The Training State: A Review of “Skills Policy in Britain and the Future of Work”
- LEI
- 3 hours ago
- 4 min read
Tom Bewick has recently published a book which is a major contribution to the literature on the UK’s Skills Policy, entitled “Skills Policy in Britain and the Future of Work” (Bristol University Press, 2025). Tom, who is currently Visiting Professor of Skills and Workforce Policy at the University of Staffordshire, has held a variety of leadership roles in the skills sector and was an adviser to the Labour Government from 1997 to 2001, so is very well placed to tell a long and a complex story. Given the tectonic shifts in policy we’re all currently experiencing, his book couldn’t be more timely.
The book’s subtitle is “A Historical-Political Analysis”, and although it is organised as a historical narrative, its great strength is its in-depth analysis of the various ideologies, theories and political perspectives that lie behind successive governments’ policies in this area. Taking as his starting point the 1881-84 Royal Commission on Technical Instruction – described in the book as the point from which “the British state …began to take workforce competitiveness and individual skills development seriously” (p14),Tom takes us through five historical phases, which he describes as five “training states”.
The Incremental State (1881-1939) was characterised by philanthropy and Gladstonian liberalism, while the Interventionist State (1940-1979) applied Keynesian demand-side economics to the problem. This was followed by an increasing reliance on the idea of the skills sector as a market, although paradoxically this has been accompanied by increased bureaucratisation and centralisation, as we moved from a Laissez-faire State (1980-88), Localism and devolved states (1989-2010), and finally from 2011 onwards, to the Technocratic State, with which most of us are very familiar.
I’ll leave it to academic experts to debate the theoretical merits of this framework, but for the general reader it has the benefit of providing a clear set of themes to make sense of the busy and at times hyper-active history of skills policy initiatives, reports, reviews, White Papers, and legislation, that has led to an endlessly revolving door of government agencies, quangos and delivery structures.
The book is wide-ranging and full of fascinating details, but for me three themes stand out. First is what Tom calls Britain’s “very peculiar social class system”, leading to our “almost unique propensity to sift and sort people in a caste-like manner, usually via qualification funnelling mechanisms, into practical and professional trades” (p62). This has consistently militated against all attempts to design an education system that blends practical and academic modes of study, with the education of those seen as doing “brain work” being systematically more highly valued and far better resourced than technical and vocational training which is viewed as intrinsically inferior. Tom is very clear: “the false notion of there being some binary distinction to be drawn between the teaching of knowledge and skills is one of the fundamental errors of British education policy”(p61).
The current Government is having another go at dismantling the Berlin Wall between academic and vocational education, but once again the academic curriculum (GCSEs, A levels) will remain almost untouched while the vocational curriculum is put through yet another bout of reform.
The second theme is the growing dominance of neoliberalism and human capital theory in influencing policy. This has led to a strong regulatory central government presiding over a quasi-market of training providers who compete with each other for students and income. It also underlies the persistent tendency for businesses to be enlisted to develop and deliver national skills policy. Tom highlights what he labels “the technocratic takeover of FE”, (p204) through which the Department for Education tightly regulates the delivery of skills training courses, sets their prices, and decides which courses are eligible for public funding, rather than enabling student choice and employer demand to determine what is delivered. In Tom’s pithy words, “FE providers have been turned into local delivery arms of a centralised Training State”. To my mind there are clear signs that the HE sector is being pushed in this direction too.
The third theme is how ineffective government policy has been over the decades. We’ve still not got an education system that delivers the skills the country needs to be internationally competitive and prosperous. “Since 1881 the UK Parliament has passed 108 pieces of legislation to improve the nation’s skills. Forty of these interventions have occurred since 1997” Tom observes toward the end of the book (p250). Sadly we haven’t received a great deal of bang for all this buck. His plea to move beyond “the false dichotomy of state and market” towards a new paradigm in which we “empower and trust educators, employers and sub-national democratic entities” certainly resonates as we watch the emergence of Skills England, the new emphasis on collaboration rather than competition, and the accelerated pace of skills devolution. But while these are all promising moves, it’s far from clear that they will add up to a genuine shift away from the Technocratic State that is now dominant.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of Tom’s arguments, this is a must-read book for all those working in the Post-16 Education sector, including politicians and senior civil servants. It helps us to understand the context we’re now working in, to clarify our thinking in relation to current skills policy debates, and, crucially, to learn from a long history of mistakes and failed initiatives. It’s a welcome contribution from someone who is not just a theoretician, but has lived and worked for a long time in the landscape he describes.
Comments