LSIPs Guidance: Too Many Cooks in the Skills Kitchen

The DfE’s statutory guidance on the next round of Local Skills Improvement Plans is now out. It reads like a particularly complicated exam question, requiring those who are to lead the process for developing updated LSIPs to answer the key question - how are you going to identify and address your local skills needs? - with reference to a range of interrelated plans and an array of multiple collaborative relationships.

The LEI is very supportive of the idea of a skills system that is decentralised, able to access up-to-date information on the supply of and demand for skills in a local area, and to harness all available resources to meet immediate and anticipated skills shortages. To achieve this, a great deal of relevant data needs to be gathered and collated, and close coordination between the delivery plans of providers is required. Our members are generally all in favour of the move from competition to collaboration, and most of them are very active in local partnerships. But does it have to be so complicated?

The guidance is shot through with a swarm of acronyms. ERBs will have to produce LSIPs -monitored and evaluated by Skills England - paying full regard to LGPs, GBWPs, the Industrial Strategy and its detailed sectoral plans, and do this, in devolved areas, in lockstep with strategic local authorities. But isn’t there a huge amount of overlap between LGPs (Local Growth Plans), GBWPs (Get Britain Working Plans) and LSIPs? Aren’t ERBs (Employer Representative Bodies) at risk of reinventing several wheels simultaneously? The guidance is at pains to emphasise some of the differences. GBWPs, we are told, “are distinct from LSIPs, tackling the broader causes of economic inactivity”. This is not very convincing, especially when one of the barriers expected to be addressed by GBWPs is cited as “lower skills levels”, surely one of the key ingredients of an LSIP?

The old saying, “there’s too many cooks in the kitchen” comes to mind. Rather than having different teams in different parts of the system working on separate plans wouldn’t it be better to have all of them working together to produce one skills and economic growth meal? The menu might include separate courses, or alternative options, but should be conceived and cooked as one dining experience, not as a series of separate dishes. The definition of an LSIP may need to be widened to include employment and health support, but this isn’t hard to imagine; a Local Skills and Employment Plan would do the trick. Such a framework would allow skills improvement to be interwoven with supporting people into employment, including by providing mental and physical health support, without the need for separate plans.

Apart from successfully navigating the collaborative maze, the major challenge for LSIPs is going to be the issue of demand. How do we stimulate demand for skill shortage and priority growth sectors, given that this may not match the dreams and ambitions of local people? What if an adult has always enjoyed working in retail banking – a shrinking role as banks close their high street branches - and can’t see themselves enjoying a job in manufacturing, no matter how important the sector is to the local economy? If a young woman wants to become a hairdresser, despite the fact that the real local need is for Adult Care workers, how do we persuade them to change their plans? How do we do this without leaving them feeling railroaded into an occupational area they had no wish to engage with? There are three possible answers to this.

First would be to greatly enhance Careers Information Advice and Guidance (CIAG). Proper careers education involves not only raising awareness of the current opportunities available in the jobs market, but also an exploration of the strengths, weaknesses, and preferences of individual students. How individual aspirations are matched with labour market needs is a matter for negotiation- sometimes over a period of time – not a top-down process.

Second would be to reform the culture in schools to incorporate a much greater focus on practical skills and the social value of manual and caring occupations, and less emphasis on the status and prestige of professional roles. It’s not difficult to make the case that a hospital consultant, although rightly held in high esteem and well paid for their high level of knowledge and expertise, can only do their job effectively if they are supported by others, from theatre nurses to hospital porters. It’s much more difficult – but necessary - to encourage young people to consider these kinds of job role as potentially fulfilling for them, by emphasising their value and importance. Chastened by stories of working class students’ ambitions being stifled by a glass ceiling of low expectations, teachers have adopted the stance that everyone should aspire to professional occupations, which means that only graduate jobs are seen as aspirational. This has to be reined in.

The third solution would be to get much more serious about lifelong learning. Over a period of time a young person who starts in one career can, with the right support and access to adult education, move way beyond their starting point into a new and different career, something they may not have imagined or considered earlier on. This means encouraging schools, colleges and universities to have a lifelong education perspective and build a lifelong learning education system. This is the vision that the LSIPs should embrace. Perhaps they should become Local Lifelong Learning Plans…