Back in May this year the Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, acknowledged the end of the NICE decade, acronym for non inflationary consistent expansion. In non economist speak we’ve enjoyed a long period of low inflation whilst at the same time also enjoying continually rising employment and economic growth. In typically understated terms, the Governor said ‘we are travelling along a bumpy road as the economy rebalances’.
But what does a recession mean for skills policy and further education?
The most profound thing to note is how much of the current skills policy and infrastructure has been built upon the NICE years. Last week saw the UK post its first contraction in economic output for 16 years, so if we take that as the start, what has come and gone in that period? The incorporation of colleges came into effect in 1993 ushering in the Further Education Funding Council till 2001, replaced by the Learning and Skills Council, scheduled for replacement in 2010. National Training Councils have been and gone, as did the Sector Skills Development Agency (SSDA), most recently replaced by the new UK Commission for Employment and Skills.
In fact the only government sponsored skills initiatives that I believe existed pre 1992 which is alive today are the National Training Awards and the Investors in People standard. The point being that we have all collectively become rather use to designing skills policies on the presumption of continuing employment growth. Even as late as June of this year the Work Skills command paper of DIUS and DWP was clearly drafted from a presumption of high employment and economic stability. And as no doubt unemployment continues to rise over the next couple of years we’ll look back at all of the brow beating that went into chasing out the remaining percentage points of employer skills gaps as relatively a rather nice problem to have had.
So what for the future?
Beyond the obvious that if there must be a recession let it be quick and shallow, my first hope is that we will finally give up the presumption of certainty and forecasting that has bedevilled skills policy over recent years. At its zenith the former SSDA was rather prone to believing that it could foresee the skills future and make quite stretching claims, relative to the evidence base, about future skills and employment prospects. This in turn inspiring the funding and planning infrastructure to believe that college provision could be so honed as to meet the needs of a specific postcode at some future date. (If anything were worthy of a Gosplan accolade the grid developed by consultants which colour coded qualifications to future employment growth would certainly have been it).
More importantly, look into the methodologies that underpinned such studies and they were usually based upon an assumption of ever lasting NICE times.
With this presumption of certainty shattered, and along with it the apparatus of ever granulated planning, my second hope is that we take uncertainty as the constant and focus on equipping adults with the broadest range of skills possible so as to maximise their life and employment chances. The goal should be to give individuals the adaptive capacity to respond to future uncertainties rather than narrowly training them into overly specific vocational areas which utilise their learning entitlement but reduce their employment options in the future; this matters particularly at Level 2.
The same principle of adaptive capacity applies to colleges and providers. Where rather than trying to plan against an assumed future we concentrate on testing and developing our collective capabilities to respond quickly to the changing needs of learners, employers and the community. Our only certainty being that this indeed is a bumpy road and we will be travelling it for a while.
Michael Davis
Managing Director, CFE