Does Boris Johnson’s adult skills revolution add up?

Analysts agree overhauling adult skills is the right economic aspiration and priority for the government. Yet there remain doubts about whether the Johnson administration’s current programme is sufficient to deliver, reports Ben Chu

The overall vista for skills funding from the government remains barren (PA)

Boris Johnson says his government will make improving adult skills the centrepiece of its new post-Brexit legislative agenda.

The Queen’s Speech on Tuesday promised new legislation to create a “lifetime skills guarantee”, which will include “flexible loans” for adults wanting to retrain that they will be able to use at any point in their lives.

“I’m revolutionising the system so we can move past the outdated notion that there is only one route up the career ladder and ensure that everyone has the opportunity to retrain or upskill at any point,” said the prime minister.

There is a consensus among analysts that this is the right economic aspiration and priority for the government.

Yet there remain serious reservations about whether the Johnson administration’s current programme is sufficient to deliver it.

For many decades the UK’s interlocking political, economic and educational systems have focused attention and resources on university and higher education, rather than on adult skills and vocational apprenticeships.

The result, as cross country studies by the OECD have suggested, is a comparatively weak level of basic skills among young adults in this country.

9 million

Adults in England with low basic skills, OECD

An estimated 9 million adults in England have low basic skills, 5 million of them being in work.

Meanwhile, only around a quarter of secondary school students follow the apprenticeship route, compared to 60 per cent in Switzerland and 40 per cent in Germany.

This is accepted to be part of the UK’s longstanding shortfall in productivity – the amount we produce per worker or per hour worked – relative to peer economies in mainland Europe.

Low skilled workers are concentrated in small firms and are usually in lower wage and less secure jobs, making low skills a key part feature of the UK’s inequality problem.

Part of the blame for the situation is attributable to the New Labour government, which was intently focused on increasing the number of people going to university, neglecting that half of young people who did not.

But, more recently, the prime culprit has been the coalition and the Conservatives after 2010, who presided over severe cuts to adult education services in the decade of austerity.

The cuts were more extreme than to other parts of the education system such as primary and secondary schools.

Total public spending on adult education and apprenticeships fell by one third over the last decade, with spending on traditional adult education down by 50 per cent.

The total number of adult learners has also collapsed from 3.2 million in 2010–11 to 2.1 million in 2018–19.

A new apprenticeship system introduced in 2017, funded by a levy on employers, is also widely acknowledged to have been a disaster, leading to a fall in the number of apprenticeship starts and a decline in overall employer investment.

Rhetorically the Conservatives have shifted in recent years on skills, perhaps in recognition of the changing social composition of their electoral support base.

But rhetoric alone will not, of course, deliver results. The recent introduction of new T-levels, designed to raise the status of vocational qualifications relative to the traditional academic A-levels, is seen as a positive move.

Yet despite the new loan pledge, which would effectively treat further education students the same as undergraduates in their access to student loans and maintenance grants, the overall vista for skills funding from the government remains barren.

The chancellor Rishi Sunak’s £2.5bn “National Skills Fund” for the current parliament, announced at the 2020 Budget, implies around £625m extra per year for four years.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) estimates that this would only reverse about a third of the cuts to adult education spending since 2010.

There are continuing limits on financial access too.

While the government has, as of last month, restored the entitlement to free A-level-equivalent courses for adults without qualifications at that level, this is restricted to courses in “high priority” subjects, chosen by ministers, so excluding important areas such as hospitality, tourism and media.

The independent 2019 Augar Review on post-18 education funding advised the government to scrap the “equivalent or lower qualification” (ELQ) rules, which restrict access to public financing for study for those who already have some qualifications at a certain level.

Yet the recent skills white paper only said the government would “consult further” on this.

The IFS argues claims of a lifetime skills guarantee will not be credible if, in practice, those who have completed any higher education course will effectively be barred from taking another higher education qualification at the same or a lower level.

“The government has kicked the can down the road, with most substantive decisions delayed awaiting further consultations,” says Ben Waltmann of the IFS.

The new legislation, which is due to be published on 18 May, might provide more details but the view of analysts is that this is, as it stands, only a very sketchy and underpowered skills reform programme.

One of the reasons adult skills have traditionally been neglected by politicians (of all stripes) is that it has been seen as less sexy than high-profile investments in big infrastructure projects, or less popular in the country and media than additional money for public services such as health.

Furthermore, the economic pay-offs of this kind of spending is gradual and long term – with any productivity and prosperity benefits falling outside the normal political cycle.

But the economic and social benefits of getting adult skills right would nevertheless be profound.

And delivery on this will be perhaps the acid test of Boris Johnson’s oft-repeated promises of levelling up the UK.