Navigating Skills Devolution
The Association of Colleges's (AoC) annual conference in Birmingham offered cautious optimism, heavily tempered by the scale of the delivery challenge ahead. In his opening address on Tuesday, AoC Chief Executive David Hughes set the stage for a sector eager to lean into the Government’s ambition to ‘Rewire the State’. Yet it was newly elected AoC President Gerry McDonald (Group Principal and CEO, New City College) who articulated the most pressing structural dilemma facing institutional leaders: the devolution of 16–19 funding.
Devolving 16–19 education is, in McDonald’s words, a “knife-edge policy”. Handled well, it empowers Mayoral Strategic Authorities to align local pipelines with regional economic realities. Handled poorly, it risks creating a structural “postcode lottery”, such as the possibility of having “hard borders on the central line between London and Essex”, or contradictory rules and entitlements across Yorkshire’s four strategic authorities.
But what about adult learning?
While 16–19 devolution and youth engagement dominates the headlines, clearly driven by the Government's push to solve the pressing NEETs issue, this intense focus carries a glaring blind spot: adult learning risks being quietly pushed to the sidelines.
We have consistently argued that our front-loaded model of post-18 education is no longer fit for purpose. In a rapidly shifting labour market, skills acquired at 21 can be obsolete by 41. Crucially, the near-term productivity gains that regional mayors and the Treasury urgently seek will not come solely from school leavers. They depend on enabling adults already in the workplace to retrain, upskill, and reskill throughout their working lives.
Devolving adult skills funds and employment support alongside 16–19 budgets offers a historic opportunity to build a truly coherent, through-life system. However, if regional authorities treat adult workplace training as an afterthought – or fail to align local commissioning with national mechanisms such as the Lifelong Learning Entitlement and the Growth and Skills Levy – adult learners and employers will remain trapped between fragmented funding streams.
Skills policies for regional economies
How, then, do leaders prevent regional hard borders while building a system that serves both young people and - in our view - working adults?
McDonald’s proposed answer was a welcome call for humility in policy design: “We need to have white papers with green edges,” he argued, urging the sector to embrace the uncertainty of new design, “step in” when the forthcoming Milburn report is published, and “step up” when mayors come asking for solutions.
Realising that vision requires moving beyond rigid institutional boundaries toward a genuinely modular and integrated tertiary system. Working adults rarely have the time or financial capacity to step out of employment for a traditional three-year degree. Instead, regional economies need flexible, stackable pathways – spanning further education, Level 4 and 5 higher technical qualifications, and university microcredentials – that allow workers to acquire targeted, employer-relevant skills alongside their jobs. When aligned with local growth plans, this precision upskilling becomes a direct engine for regional productivity.
Co-designing a place-based system
Building what McDonald termed a “glorious patchwork of ideas from all of us” cannot happen in institutional silos. A university in the West Midlands, an FE college in Greater Manchester, and an independent training provider in West Yorkshire may answer to different Mayoral Strategic Authorities, yet they grapple with identical operational questions. How do we connect devolved technical routes from age 14 with adult progression pathways? How do we ensure modular credit transfers seamlessly across regional borders, and how do we incentivise employers to co-invest in workforce development?
Rather than acting merely as competing contractors responding to local tenders, universities, colleges, employers, and local government must come together as co-designers of place-based workforce strategies.
To advise ministers and regional mayors credibly ahead of the 2027 roll-out, the sector requires a rigorously tested evidence base drawn from the frontline of delivery. Creating structured spaces where institutional leaders, employers, and policymakers can share practical experiences in real-time, learn from diverging regional models, and translate those insights into a cohesive national playbook is now essential.
Only by placing lifelong learning at the heart of devolution can sector leaders turn a knife-edge policy into a generational productivity dividend.
