If there was one memorable moment to take from the party conference fringe events this year, it came in the form of an exasperated outburst from a former business secretary.

At Labour’s annual gathering in Liverpool, John Denham told delegates that “a special place was reserved in hell for those involved in skills policy”.

While the room erupted in laughter, it came as a salutary reminder to those of us that toil away in the sector every day, just how elusive a more heavenly state of affairs has become. For all the positive things happening in skills world these days, the bigger picture looks gloomier.

Ten years on from the financial crisis, average wages have stagnated. The so-called productivity puzzle means we have reached almost full employment, while living standards continue to feel the squeeze.

‘Battleground around skills policy’

Deal or no deal Brexit, it won’t change the fact employers have become addicted to cheap labour and low skills in recent years, as investment in training has been steadily in decline.

Commons Education Select Committee member, Labour’s Lucy Powell, referred to this challenge as the need for more “placed-based” and “inclusive growth” while telling her audience, “only Estonia and Greece have more graduates in non-graduate employment than Britain does.”

Better skills, for both those joining and currently in the workforce, are the key to higher productivity - and therefore rising living standards. That much all politicians can agree.

What the Labour and Conservative tribal gatherings showed, however, is that the battleground around skills policy is, as ever, about the means, rather than the ends. The outcome, they can all agree, is a world-class education and training system the envy of other countries. But how we get there remains divided along some very stark party-political lines.

Angela Rayner, the shadow secretary of state for education, thundered from the main platform that the answer lay in the nationalisation of learning, from cradle to grave. Schools would be brought back under democratic control, and a new National Education Service, under a future Labour government, would pursue lifelong learning.

Disappointedly, Rayner said very little about technical education and skills in her speech, instead preferring to outsource all future policy work to her junior colleague, Gordon Marsden. People in the FE sector like Marsden, but he is not seen as a very influential figure in a party now firmly led by Corbyn and McDonnell.

In Birmingham, Damian Hinds, the incumbent secretary of state, gave a teacher-like presentation to the Tory faithful, complete with power-point slides that would not have looked out of place at a management away-day.

As Hinds extolled the virtues of diversity and choice in the state sector, Conservative councillors in the room gave him a more lacklustre response; particularly in his assertion that it would be a retrograde step to return all maintained schools back within local authority control.

In one important sense, Labour and Conservatives are on the same page. Both parties seem to believe that becoming a world-leading education system comes from the top-down, not the bottom up.

‘Scant details’

The argument over structures rages on while improving standards gets relegated to a footnote. At first glance, Labour’s proposed National Education Service, sounds like an attractive solution to the challenges of the fourth industrial revolution.

But scant details are available as to how the party’s flagship education program would work in practice.

At one fringe event, I challenged a panel to describe in just one sentence the underlying principle of the National Education Service, in a similar way to how, at the birth of the NHS, the admiration of the public was won over with the idea of ‘free healthcare at the point of use.’

Only James Frith MP, attempted to provide a proper answer - and even then - struggled to get beyond some of the well-worn clichés about the importance of institutions underpinning continual learning.

One of the liveliest events on the Conservative fringe took place in conversation between the current Commons Education Select Committee chair, Robert Halfon, and Anne Milton, the serving skills minister. The dynamic between these two Conservative colleagues is fascinating. Both know what it is like to do the “best job in government” as Milton never tires of telling her audiences.

It soon became apparent however that they both have very different views about what the role entails.

Halfon, on the left wing of the Tory party, spelt out a more comprehensive agenda to tackle the “march of the robots”. He would merge the inadequate careers enterprise companies and enforce the Baker clause that makes it an offence for schools not to expose their pupils to objective careers advice.

‘Stability needed’

He would introduce an apprenticeship premium for those living in disadvantaged areas as well as push for more degree level apprenticeships.

Milton talked a lot of sense about why we are where we are with the ongoing apprenticeship reforms, including the fresh announcements about the levy. A period of stability was needed. One employer asked Milton why, compared to frameworks, the new apprenticeship standards were taking his provider up to 200 days to enrol a learner.

Others expressed frustration with the Institute for Apprenticeships, which was described as a “bureaucracy wading in treacle.” 

‘The minister seemed to ignore her own advice’

At times on the defensive, Milton claimed it was important to resist the knee-jerk reaction “something must be done” tendency in government and focus instead on gathering the evidence and establishing “causality”. On the issue of qualifications reform, the minister seemed to ignore her own advice.

Asked about her department’s hostile environment towards the awarding sector since the Wolf Review, and the important role vocational qualifications play internationally in achieving quality work-based learning, she said: “There are 13,000 qualifications. Some of them are not worth the paper they are written on and are fraudulent.”

With policy views expressed like that, perhaps John Denham was right after all.

Tom Bewick is chief executive of the Federation of Awarding Bodies