It’s been a whole 12 months since the Leitch Review of Skills was published, so listening to skills minister David Lammy speak yesterday at the Public Sector Skills Conference in London, I was waiting for some big announcement to mark its first anniversary.
I was expecting to hear what government had achieved and employer comment one year on since the Review, which told the UK to ‘shape up or ship out’ of the global economy.
I wanted to hear the latest thinking behind mandatory, paid time off for employee training or employer self-accreditation of internal qualifications.
How wrong I was:
Predictably, Lammy plugged the skills pledge: a formal, voluntary commitment by employers to train their staff to Level 2 by 2010. “There are 14 more employers signing up today”, he said, in what felt like a hopeful plea to get everyone in that audience to sign on the dotted line – now.
And if I can sidetrack slightly – 14 more employers? That brings the grand total of signatures signed up to the pledge to somewhere between 550 and 600, does it not? Which covers around three million employees, Lammy said. What about the remaining 25 million employees in work that aren’t covered? When will they be ‘covered’ by the pledge?
But no, there was no mention of these topics today.
And naturally, the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills minister went on to talk about the public sector’s role in leading the way for the private sector. We were at a public sector skills conference after all.
But then Lammy talked over and over about apprenticeships – about how the public sector only play a small part in offering them and that now was the right time to promote them.
“The public sector accounts for 24% of the workforce. Yet only 10% of employees do apprenticeships... Those that have been reticent in the past can now take up apprenticeships,” he told delegates.
Several central government department workers in the audience raised concerns about funding and lack of timing over offering such apprenticeships – but these were quashed.
“The funding will be there by 2011”, Lammy assured them. He mentioned a recent department apprenticeship review, and said the money will be there to subsidise apprenticeships working with employers.
Education, education, education, and the associated skills gap, it seems, can be sorted through apprenticeships - plenty more of them.
But do apprenticeships truly follow the demand-led skills system, which Leitch called for? Or is this an example of the government telling employers what to do?
