Skills White Paper: Three Billboards for the Lifelong Adult Learner

In the film “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri”, a grieving woman rents three billboards to draw attention to her daughter’s unsolved murder. Adult education is far from dead, but is on life-support with its funding ebbing away, contributing to the growing pool of economically inactive adults and chronic skill shortages across industry. Acknowledging the scale of the challenge, the Education and Skills White Paper lines up three branches of government to tackle the unsolved problem – the DfE, the DWP, and Strategic Local Authorities. The future Post-16 education landscape will certainly not be lacking in policy initiatives under this Labour government.

Billboard no.1 is the DfE, but the recent arrival on the scene of the DWP means that its role in relation to adult skills has diminished. It retains responsibility for Higher Education and for the implementation of the flagship Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE), with a welcome focus on the “missing middle” of Level 4 and 5 Higher Technical Qualifications. The document makes clear that addressing this issue will be a joint responsibility between FE and HE, with a whole raft of initiatives – Technical Excellence Colleges, the Institutes of Technology network, and the proposal to explore “break points” in three year degree courses – backing this up.

The White Paper is fulsome in its praise of the FE sector and reaffirms the vital role of colleges in meeting adult skills needs, but its headline policy – the introduction of a whole new suite of V-Level qualifications to replace BTECs, City & Guilds and all other Level 3 Applied General courses – makes it clear that this is designed for 16-19 year olds, leaving unanswered the question of what vocational qualifications those over 19 will be able to access. Explicitly designed to be the same shape and size as A Levels, the new V Levels will be long, chunky courses requiring a big time commitment from students, so will only be attractive to a small minority of adult students.

Billboard no.2, the DWP, is now the big one for adult skills. With responsibility for Skills England,  apprenticeships and the Growth and Skills Levy, the department is proposing “apprenticeship units” as the way in which to provide more flexibility to employers wanting to recoup their levy costs through workforce training. The DWP will also be managing a fresh attempt to weld skills training to employment support, with adult careers advice also much more readily available. In parallel with initiatives that focus on reducing the number of NEETs, programmes such as “Get Britain Working” for economically inactive adults, and “Pathways to Work” for those with disabilities, will engage mostly with lower-skilled or unqualified adults, at Level 2 and below. But how will all this be integrated with the DfE’s Level 3 and above reforms? It will be important to ensure there are seamless learning pathways from one level to the next.   

All very promising in theory. But there are two problems. The first is theoretical; there is little evidence that this approach has worked in the past – the YTS scheme is the clearest example – so success will depend on finding innovative new techniques to support adults back into the workforce. The second is practical; the organisational culture of the DWP and the JobCentre Plus network is renowned for being driven solely by job targets, and prone to short term thinking, but delivering an effective adult skills strategy will require a focus on longer term careers rather than immediate jobs, and a much more nuanced approach to measuring impact.

Billboard no.3 is perhaps better described as a notice board covered in Post-it notes, since there will soon be dozens of Strategic Local Authorities with Adult Skills budgets to spend, who will have “even greater flexibility in how they use their funding”. They will also have considerable influence in shaping local skills strategy, through their links with Skills England, their role in developing Local Skills Improvement Plans, and their engagement with Local Growth Plans and local Get Britain Working plans. This is a complex and multi-faceted role for devolved authorities who are at very different stages of organisational maturity, will be run by a variety of political parties all with their own policies, and have a wide range of starting points in terms of local capacity and the extent of  collaboration between skills providers.

So while the Pre-18 education sector is heading towards greater simplification, the Post-18 sector looks set for greater complexity. While there’s no doubt this to some extent reflects the intrinsic diversity of adult learners – the skilled and unskilled, the employed and unemployed, the healthy and unhealthy – it will also require extraordinary coordination and communication skills from all those offering services if the intricate matrix of policies and initiatives is going to work on the ground. An adult lifelong learner wanting to improve their skills and qualifications will be confronted with a range of options offered by a range of providers funded by a range of local and national government departments. The recently announced major expansion of adult careers services is going to be crucial if adults are going to navigate this complex system.

Three adult skills billboards, all advertising different products and services to the lifelong learner. Those of us who’ve lived through the journey from three television channels to hundreds of streaming services, can testify that more diversity and choice is generally a good thing. The key to success will be user-friendly systems through which adults can quickly and easily find the learning service they need.