McFadden and Smith – Our New Skills Double Act

Last week’s Government reshuffle was more of a soft shoe shuffle than a full Fandango, moving familiar faces around the ballroom who look set to dance to familiar government tunes. It has given us a new minister for skills, although so far it’s not clear what exactly the scope of Pat McFadden’s skills remit will be. Just as interesting is that skills has been placed under a new department, the DWP, which will make it, we are told, “a super ministry” and the “ministry for growth”.  Our current Skills Minister, Baroness Jacqui Smith, is also moving across to the DWP, but is retaining her skills role in the DfE, so presumably will continue to have oversight of FE, HE and Apprenticeships. We await details of how this will work – in particular how the DfE will coordinate with the DWP on skills policy and strategy.

This change is another attempt to resolve a dilemma British governments have struggled with throughout modern history. Are skills best seen as part of education or part of business? The problem is that skills straddles both: skills are one of the major products of the education system, but are also the oil in the engine of industry and economic growth. While schools, colleges and universities produce students with a good foundation of knowledge and skills, these are honed and improved through employment. If compulsory education is the preparatory school for skills, employment is the finishing school.

Over the past 30 years skills has moved six times between government departments focused on education and training and departments focused on business and employment. At times it has included higher education, at times it hasn’t; sometimes a Cabinet-level minister has been in charge, sometimes not.

1995	2001	2007	2009	2016	2025
Dept for Education & Employment	Dept for Education & Skills	Dept of Innovation, Industry & Science	Dept of Business, Innovation & Skills	Dept for Education	DfE & DWP?

In Pat McFadden we have an incoming Secretary of State who is a highly experienced politician and already a member of the Cabinet. He steps into a department which has already set its sights on tackling the extraordinary surge in the number of economically inactive people that is not only placing a huge burden on the welfare system, but also becoming a major obstacle to economic growth. Alongside dealing with health issues, improving people’s skills to make them job ready will be a crucial part of the “Get Britain Working” campaign. From this perspective the new appointment is very welcome, especially if it signals a recognition at the highest level of the pivotal role of adult skills in reversing social and economic stagnation.

It’s also a positive sign that Jacqui Smith is retaining her role within the DfE. Whatever the nature of Pat McFadden’s skills brief in the DWP, it would be a mistake to allow skills to drop down the DfE’s priority list, as education is the crucial first stage in developing skills for our future workforce. Skills have struggled for oxygen in an education system increasingly organised around subjects and knowledge. The reforms to the school curriculum brought in a decade ago doubled down on a historic bias, setting up a false dichotomy between knowledge and skills and then prioritising “knowledge-first” teaching, shoving skills to the margins in the process. It was always a defective approach since there’s clearly a two-way relationship between knowledge and skills. Skill manifests itself in actions that are guided by knowledge; knowledge is enhanced through practical application.

Reflecting the difficult place of skills in British culture – grudgingly accepted as important, but stubbornly perceived as second-rate compared to knowledge – our education system has failed to find a balance, and instead of designing a knowledge+skills school curriculum, there have been repeated attempts to graft a skills dimension onto the existing system through initiatives such as Studio Schools, University Technical Colleges, and more recently T-levels. While these have delivered small scale successes, they have done little or nothing to change the overall landscape. We are still producing far too many school leavers without good job skills and far too few with the right skills for key industries.

We need a minister focused on skills within the DfE – skills at school, and in further and higher education – to work alongside Pat McFadden in the DWP. Most of all, we have to develop the right relationships between the three main components of the skills delivery system - education and training providers, employers, and devolved authorities - and make sure that Skills England fulfils its mobilising role.

There is already a sense of frustration that no tangible flexibilities have yet emerged from the Growth & Skills Levy and that there are few signs of any transformative new initiatives coming out of the long-awaited Post-16 White Paper. The risk is that skills policy gets bogged down in machinery of government and funding constraints, rather than being agile and moving at pace. We need politicians who are focused on delivery, who can communicate an energising vision to key stakeholders, who can generate targeted investment; in short, politicians who can dance well in and out of Westminster.

If McFadden and Smith are the new skills double act, let’s hope their choreography is as fleet of foot as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and that their combined impact will get all actors dancing with a surer step.