Adult education and skills training must undergo a huge transformation to tackle the looming unemployment spike, the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) has said.
A report published by the CSJ today, The long game: how to reboot skills training for disadvantaged adults, warns that Britain’s workers with the lowest skills face a “dire future” as a result of the impending recession.
There are currently 8.4 million people on furlough in the UK - and, in the report, the CSJ warns that many will have no job to return to.
To mitigate against this, the report calls for community learning centres to be revitalised and for extra funding to boost levels of qualifications, as well as improved access to part-time higher learning and a tax break for employers who invest in low-skilled workers.
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The report is being backed by the chair of the Education Select Committee, Robert Halfon, who wrote the foreword.
In it, he said: “We are not doing enough specifically for disadvantaged individuals. Adult training, it seems, is a higher earner’s game. Those who might benefit most from training are the least likely to be doing it. Almost half of adults from the lowest socioeconomic groups have not received any training at all since they left education.
“Ultimately, what we have to ask ourselves is this: do we want to live in a society in which today’s divisions escalate because people who have the most to gain from adult learning continue to be the least likely to access it? Or do we want to build something else? A society in which people have the tools to adapt and prosper in the face of adversity.”
The decrease in adult education
In 2019, just 33 per cent of adults surveyed in the Adult Participation in Learning Survey, were engaged in any form of learning. This is the lowest level recorded in the history of the survey, which began in 1996. The number of adults enrolling in part-time higher education has fallen by 70 per cent since 2009-10.
And yet the CSJ report states that one in four UK workers are underqualified for their jobs, making Britain’s rate of under qualification one of the highest among OECD countries.
According to the report, data published by the Department for Education shows that adults aged between 19 and 64 in England who are educated to level 3 are almost 50 per cent more likely to be unemployed than those who are educated to level 4 and above.
While 87.7 per cent of graduates aged between 16 and 64 who lived in England are employed, the figure for non-graduates is 71.6 per cent.
Andy Cook, chief executive of the CSJ, said that the people left worse off by the effect of the coronavirus pandemic are those on low salaries, with few educational qualifications.
He said: “We must help our lowest-skilled workers through private and public sector initiatives. Long term, this would reduce many such catastrophes, and produce a healthy tax return for the government if it can make that initial investment in the British workforce.
“The economy after Covid-19 may look very different to how it does now. When the government drafts policy to improve lifelong learning for adults, and as employers take our recommendations on board, we urge them to factor in the contribution currently low-skilled workers can make to emerging industries.
“If anything, the value key workers have added during this pandemic has shown that all the more.”
