Schools have been persistently in the front row of the coronavirus narrative for weeks – controversies about how safe they were to reopen and when, and now a £1bn government catch up on teaching scheme announced for young people, including a subsidised tutorial scheme for the most disadvantaged. There are genuine dilemmas, but also fears and recrimination – the more potent when, what, and how to decide confronts millions of individual families directly.

Much is said, quite rightly, about the danger of a lost generation of school leavers. Statistics show more than three-quarters of a million 16- to 24-year-olds as not in employment, education or training between January and March. That number could become far worse from exams not taken or grades not given, apprenticeships not completed, or inadequate career advice on the back of the pandemic lockdown. We know already from figures just released that over 600,000 more people went off payroll between March and May.

Several generations

It’s not just one generation we risk losing, but several. The impact of coronavirus risks rippling through the skills and economic life chances of people from their late 20s to their late 60s. The stark statistic of a 20 per cent shrinkage in the UK economic output in April, the millions of people still furloughed and the OECD prediction of 11.5 per cent fall in UK national income by the end of 2020 – plus the human tragedy of nearly 50,000 coronavirus deaths – as Shakespeare says in Macbeth: "When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions."

That is precisely why we need the fightback for jobs and skills to operate right across the age spectrum – and why, incidentally, the government’s disgraceful failure so far to come up with a catch-up package for the FE and sixth-form colleges sector to match the one given to schools is so concerning.

Having been a shadow minister covering these areas for most of the past decade and challenging governments over them, I know those weaknesses remain formidable: too many policy swerves and changes in the machinery of government hampering preparation for new jobs and skills for the 2020s. There has been too little progress on basic skills deficits including adult literacy and numeracy, leaving millions of workers still languishing with poor productivity.

There’s also the failure to support adequately the smaller businesses and training providers who deliver nearly 70 per cent of all apprenticeships. Even now at the height of the current crisis, the Department for Education (DfE) is excluding providers with levy-funded apprentices from its coronavirus relief scheme.

As for FE colleges – government cuts of nearly £3 billion to their budgets have still not been fully reversed. The unit of funding in FE for adult learners has not increased since 2013 while in higher education, the tripling of tuition fees in 2012 has left a million fewer adult learners studying in England and a trail of closed adult education departments in many universities. It has also created severe challenges for FE colleges offering HE courses, the Open University, WEA and others.

We need to examine critically the feasibility of the apprenticeship guarantee for all 16- to 24-year-olds, which the prime minister has spoken about recently. Mark Dawe, chief executive of the Association of Employment of Learning Providers has been quick to point out the guarantee will only be successful if there is some form of government wage subsidy for the employer to do the skills training, suggesting that it should be at least 50 per cent of the appropriate minimum wage for 16- 24-year-olds. This, of course, should cover existing apprentices at risk as well as new ones taken on.

Andy Westwood, writing in Tes recently, believes any scheme must guarantee an employer would offer an apprentice a job at the end and be tied into a far larger offer with programmes guaranteeing training and employment to adults as well as young people.

Left-behind places

This is crucial. In the eternal tension between demand and supply in the economy, it is not just financial input from the government that matters, but output as well, and most crucially outcome – especially in left-behind places where speedy recovery from the pandemic’s seismic shock will be essential.

The shopping lists range from the Association of College’s £3.5 billion package to support work facing training programmes in colleges for both adults and young people, through to AELP’s £8.5 billion programme adding support for SME non-levy-payers, booster support for 16- to18-year-olds and doubling adult education budgets.

These demand not just pragmatic fixes now, but also being linked into a comprehensive skills approach that embodies a central principle of progression in education and skills throughout the 2020s.

That progression must recognise, given the ever-accelerating changes of the digital world and automation, reskilling and retraining, that targeting generic skills as well as bespoke ones will not be luxuries but necessities, not just for employers but for the future jobs and careers of the people they currently employ (remembering that 3.5 million people are already self-employed).

The emphasis on "progression, progression, progression" is, for example, a critical factor in the pipeline for bringing people of all ages into the health and social care sectors, often starting with level 2 apprenticeships. The dramatic decline in level 2s overall, (nearly 40 per cent since the introduction of the apprenticeship levy) risks threatening not just social mobility, but those very sectors on whom we have depended, above all the NHS, throughout the pandemic.

These issues were central to much of the work of the independent Lifelong Learning Commission I took forward and co-ordinated and whose report and recommendations to the Labour party were published last November.

Its 14 commissioners from the worlds of HE, FE and skills cut through the traditional silos to propose a universal, publicly funded right to learn through life (underpinned by an entitlement up to fully funded level 3 provision alongside the equivalent of 6 years publicly funded credits at level 4 and above) as well as developing a right to paid time off to train and reskill.

Buttressing this would be a national information advice and training careers service for all ages, with means-tested maintenance support for adults to access learning. Crucially, the commission proposed embedding progression in learning structures able to accredit specific as well as enabling skills, formal and informal training – modelled on much of how the Open University operates.

The urgent chorus of calls for action on ministers from the FE and skills sector to act now echoes some of the commission‘s proposals – including entitlements to free provision to level 3, support for adults to do retraining schemes, and bursary schemes for young people in FE.

We also need to look at and learn from, as the commission suggested, what is going on already in the other nations of the UK – Scotland’s Learning Accounts, the continuation of grant funding in Northern Ireland, and at what the Welsh government has been doing since March working closely with the Welsh TUC and Union Learning Fund to deliver immediate support.

Responses to Covid-19 need to prioritise existing unequal skills distribution and geographic cold spots – such as the 27 per cent decline in people accessing higher education in coastal towns since 2011. City and Guilds report The Missing Millions spelled out starkly our weak labour market on the eve of the pandemic.

It is no surprise, therefore, that elected mayors and combined authorities across England are clamouring for extended powers and a strategic role in delivering any economic stimulus forthcoming from now on.

We must give hope to the hundreds of thousands of people who have been affected by the pandemic and who will need to reskill, retrain, change track and be rejuvenated, personally as well as economically

The proposals and analyses from the Lifelong Learning Commission offer a toolkit now to examine what could be done and a road map to pilot some of those ideas locally. They echo the words Abraham Lincoln put to Congress in 1862: "As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew."

Gordon Marsden was Labour's shadow minister for skills, further and higher education from 2015 to 2019