Learning after Leitch

Very few Quest readers will have heard of Lord Sandy Leitch, and even fewer will have read his recent 150-page report ‘Prosperity for all in the Global Economy: World Class Skills’. Commissioned by Chancellor Gordon Brown, the report is output-led. It concentrates on the needs of the country in relation to the competition, rather than the desires of the individual, social aspirations of the government, or the current patchily gathered and interpreted wishes of employers.

If it is adopted, it will shape the learning lives of anyone with ten or more years of a working life ahead of them, their children and their children’s children. If not, the UK will continue to slide down the global skills table – of the 30 OECD nations it is currently 17th on low skills (Level 1 and below), 20th on intermediate skills (Levels 2 and 3) and 11th on high skills (Level 4 and above). Five million UK adults lack functional literacy, 17 million have difficulty with numbers and more than one in six youngsters leave school unable to read, write or add up properly.

To allow Britain to become a world leader in skills, and thus achieve a competitive advantage, Leitch believes that 95 per cent of working-age adults must have basic literacy and numeracy skills (currently 85 per cent and 79 per cent respectively), the number of adults skilled to Level 2 and above must rise from 70 per cent to 90 per cent, and the number of adults skilled to Level 4 and above must rise by 10 per cent to reach 40 per cent. He also calls for 500,000 apprenticeships a year, with all these measures focusing on what he calls ‘economically valuable skills’. The approach has to be led by demand, with both employers and workers eager to embrace new learning; with adequate resources and energy invested by government, employers and learners. He wants to shift the balance of intermediate skills from its current Level 2 to Level 3.

System reforms include strengthening employers’ input through a new Commission for Employment & Skills, and routing public funding for economically useful qualifications through Train to Gain and Learner Accounts. (Train to Gain is a piloted scheme that provides no-cost or very cheap training to allow employees to achieve basic skills or a Level 2 qualification, with employers compensated for the costs they incur. Learner Accounts would channel financial support for further education that is outside the scope of Train to Gain into new grants that would again support the demand-led nature of the Leitch approach. People with long memories will hope this will be better policed than Individual Learning Accounts, which failed through lack of audit controls and fraud by some learning providers.)

Employers will also be expected to train more employees while they work. At first this will be through a voluntary ‘pledge’, but employees will be given a statutory right to access such training in 2010 if employers do not act ‘voluntarily’. In any case, education or work-based learning until the age of 18 will become compulsory. Leitch describes the outcomes of such changes as ‘huge – a more prosperous and productive society with higher rates of employment and lower levels of poverty and inequality’. Anticipated results include a net benefit of at least £80 billion over 30 years (£2.5 billion annually). However, big changes take time to implement – more than 70 per cent of the workforce in 2020 have already completed their schooling, so the first 15 years of any programme will be spent in running to catch up, with major benefits still to come.

The report draws a clear distinction between academic and vocational skills. Put simply, if you think about the job you are doing right now, the chances are that the vast majority of the different skills that you need to do it were learnt in the workplace or on specific training that prepared you for the tasks required. In other words, although some academic knowledge may have been required for you to start doing your job, the actual work needs skills learnt from a manager or a supervisor, or from a workmate or friend, or through experience.

Academic learning is vital to our understanding and provides the knowledge that underpins much of our performance. School, teachers and classrooms remain essential to our personal development and to the well-being of society, but work-based, or vocational, learning has been overshadowed by its academic brother for too long, and the dominance of the academic educational establishment has led to some major policies that are becoming unglued. Annual government expenditure bears out this imbalance with £7.4 billion spent on higher education (and individuals due to pay £2.3 billion in fees) with just £4.5 billion going towards further education.

No one remembered Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, in which he observed that, ‘the greater part of what is taught in schools and universities … does not seem to be the proper preparation for that of business’. Indeed, people still ignore the fact that the training for many highly valued careers – medicine, law, teaching, nursing – includes a great deal of vocational learning. The old apprentice system of vocational learning, which served the country so well over centuries, was virtually abandoned during decades of government meddling and social engineering. Leitch believes that the modern apprenticeship system that is today’s equivalent should be expanded, with vocational training becoming as highly rated in the UK as it is in many of our international competitors.

There is a strong social dimension to the report. By 2020 the number of jobs available to people without Level 2 skills will have fallen from today’s 3.4 million to just 500,000, so there will be even less opportunity than there is at present for relatively unskilled people to find employment. There is significant linkage between the educational attainment of parents and their children, resulting in generations of under-achieving individuals locking families into persistent poverty. The effects may be seen geographically and demographically, with people living in England’s north-east, Yorkshire and Humberside, the East Midlands, Wales and Northern Ireland generally having lower skills than those in the south-east and Scotland.

Leitch wants money and information directed at these households to motivate people to want to learn and to enable them to make choices about how to learn. He wants to end the cycle of underachieving adults producing underachieving children who ‘fail’ at school, becoming underachieving adults producing … He envisages a national campaign to ‘lift aspirations and build awareness’, a national career service working alongside JobCentres to deliver advice and opportunities to help people manage their working lives, and the use of Learner Accounts to provide funds for people to access learning.

All this seems very admirable and straightforward. Indeed, the Armed Forces have already adopted many of the principles that Leitch holds dear: learner accounts (learning credits) allowing people to select their own pathways, a career service (line management and education and learning advisers), rigorous policing of training providers (preferred supplier and approved provider lists), raising skills at all levels and the importance of driving this primarily through employer demand rather than course availability or individual desires.

Contrary to the popular image, the military is again ahead of the field rather than chasing it, and this is largely due to a 15-year transformation of the education, training, learning and resettlement process. All three Services used to do their own thing, based on what their senior commanders saw as their priorities. There were very few tri-Service initiatives, and even fewer that involved the Civil Service. Skills that were identical or very similar were taught in different single-Service establishments; there were very few military courses that offered a route to civilian qualifications and even outplacement at the end of Service was handled very differently.

While the current situation is far from perfect, it is pretty damn good when compared with the rest of the UK. Just one example is that of accreditation. A few years ago, a Royal Marine Warrant Officer worked in Lympstone, examining all RM career training and mapping it against civilian awards. He found a number of similarities and a great deal of common ground. Gradually he found elements of RM training that matched civilian equivalents; these built into modules, then units and finally, with a little adjustment, into transferable qualifications.

The Armed Forces have had the good sense to hang on to this person when his formal contract finished through age. He is now working in the Director General of Education and Training’s area of the MoD on … accreditation. Recently the Ministry held its first Accreditation Seminar, attended by people from the Services, the Civil Service, Learning & Skills Councils, the Qualifications & Curriculum Authority and the Association of Learning Providers. While the content of the day was primarily of interest to specialists, the idea was revolutionary. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to call it a very rapid evolution.

The thought of spending time and money in making military training useful and useable in subsequent careers was certainly not accepted a decade or two ago. Now it is generally seen as being in everyone’s best interest, although there are doubtless a few die-hards in some long-forgotten barracks who mutter about wasting resources that would be better spent on ‘proper’ training for war.

No doubt the Leitch Report will have its detractors. Perhaps the academic establishment will not like it. Certainly, the lobby that believes that higher education is a ‘right’ and that vocational training is somehow ‘second rate’ will not be in favour. But perhaps these people need to think again. Because the nation cannot afford to fund the vast numbers passing through our universities, students increasingly take out loans to fund their learning, with the poorest of them needing to borrow the most money because their parents cannot afford to subsidise them. Net results are huge numbers of graduates with degrees that do not impress employers from new universities that impress them even less, and hordes of twentysomethings with high expectations, mountains of debt and few useful skills.

Leitch’s alternative makes sound sense; the government should listen and learn.