want to know "what works" with the added proviso that it should not imply regulating employer behaviour, the scope for progress towards a socially inclusive, high-skill economy remains strictly limited. (Jonathan Payne, SKOPE)