The need to focus on basic, work-ready skills has been in the spotlight again, with some in the Further Education sector arguing that the government should be focusing its efforts on improving basic skills rather than its heavy emphasis on Apprenticeships.
As recently reported in FE Week, “the BIS Select Committee’s report on the Government’s productivity plan raised concerns about the lack of focus on a variety of policy areas, including Apprenticeships, but what has escaped most attention was the call to address the poor level of basic skills in the workforce”.
‘Soft’ and basic skills – including English, maths, problem-solving and creativity – are undoubtedly important in the drive to improve national productivity, so we do believe that they deserve as much focus as Apprenticeships. It’s estimated that the productivity gap between Britain and our international competitors is the biggest since records began in the 1990s.
It’s frequently reported that employers are struggling to find employees with the essential skills they need for the job, especially among graduates as our universities are not adequately preparing them to enter the world of work.
Recent Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) figures also suggest 9m working age people in England don’t have sufficient literacy and numeracy skills.
The Government has stated that the increase in new Apprenticeships will help improve proficiency in literacy and numeracy, and obviously there are many benefits to Apprenticeships in terms of helping young people into employment. However, the problem is that Apprenticeships aren’t suitable for everyone. For example, a significant section of the labour market is made up of older workers with families to support. An additional problem is that proficiency in English and maths is required by a number of Apprenticeships, so workers with existing poor skills wouldn’t get a place.
Therefore, there needs to be more English and maths training for adults in the workplace in order to improve their basic skills without impacting on their day jobs. Learning in the workplace is vital to the performance of businesses, which ultimately contributes to a more productive workforce. This is also likely to result in increased motivation among employees as they’ll be learning while they earn.
We’d like to see some plans from the government on what they’ll do to improve basic skills in order to contribute towards productivity. While we fully support the drive towards more Apprenticeships, this simply won’t be enough to solve the issue so we’d welcome an increased focus on these highly important ‘soft’ skills. It’s vital to ensure that the older members of the workforce are not forgotten, and to avoid the creation of a generational gap between older employees and young people entering the workforce.
