To level up, empower regions to invest in skills and education

Last week’s release of the Levelling Up White Paper made one thing very clear: new thinking about skills and education is at the heart of the UK government’s flagship plan for regional regeneration.

There is much to praise. Many of the White Paper’s flagship policies – some new, others re-energised – promise to change the education landscape across the country. Education Investment Areas will help target school investment at the communities with the highest deprivation and worst educational attainment. The UK National Academy will offer advanced online knowledge and skills services to students across the country. And Institutes of Technology will pioneer a new era in higher technical qualifications.

The creation of Local Skill Improvement Plans (LSIPs) also provides a welcome bottom-up dimension to the agenda, bringing local authorities, businesses and education providers around the same table. Yet if the government is serious about giving left-behind communities the autonomy to forge their own innovative paths, its “devolution deals” with the English regions need to hand over a bigger share of responsibility and funding for skills and education. And while the White Paper’s provisions for school improvement are justified, the government must not forget that post-16 education does not end at the age of 21. Lifelong learning is a key factor in levelling up, and much more needs to be said about what role higher and further education can play in delivering it.

The starting point has to be giving local authorities decisive control over LSIPs – which are described in the White Paper as “employer-led”. The bodies charged with developing the plans should also be broadened to include SMEs, trade unions, arts, faith, and third sector organisations, as well as universities and colleges. And, crucially, education providers cannot be made to feel lesser partners to the employer representative bodies. After all, they will bear the burden of delivering the higher qualifications needed to realise the government’s hopes for a skills boost to productivity. They must play as significant a role in LSIPs as they do in the science and innovation audit consortia announced in 2015 and charged with identifying areas of competitive advantage in local and regional research and innovation.

The skills devolution offer should not stop there. Local areas need to know that when they call for help from government, their voices will be heard. Local authorities need the power to declare “skills emergencies” in their key industries, unlocking central investment and empowerment, including localised “skills lift” industrial strategies.

Local areas also need greater control of their skills and education budgets. They must be able to simplify the process by which local providers bid for learning and training funding, unifying the various streams into a Local Skills Development Fund. Part of this funding must be used to pay for full fee and maintenance grants for students of all ages taking intermediate qualifications, from certificates and higher apprenticeships to degrees and graduate diplomas. It should also be available to top up university and college payrolls, so they can retain the best lecturers.

Local authorities also need the power to set up “skills accounts”, funded by contributions from employers and employees, which local workers could use to pay for selected additional skills or education courses at any point in their careers.

A key role for the LSIPs should be developing innovative education partnerships between schools, colleges and universities. These should ensure that every local area benefits from the “campus effect” of university-style knowledge and teaching concentrations, helping learners enjoy a more joined-up journey from one level of academic and vocational qualification to the next. LSIPs must also lead the way in overhauling local career advice provision, creating dedicated hubs that help people understand what their best local learning and employment opportunities are.

Of course, government cannot just hand over all these powers and leave local authorities wholly to their own devices. It has to offer them – and, through them, universities and colleges – the resources to make the most of their capacity to innovate in skills and education provision. That is why the government’s planned Unit for Future Skills has to be upgraded to a roving National Institute for Future Skills – a “think and do tank” that can give local areas specialist hands-on logistical and strategic guidance.

By the same principle, investing in training and development has to be made easier for businesses. A Skills Tax Credit should be targeted at industries in growth sectors and skills “cold spots”, and the Apprenticeship Levy should be expanded into a Flexible Skills Levy, supporting investment in vocational training and minimum quotas of “business skills” coaching. This should mirror the model of higher education collaboration envisaged by the Knowledge Exchange Framework and must be calibrated against measures of how effectively businesses support local higher skills and education provision.

Beyond that, the government has to think carefully about what learning pathways work best for different jobs, especially service-heavy jobs in the public sector. Nursing and care work, policing and emergency response all rely on intensive on-the-job experience; they would benefit from specialist lifelong training pathways that better integrate formal learning with in-work expertise.

Together, these local powers and national policy changes can help make the UK a leader in educational innovation and put real substance behind the levelling up rhetoric. The longed-for productivity revolution depends on a skills revolution – and that revolution has to start at the local level.

Marius S. Ostrowski is senior public policy researcher at the thinktank ResPublica. He is also policy lead for the Lifelong Education Commission, chaired by Chris Skidmore, which has published a Skills and Levelling Up Manifesto in response to the government’s White Paper.