As we progress through the roadmap out of lockdown, many of us our are turning our attention to the economic impacts the pandemic will likely have over the months and years to come. So far, the UK Government’s furlough scheme has, to a large extent, buffered employment levels, with unemployment at 5%. However, the longer-term picture will be markedly different. The crisis has devastated some sectors and places to an extent that a return to pre-pandemic levels of activity is just not going to be possible. Job vacancies are well below 2019 levels, and the Office for Budget Responsibility is forecasting a spike in unemployment of 6.5%by the end of the year. The types of job available to workers, and the skills in demand by employers, are already shifting, partly as a direct result of the pandemic, and partly as we have seen an acceleration of prepandemic trends such as automation, digital consumption and low carbon production. In this context, it is clear that lifelong learning will play a pivotal role through the recovery and beyond. Recognising this, the Government recently set out plans to introduce a new entitlement to training courses, the ‘Lifetime Skills Guarantee’. FromApril this year, the scheme provides free intermediate and higher level training courses to individuals in England who do not hold a qualification at or above level 3 (A-Level equivalent). At theWork Foundation, we have worked in partnership with Totaljobs to understand more about the scheme through analysis of the labour force survey and a series of interviews with employers and training providers. We found that as things stand, more than a million low-paid workers will not be eligible for support through the scheme because they already hold a level 3 qualification, despite the fact they are overwhelmingly likely to benefit from additional training support. This risks compounding a situation where those who would gain the most from learning opportunities find it most difficult to access them. For example, our analysis found that just under a fifth of workers in routine and intermediate roles have taken part in training, compared to just under a third of those in more senior roles between April and June 2019. In addition, take-up rates of existing subsidised training courses indicate that wider work will be needed to address long-standing barriers to participation. The adult education budget already includes a legal entitlement for adults without GCSE English and Maths to access those courses, but take-up for this offer has declined in recent years, with the number of adults aged 19 or above enrolled on level 2 courses falling by over 300,000 between 2011/12 and 2015/2016. Similarly, the number of apprenticeship starts at Level 2 in March/April of this year was 70% less than the same period a year ago. Barriers to accessing lifelong learning opportunities will differ for different worker groups. For example, our analysis found that up to 1.9 million people with children under the age of 16 may struggle to take up training opportunities alongside meeting caring and family responsibilities. In addition, our social security system currently imposes restrictions on training by requiring that people in the Universal Credit all work requirements group are available to work. We estimate this could affect 1.4 million mid-career recipients of Universal Credit who were required to spend 35 hours a week looking for a job in order to access their payments, and more than 300,000 mid-career recipients of Income Support or Jobseekers Allowance were only permitted to undertake a maximum of 16 hours of training per week. As social security caseloads reach record levels, with many experiencing acute financial hardship through the pandemic, it is essential that the benefits system adapts to support people who want to retrain. Furthermore, we found that people who have had continual access to training are more likely to take part in training again. This disparity can lead to a situation where some people feel that training opportunities “aren’t for them”, but are instead meant for people in better paid, more secure or senior roles. Negative experiences at school or college, or stigma associated with low levels of literacy, numeracy or digital skills, can also contribute to this. Our analysis found that more than 7.5 million mid-career workers have not received any training since leaving fulltime education, meaning they have no recent experience of engaging in learning and skills development. A concerted effort to make adult education accessible to a more diverse range of prospective learners will be essential to address this. Recognising the potential role that further education could stand to play through the recovery, the Government recently published the Skills for Jobs White Paper. The paper also proposes giving employers a more central role in developing technical qualifications. In principle, greater employer involvement in the local provision of skills and training is a good thing, but greater employer engagement has been a long-stated policy ambition and questions remain on how this can be meaningfully achieved in practice. To get beneath this, The Work Foundation is engaging with businesses in the low carbon and energy sector in Lancashire – a sector with significant growth potential across the region – to understand more about the skills challenges they face, and what the proposed reforms may mean for them. In the meantime, it will be vital that Government builds on its Lifetime Skills Guarantee, and focuses on better understanding the barriers many workers face to accessing training and learning opportunities, and how it can widen access and participation from those most likely to benefit from them in the future. 44 | MelanieWilkes is InterimHead of Research at theWorkFoundation. The Learning toLevel Up: The roleof skills in tackling job insecurity throughBrexit andCovid-19 report, was co-authored by TrinleyWalker, Rebecca Florisson andMelanieWilkes, in partnershipwith Totaljobs. m.wilkes@lancaster.ac.uk
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