The Skills for Jobs White Paper might not be everything the sector would have wanted but there is a lot to like about it and we need to get behind it. It has the potential to be transformational in terms of how we see education, not as something we do and then leave behind but as something that continues throughout our lives. 

However, one element needs to be impressed upon the Department for Education. We need a light touch from the centre so individual colleges can do what we do best, connecting policy to the needs of our local economies.

Colleges are ideally placed at the heart of their communities as the vital link between employers and learners, whatever their age, experience and existing qualifications.  That connection to the areas they serve needs to be leveraged to the highest possible degree. Skills in great need in Sunderland may be much less relevant in Stoke or Southampton. 

Need to know: The key proposals from the Skills for Jobs White Paper

Background: Boris Johnson to announce ‘Lifetime Skills Guarantee’

News: Third of adults ‘worry about a second career’

It is vital that there is flexibility built into the Lifetime Skills Guarantee so that each provider can gauge the needs of local people and businesses.

FE White Paper: Making the most of the Lifetime Skills Guarantee

At Milton Keynes College, we’ve fed back via the Association of Colleges that there must be some room for manoeuvre to meet local conditions. That’s not to say that there mustn’t be a list prescribed from Whitehall but it needs to be agile and open to local nuance. These days, local employment markets are more dynamic than ever before and none of us can be sure of the requirements of a post-Covid world, nor indeed of how quickly those requirements will transform and change in any particular area. In these changing times, it’s not always even possible to accurately predict the skills that will definitely be most in need in six months or a year. Flexibility will be critical to maximise the long-term return on investment.

We hope very much that there will be a place for credit-based learning. If we can tell adults that they can take a course now and another later to give them flexibility in the balance between work and study, the idea of retraining may not seem so daunting. The inclusion agenda cannot be neglected either. We need to think about where we focus investment in terms not only of sectors but geographical wards, socioeconomic and ethnic groups and so on. Levelling up should not just be about north and south but about neighbourhoods in towns and cities, about women, about people with disabilities; we need to focus on every element of disadvantage - something only possible with a thorough level of local knowledge unavailable in Westminster.

Making this work will rely heavily on having accurate data. If we go to government saying, “We know our areas, so leave it to us,” we have to be able to back that up with statistical analysis. Relying on anecdote and what we believe the conditions are in our areas is far too great a risk to take. Success will largely depend on communication.  We have to make sure that those people who might have previously been put off retraining on grounds of cost realise the new possibilities that the White Paper proposes.

One element which we strongly hope will be revisited is the delay in the introduction of the Lifelong Loan scheme, currently not scheduled to come into effect until 2025. The need for adults to retrain and reskill is urgent and most definitely current. There will be people for whom such financial backing will be the difference between them feeling able to take up a course or study or not.  It’s questionable whether they and the economy can wait four years for them to be able to do so. 

In the wake of Covid and the unimaginable disruption that will bring to so many business and industrial sectors, we face both enormous risk and equal opportunity. As college leaders, we need to be sure that we’re right on top of what is really happening around us and adapt the curriculum to meet those needs. The employment futures of an entire generation may depend on it.

Julie Mills is the chief executive and group principal of Milton Keynes College