Changing the course of UK skills policy as opposed to shuffling the deckchairs

This summary of discussion at the 3^rd Digital Policy Alliance 21CN Skills Round Table on 17th July ends with the action plans being worked up over the summer for announcement at the start of September and the draft preface to the more detailed report that will accompany them.

Changing the course of policy as opposed to shuffling the deckchairs

• Since 1918 (the Haldane Report) the UK Education and Training system has become ever more centralised and focused on identifying and developing academic mindsets and skills as opposed to the diversity of talents and vocational skills needed by the majority of employers for most of the workforce.
• We have seen the consequences over the past two decades as productivity stagnates and artificial  intelligence transforms productivity in roles demanding academic skills. The pace of change accelerated with Covid lockdown and the rise of home-based/remote working.
• The first DPA round table (public report here) discussed the scale and nature of change. The second (here) was on the skills to deliver the insutrial strategy, climate change projects and public service transformation: from improving societal and organizational resilience to caring for an aging population.
• This third round table (report here) focused on topics not well covered by the all-party groups looking at how to handle issues of exclusion (economic, geographic, neural, physical and social) as the pace of change accelerates faster than the ability of post-Haldane policy and funding structures to cope.

 Governance and Assurance of Skills

• The rise of on-line recruitment means that most demand for skills is local or global. There is a growing divide between courses and qualifications that meet intra-UK requirements for governance, assurance and/or public funding, and those designed to meet global needs and/or available on-line.
• The UK needs to lead, not follow, debate on reconciling national and international regimes for governance and assurance, in order to secure the position of London as a global financial services (including, fintech and Cybertech)skills hub and the regional, but also global, skills hubs (e.g. Barrow, Derby, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Wharton etc.) of our engineering, aerospace and defence industries ,.
• There is a need to distil high level cyber/digital governance principles from relevant UK, EU, US codes and regulation, identify the skills and bit-size education needed to meet the common objectives, (not just tick the common boxes), and define/promote the business value of the skills required.
• Making these relevant to over five million SMEs and Microbusinesses dependent on that which they find and trust on-line is equally important but will require a very different approach, beginning with long-overdue research into how to reach, understand and/or inform SMBs.

 Employer led Digital Skills Forecasting

• There is a need to build and improve on 60 years of attempts (some successful, most not) to produce forecasts which enable digital (embracing data processing, information and communications technology) employers and training providers to plan ahead, individually and collectively, locally and/or globally, by sector or discipline, across boundaries as necessary.
• This is different to organizing inputs to consultations to inform committees of experts to “advise ministers”: the Haldane approach. That should be left to the APPGs shadowing the departments.
• Improve forecasting is commonly achieved by engaging major employers (both users and suppliers of products and services), recruitment and employment agencies and education and training providers, in order to build on their collective wisdom and enable them to better plan their own forward strategies and organise collective action, globally as well as intra-UK and/or regionally (e.g. EU, ASEAN etc.)

Needs Driven Recruitment, Assessment, Validation and Testing

• We need to address the vetting and selection blockages that can leave candidates in limbo for months while awaiting security and regulatory clearances and/or confirmation of their right to work in the UK. Delays and shortages can be compounded by AI-driven selection tools that avoid such problem by excluding candidates from non-conformist backgrounds.
• Current processes are all-too-often
  • a bottleneck, with thousands waiting for months for SC and DV checks and
  • a point of vulnerability to fraud and impersonation  (most serious cyber incidents/frauds involve criminal insiders in the software/security supply chain, and
  • a catch 22 with AI-driven selection and compliance processes blocking the diversity and inclusion supposedly sought by employers.
• The first task is to identify and promote examples of best practice and use these to encourage cyber/digital employers to work with and through groups like the Better Hiring Institute, JISC (ncluding Luminate, Prospects and HEDD), Governors for Schools, Career and Enterprise Company, and JobsAware to ensure that this is adopted and enforced along their own supply chains.

From career ladders to lifelong training frameworks

• Employers face many practical problems in moving from a world of fixed career ladders and making staff redundant when their technical/professional skills and experience are no longer needed, to one of flexible, and often unpredictable career paths, redeploying and retraining staff who understand the organization and/or business as needs change.
• These include the need to:
  • much better record and monitor skills and experience, attitudes and aptitudes
  • re-engineer training and support structures to respond to “just-in-time” needs analysis
  • access libraries of training micro-modules of known relevance and quality
  • organize “train the trainer” facilities to manage delivery and support, including pastoral care and support for trainees from diverse backgrounds.
• Progress is being made, e.g. with mapping skills and materials onto global frameworks like SFIA and thus NIST (as required by US regulators).
• But there is much to be done, including to identify and publicise good practice in organizing activities relevant to local employers (including the local operations of global operations) who wish to operate to the same standards (e.g. for aerospace support and maintenance engineers) around the world.   .

Using social values procurement to help drive place-based regeneration

• The legislation for Transforming Public Procurement offers an opportunity to move social values procurement from tick box, add-on, exercises to in support of fragmented low-level initiatives, to supporting  a change of culture towards employer engagement with place-based regeneration, based on strategic workforce planning.
• The National Procurement Policy Statement identifies five key missions to:
  • kickstart economic growth,
  • make Britain a clean energy superpower,
  • take back our streets,
  • breakdown barriers to opportunity and
  • Build a National Health Service.
• Within and across these, the focus needs to be on using creating a whole system approach to skills, engaging small and micro-businesses in supply chains, leveraging opportunities to involve diverse and under-represented cohorts and draw millions from welfare into work.
• Successful delivery will entail agreeing key performance indicators, how to measure and report them and the rewards for success and penalties for failure.
• There is a need to identify and publicise good practice in using social values procurement to facilitate employer co-operation, including between competitors, to build the skills pipelines (including shared recruitment, training and support, e.g. pastoral care, facilities) for who-over wins the contract(s) and employs those trained.
• There is also a need to apply the same approach to education and training, include materials/support for vocational education for those with practical rather than academic talents, including design and technology, operational (and social). Those involved should include the Design and Technology Association, BESA, JISC and the Grids for Learning.

Making a difference: Action Plans to December 2025

• Five groups are working on agreeing objectives, terms of reference and invitations for work programmes to be launched in September on;
  • Governance and Assurance of Skills: with ISACA and others
  • Employer Driven Digital Skills Forecasting: with City & Guilds and others
  • Recruitment, Assessment, Validation and Testing: with BHI, CYNAM, JISC and others
  • Transition to Lifelong Training and Retraining: OCN London and others
  • Using Social Values Procurement to drive place-based change: Atkins Realis and others
• There will be a cross-cutting group looking at provision of the skills to use AI for needs and policy analysis and the production and delivery of courses, materials and assessments.
• The programmes are expected to present tangible deliverables to parliamentary round tables (organised in partnership with relevant APPGs) in the period October to December. The will include exercises to help deliver economic and social regeneration and inclusion in the constituencies of participating parliamentarians.

Those who are not already involved with the Digital Policy Alliance and/or one of the existing participants (including APPGs) can request an invitation by messaging me with what they would bring to the table (expertise, resources, contacts and/or budgets).  I will then forward that request to the team leaders and/or DPA

Preface to full Report

Changing the course of policy as opposed to shuffling the deckchairs.

Each decade Since the Haldane Report on the Machinery of Government (1918) the UK Education system has become more focused on identifying and developing academic excellence for University research, as opposed to meeting the needs of the majority of pupils, students and employers. The pace accelerated when Tony Blair set a goal of half of all teenagers to go to University.

But the rise of AI  now challenges the priority given to on academic skills . Covid Lockdown and its consequence have increased pressures to accelerate change to improve national productivity by retraining the existing workforce at the same time as drawing millions of NEETs from welfare into work and reducing dependence on immigrant labour. Dominic Cummings has described the need  for Regime Change because the post-Haldane structures have lost touch with reality. This is particularly so with regard to UK skills policy.

Most non-public sector training is organised by a couple of dozen large employers with global career paths or by a couple of million small and micro businesses too small to plan ahead and reliant on “free” downloads over the Internet. It is global or local, It is not organised regionally or nationally

Many All Party Groups are  involved with proposing or scrutinising legislation to handle the consequences,  including to reduce inequality of access and improve support for neurodiversity and meet the needs of particularly interests groups and/or sectors. The objective of this round table was to agree co-operation to address issues not already being well addressed by others.

In 2023 the DPA Skills Group approached over 30 APPGs and their supporters to discuss the relevant issues from changing educational structures and widening inequalities, to the need to enable/encourage employers to spend on regularly updating their existing workforce than on new entrants. The report of the resultant round table was published here: Will 2024 be the year AI begins to transform Education, Recruitment, Training from cradle to dotage?

The second round table focussed on supplying the skills that would be needed to deliver The UK’s Modern Industrial Strategy just announced. The report was published as: Will Skills England be allowed to change the course of the Government’s inherited policy Titanic? Action to reform UK hiring processes was urgent and the Modernising Employment APPG and Better Hiring Institute have since organised an ambitious programme of work.

Shortages of cyber, security and counter-fraud skills threatened to derail economic growth, and an event in April organised to consider Cyber Skills Today for Economic Growth Tomorrow called for proposals to be put to a third round table before the summer recess.

It felt that ongoing efforts should focus on removing the barriers to enabling a socially and culturally inclusive workforce at all levels to acquire and demonstrate the changing skills, when needed, for future challenges to:

• deliver big digital, communications, energy and climate change projects;
• transform public services;
• make good use of increasing defence spend (including on cyber security);
• support an aging population without depending on increased immigration;
  improve social and operational resilience.