Cicero Policy Briefer

Issue 8, January 2007

Skills for one and all?

By Stephanie Fraser

At the start of the year, the Conservative Party policy review released an interim report outlining the party’s position on skills. This report follows the publication of the Leitch Review of Skills, commissioned by the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, and published in December 2006, and continues to promote skills as the veritable mot du jour.

However, while skills are being hailed on all sides as the philosopher’s stone for the UK economy, there is little consensus about how this will be achieved and who the direct beneficiaries of skills training might be. Higher education levels have been directly correlated with a higher standard of living and greater lifetime opportunities, which seems to be what the Government has in mind when it champions the near universal proliferation of Level 2 skills (equivalent to GCSE), and favours the particular targeting of deprived or excluded social groups. However, in spite of the prevalence of softer rhetoric, it is in fact the ‘demand-led’ and ‘economically valuable’ skills which are called for by UK industry, i.e. Level 3 or above. It is these which require the most investment if the economy is to avoid imminently losing its global competitiveness.

In competition with the population powerhouses of India and China, a UK workforce with only basic skills and training cannot possibly hold a competitive advantage; so, is it to be the market and not the state that determines the future distribution of skills? This supposition is apparently supported by current Education Secretary—and prospective Deputy Leader—Alan Johnson MP. His statement that “one of the great fallacies of the past was the extraordinary view that either liberal educationalists or Whitehall civil servants knew what business needed better than business itself”1 leaves no doubt where the impetus for skills reform lies.

The underlying thrust of the Leitch Review has led to a prophecy that the UK economy is “on track to achieve undistinguished mediocrity" if it fails to upgrade the skills of its workforce by 2020. However, such comments rather pale in comparison with the catastrophic economic warnings contained within the earlier Stern Review on climate change. Setting aside the inference that the damage of rising sea levels can be mitigated by a greater spattering of GCSEs, the UK should finally come to terms with the fact that it will no longer be able to punch above its weight in the global economy, and turn instead to improving equally persistent issues of social inequality—through education, education, education.

1. Speech at the Lifelong Learning UK Annual Conference, 7 December 2006

Stephanie Fraser can be contacted on +44 (0)20 7665 9531 or click here to email.

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