At the recent launch of a £20m advertising campaign for adult skills training earlier this month, John Denham, the minister for innovation, universities and skills, promised “a cultural change in the nation’s attitude to skills”.
For many in the business world, who complain that the education system fails to produce employees fit for work or courses appropriate for retraining existing workers, such a change cannot come soon enough. As well as bemoaning the lack of basic numeracy and literacy among the working population as a whole – and among school leavers and graduates – employers argue that there are too few graduates or postgraduates from science or maths degrees to go round.
Although in some of the sciences and in engineering, applications for undergraduate courses are on the rise again, it comes after a long period of decline and not all subjects are feeling such positive effects: maths is still declining, and, in broad terms, pupils are not choosing science A-levels. Even the official figures can be misleading: 47 per cent more people are recorded as choosing the biological sciences between 2002 and 2005, for example, but within that group the proportion studying biology has fallen from 31 per cent to 17 per cent, as the pure subject loses out to sports science, psychology and other hybrid courses.
Studies by several campaigning groups and learned societies, including the Royal Society, have identified the need for more schoolchildren and students to be encouraged to opt for science subjects. Meanwhile, the manufacturing and technical industries say their productivity and competitiveness is hampered by the lack of technical skills at the intermediate (sub-degree) level, which the Engineering Employers Federation (EEF) blames on a long period when there was minimal provision of or take up for apprenticeships.
According to Lee Hopely, the EEF’s senior economist, the near-absence of apprenticeships in the 1990s was due to a number of factors affecting business: adverse economic conditions meant companies were unable or unwilling to participate in the schemes; there were doubts about the relevance of such courses; and their unattractiveness. “Young people have to want to do them,” she points out.
Herein lies the root cause of the mismatch between the qualifications young people attain and what business wants: the UK higher and further education system responds principally to demands from students about what they would prefer to study, and less to what employers say the economy needs: if sixth-formers are rushing to sign up for psychology A-levels and media studies courses, the system adapts to meet that appetite. What is more, universities say they have to provide the popular “softer” courses so that they can cross-subsidise struggling science departments.
When it comes to courses for existing employers to improve or add to their education, the mismatch becomes even worse. The Council for Industry and Higher Education (CIHE), which has spent the past 20 years arguing for better links between business and the universities, estimates that there is a market worth about £5bn in high-level learning. But at the moment, a handful of institutions are receiving only around £330m a year from large and small companies who want to use them for continuing professional development.
“We have a system of higher education which is excellent,” says Richard Brown, chief executive of the CIHE, “but there is a complete divorce between that system and what business needs for up-skilling its workforce.”
To improve the gaps between workers’ existing skills and the demands of modern jobs, Ms Hopely would like to see a major expansion of funding for adult apprenticeships. She argues that the pace of technological advances has changed radically what many manufacturers need their workers to do, and training has not kept pace. But a return to centralised workforce planning is not realistic in the modern era. “Attempts at forecasting changing needs in the labour market have proved unsuccessful,” she says, “and predicting technological change is not easy either. Instead we want a training system that can respond relatively quickly and easily to what industry needs.”
According to Mr Brown, the UK has suffered from decades of change in the structures and state-run enterprises which were designed to articulate and then fulfil business training needs, which has made some business-people sceptical – even cynical – about recent government initiatives. He suggests we may now have to construct an entirely new set of institutions, based within or alongside universities, to fill the training needs of companies trying to adapt at breakneck speed to the new realities of global competition. This has partly become necessary because a whole generation of people now in the workforce missed out on higher education. “Only in the last couple of years have we realised the extent to which our future lies in value-added, high-end services,” he says.
Mr Brown points out that while the UK was being transformed from a manufacturing to a service economy during the 1980s, higher education took a long time to open its doors to more than the elite high achievers. Even now, the government target of seeing 50 per cent of all young people take part in higher education remains controversial.
Meanwhile, the country has also lagged behind its competitors in developing management education, which was fashionable and highly regarded in the US and elsewhere in Europe long before Britons began to understand its value. One recent study showed that only 11 per cent of British CEOs or MDs have an MBA, compared to 20 per cent in the US.
Mr Brown is optimistic about the UK’s prospects for improving the links between business and strong, world-class universities. He points out that part of the reason so many overseas students come to study in UK universities is because the education is unique in its focus on problem-based learning, its small-group teaching and its multicultural student population – all factors which should equip graduates perfectly for global business. “If our future depends on flexible learners who can be creative and adaptable, then we might be better situated than others,” he asserts.
But for some observers of UK workforce trends, there are still urgent cultural problems to be overcome. Faye Chua, head of research at the Financial Services Skills Council, says that specialisation at A-levels and at university tends to make British graduates less employable than their international counterparts because they are either numerate or good at people skills – but rarely at both. “Internationals students tend to be more rounded,” she says. “Promotion comes to those who are technically excellent but then they lack the skills to manage their team, or manage client relationships.”
Even in an era of expanding undergraduate numbers, Ms Chua believes the message about what difference university can make for the individual is yet to get through to the public as a whole. “UK citizens really need to learn to value the importance of higher education and how it ripples out into the economy,” she says.
