The announcement that the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, will deliver an emergency mini-budget in July is a sensible move, given how much has changed since his first budget in early March.
It’s also potentially good news for colleges as it becomes increasingly clear that skills, education and training are key to the economic recovery and that this government seems to understand that. The new normal in every sector will look different to before, and we must not forget just how weak our labour market was in many key sectors of the economy before the Covid-19 crisis.
Pre-crisis, hard-to-fill vacancies were an increasing concern in health, social care, construction, engineering, digital, manufacturing, sales and procurement. Many businesses were struggling to find people, with Brexit worries reducing the numbers of skilled EU nationals, particularly at intermediate and higher level in many technical areas. That has not changed, and despite the likely very high unemployment, many of those jobs will not be filled because of skills shortages and gaps.
The chancellor understood all of this when he delivered his first budget in March, promising to invest £3 billion in a new national skills fund and half that on college capital. Those two funds must not be lost in the turmoil of this crisis, because both address long-term underlying weaknesses in our post-16 skills and education system that have not gone away.
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We’ll be publishing our recovery plan next week with detailed proposals to help the chancellor target investment in this area. Our plan will set out the proposals we have been working with officials on over the past two months as we support them to get this right. We have identified four headline challenges that need to be addressed in any spending plans:
- More young people aged between 16 and 25 needing college places due to high unemployment and being crowded out of jobs.
- A large cohort of young people needing support to catch up on learning after several months of lockdown.
- A shortage of apprenticeship places for new recruits and the likelihood of large numbers of existing apprentices being made redundant.
- Large numbers of adults requiring training to help them move from the sectors in most difficulties into those which might expand or recover more quickly and the emergence again of hard-to-fill vacancies in vital recovery sectors despite high unemployment.
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Our proposals are practical, simple and urgently needed. We start with a September promise in which we want to ensure that every 16- to 19-year-old has a funded place in education and that college and school “leavers” are provided with a flexible programme and some maintenance support to allow them to stay in education for an extra year.
For those young people moving into college from school at 16 or those continuing their studies, we will make the case for additional resources to make up for their lost learning. Experience shows that young people, particularly those with lower levels of qualifications, are more at risk of long-term disadvantage from recessions than anyone else. Targeted support this September to catch up is a wise investment that will save billions over the coming years and show that this government really does want to level up.
We will propose an extension of the national retraining scheme to provide resources to colleges to help those in furlough. This will offer those being made redundant access to intensive support, advice and training to move quickly into the jobs which are likely to be available in sectors like health and social care, as well as more niche roles in food manufacturing, transport and logistics.
We’ll be urging the chancellor to bring forward the national skills fund to support adults with modular education at levels 3, 4 and 5, which will help them progress at work or find new jobs. There will be some who see this as a luxury, but with the underlying weakness pre-Covid of the labour market in these intermediate and higher-level technical skills, we need urgent action if we want to avoid the terrible scenarios of lots of hard-to-fill vacancies at a time of high unemployment.
We also want the chancellor to release a modest amount, say £75 million, of the £1.5 billion capital fund announced in March to support colleges. This will pay for the urgent adaptations, modifications and digital investments they will need to make to ensure that every college student can study, learn and succeed in the next academic year. Or simply ask the Department for Education to dip into its £4 billion capital fund, which might be easier and quicker.
Our recovery plan is focused on making sure that young people and adults have the best opportunities, in every community, to help them cope with this crisis. It will target support where it is most needed, and it will enable colleges to help more people to succeed despite the challenges of what looks likely to be a deep recession with high levels of unemployment.
We will be urging the chancellor and the prime minister to remember their pre-crisis commitments to colleges and to technical education and skills. And to invest now to “level up” and to support the people and communities in the seats they won in the North and the Midlands at last year’s general election. I’m sure they will remember, and I’m optimistic that the investment will follow in what needs to be a skills, education and training recovery.
David Hughes is chief executive of the Association of Colleges
