Education Reforms – Keep Calm and Carry on ELBA

Much ado this week about technical education. Lord Sainsbury published his report and the Government immediately published its Skills Plan in response – proposing that technical qualifications post 16 should be reduced from thousands to just 16. It has to be a good idea to make it easier for young people to understand how to make something of their lives without needing to consider higher education. The route from A- levels to university is well understood; it’s right that the technical route should be as clear.

I am slightly cynical, having seen a number of reforms of technical education and qualifications come and go over the years. Indeed, my home town is Wigan in Lancashire, and Wigan Mining and Technical College was one of the first, if not the first, technical college in the country, being established to respond to the need for skilled workers in the rapidly expanding cotton, coal and engineering industries. So you can see that new dawns in the provision of technical skills to meet the needs of the nation go back a long way.

Not that past endeavours should be any brake on ambitions for current reform. And it is always good to see a commitment to parity of status between academic and technical routes. But we need to be careful to get it all of a piece, or we risk creating a bit of a dog’s breakfast, and compounding, rather than removing, complexity. For example, where would the new 15 technical qualifications fit with apprenticeship frameworks; and how do the new age 16 qualifications fit with the reformed post-16 technical route?

The Government’s Plan states that every young person should be presented with two clear choices post-16- academic or technical. The problem I can see that all the recent reforms to the pre-16 curriculum give pretty exclusive attention to academic study, and the focus on EBAC and “best 8” as the means to recognise achievement of schools and pupils does not fit with or encourage an easy transition to post-16 technical education.

ELBA corporate partners, who between them represent some of the UK’s largest employers, have been exercised in recent months about the proposed introduction of the Apprenticeship Levy. The Levy is a good idea in principle, and should lead to a significant increase in skills investment. But concerns have been raised about how the Levy will be implemented, and ELBA employers are hoping to put some ideas and solutions to representatives from the Skills Funding Agency when we hold our event with Newham College and University of East London on the 20th July. The thinking applied to the Levy would apply just as well to the proposed reform of technical qualifications:

• Keep it simple – don’t make it so complicated for employers to understand
• Let employers control the final detail – ok so you want fewer, more understandable routes – but there has to be some room for employers to customise what is included to meet their own sector and circumstances
• Allow room for innovation – pooling with other employers, collaborative work with supply chains and use of digital delivery platforms should all be encouraged. And the system needs to be able to change quickly – in months, not years.
• Make sure what is done in schools matches what you want to see happen post-16 and in the workplace – ELBA corporate partners are actively engaged in helping school pupils understand the choices facing them and how they can get into good jobs and careers
• If you want to give technical education the same status as the academic routes, then FE colleges and the non-traditional universities need to get more recognition and dare one say, more funding.

But all in all, the proposed reforms should bring benefits. We will be supporting ELBA corporate partners to make the most of the reforms and to help them play their part in making the technical route attractive and successful. Our corporate partners already do a great deal – so it’s a case of Carry On Elba.