Context:

In November 2001 and November 2002 the Cabinet Performance and Innovation Unit (now the Strategy Unit) published parts one and two of In Demand: Adult skills in the 21st century. The project on workforce development provided a critical review of the problems faced in trying to address complex problems in the first report (note copy of full report avaiable at the end of this section). This report made clear that the UK’s longstanding difficulties with vocational education and training appear to be the result of a complex web of circumstances, environmental factors and incentive structures that interact in ways that are anything but simple. In other words, what policy makers are faced with is a form of systems failure. If this is the case, effective policies have to be grounded in a full appreciation of the tangled and often complex inter-relationships that underlie current conditions.

The report also pointed out that experience over the last two decades indicates that the problems surrounding skill development at work are extremely difficult to solve. After at least a century of concern, and two decades of intensive intervention in all aspects of skill policy, the remaining problems will not be easy to resolve – particularly those that have defeated successive policy initiatives and reforms. The history of the last twenty years of policy formation is littered with well-intentioned but narrowly targeted interventions that were meant to deal with a discrete failing or weakness. All too often the result was that the intervention or scheme sank as a result of striking the unseen bulk of the wider problem, particularly in terms of incentive structures and the attitudes they support.

It may be that at present there is a greater willingness among 'key players' in the policy community (e.g. DTI, DfES, Treasury, LSC, SSDA and SSCs, SBS, and RDAs) to collaborate. This could lead to a focus upon some of the broader forces and incentives, and a willingness to work with other partners to evolve less narrowly-focused solutions. One way forward may be to look at issues of competitiveness and innovation, workplace employment relations, work organisation and job design together. This was the line of argument adopted in the PIU Workforce Development project, when it suggested there might be a need to help stimulate long-term demand for skills within employment and to ensure that those skills are then used to maximum productive effect. It is important not to underestimate the scale of the challenge that such a more integrated approach poses to the policy community.

Commentary

One further issue here is how far previous policies have not always been faulty per se, but rather there have been problems in the translation dynamics in trying to move from a policy context to an implementation context. For example, the sector skills councils are yet another attempt to give employers a collective voice in skill development policy and implementation. However, even if individual employers are involved the UK still has weak employer networks and this poses fundamental challenges as to how to implement policy in practice.

In this area there is also an issue about how far removed is economic reality from the rhetoric espoused by governments. 'In an age where knowledge is a key competitive weapon', and skills and learning are at the centre of government policy aimed at creating a high skill, high wage economy (from A Smart, Successful Scotland, Scottish Executive, 2001). It could also be that some policy interventions are intended to be primarily symbolic – the government is associating itself with an aspiration or being seen to be attempting to do something positive, influencing the representation of policy.

John Elliott (1998) argues that, notwithstanding the waves of policy reform in education and the resulting policy turbulence, the basic thrust of policy interventions are designed to recast belief in an economic (market-oriented) direction. '"How else, Rist (1997) asks, does one explain the countless plans to boost the economy, which are announced with " great solemnity even if every one knows that the effect would at best be only marginal". Does his point not hold for the recent wave of educational reforms, in the UK and other parts of Europe, in which politicians act as if the declamatory effects of their pronouncements herald real effects, and in doing so try to get us to believe they do? Policy interventions in education and other area’s of social life can be understood in these terms, as symbolically rather than instrumentally significant' (Elliott, 1998).

It is also worth pointing out that the PIU (2002) analysis highlighting the nature of the skills problem suggested a deep-seated set of structural factors and, critically, a lack of adequate demand for skills, was a significant break with earlier analyses. The PIU suggestion of stimulating demand for skills by impacting on wider business strategies was unusual in that, as

Keep (2003) points out, "the general direction of policy across the whole UK over the last twenty years has been to concentrate attention and resources upon the development of a supply-side skills revolution, whereby a step change (or in reality series of changes) in the supply of skills – largely through expansion of the tertiary education system – will enable the transition to our becoming a knowledge driven economy (KDE). Major elements of this strategy have included:

• Massive expansion of post-compulsory education
• Massive expansion of higher education
• Massive and unceasing changes to the organisational structures that plan, manage and fund VET
• Attempts to reform and revitalise a work-based route for initial VET
• Reform of qualifications and of the qualifications structure (still ongoing)
• Increasing central government control of all aspects of VET.

As the author and many others have observed on countless occasions, there has been very little attempt to link these reforms with any wider economic development agenda, or to draw any meaningful connections between skills policy and issues such as employee relations systems, work organisation, job design, or quality of working life. Indeed, the argument from policy makers has been that skills and skills alone will provide a sufficient lever to generate the economic transformation that is desired (see, for instance, H. M. Treasury (2002), which argues that the UK can escape from a low skills equilibrium simply by the government supporting more skills creation)" (Keep, 2003, pp 12-13).

References:

• Elliott, J. (1998) LIVING WITH AMBIGUITY AND CONTRADICTION: the challenges for educational research in positioning itself for the 21st century. KEY-NOTE ADDRESS: EUROPEAN CONFERENCE FOR EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH (ECER), LJUBLJANA, September, 1998.
• Keep, E. (2003) TOO TRUE TO BE GOOD – SOME THOUGHTS ON THE 'HIGH SKILLS VISION', AND ON WHERE POLICY IS REALLY TAKING US, Paper presented to the SKOPE High Skills Conference, Cable and Wireless College, Coventry, September 2003. 
• Performance and Innovation Unit (2002) In Demand: Adult skills for the 21st century, London: The Cabinet Office.
• Rist, G. (1997) The History of Development: from western origins to global faith, Zed Books: London & New York.
• Scottish Executive (2001) A Smart, Successful Scotland, Edinburgh: Scottish Executive.

In demand: adult skills in the twenty first century

Preview Info - in demand - adult skills piu.pdf - 825.77 Kb

A PIU report produced in December 2001 on workforce development.