City & Guilds Director-General Chris Jones responds to DIUS announcement of £158 funding

In response to DIUS’ recent announcement that it will fund pre-employment training and careers advice to the tune of £158 million, Chris Jones Director-General of City & Guilds commented:

City & Guilds applauds the Government’s recent announcement of a £158 million fund to help people who have lost, or fear losing, their jobs in the current downturn. 

We particularly support the increased provision for careers advice and focus on adult training – these are areas which have been neglected for too long with a serious impact on our competitiveness as a nation. 

With unemployment figures rising to the highest level since 1997 and job losses announced daily, the current economic downturn poses huge challenges for the UK and the stakes couldn’t be higher for the Government to get it right.

The skills problems we face however, are not solely due to the recession; demographic changes and the rise of new economic powers have also taken their toll.

Today, more than one third of adults do not hold the equivalent of a basic school-leaving qualification; we have an ageing population and, we are in danger losing the skills race as the balance of economic power shifts eastwards. To meet these challenges, we urge the Government to ensure that new funding arrangements are targeted at all adults looking to retrain or up-skill, not just those affected by the job cuts.

New funding arrangements must encompass the millions of long-term economically inactive people, including carers, stay at home parents and the sick, who often have lower skills levels than those in recently in work and may require up-skilling to meet employer demands.

The Government is moving in the right direction with an extension of pre-training and support services. The key to success will be ensuring solutions are bespoke and inclusive; too often in the past access to training has been limited by the use of a too rigid set of policies.

We commend the new initiative for employers to access free support for training for new staff who have been unemployed and, claiming benefits. We especially welcome the funding support for a more flexible range of learning options. City & Guilds supports this by continuing to ensure that our offer meets a diverse range of needs from basic literacy and numeracy to general employability and specific technical skills.  

The City & Guilds Centre for Skills Development, which conducts research and policy development for skills internationally, further calls upon the Government to invest more time in listening closely to the specific needs of employers within different sectors.

A one-size-fits-all approach to funding and developing the UK's skills base is not sufficient to meet the unique challenges facing sectors as diverse as, for example, social care, catering and construction. More must be done to understand the needs and concerns of practitioners, without whom no boost to funding could ever tackle the problems the Government aims to solve. To that end, the Centre for Skills Development has conducted round-table discussions with leading practitioners within the social care, catering and construction sectors, aiming better to understand their needs, and to help to identify and share best practice. We urge DIUS to consider the Centre for Skills Development's findings when they are published in mid-January. The Centre will provide a copy of its final report to the Secretary of State.

As DIUS moves to establish the new national Careers Advice Service for 2010, City & Guilds calls on the Government to ensure that it is a responsive service that serves us beyond these times.

According to research conducted for City & Guilds in November, a legacy of stop-start and inadequate careers advice has left one in five of us needing to retrain or re-skill. The economic downturn is set to compound this further as employees need to adapt their skills to the changing needs of businesses and the labour market.

Future careers advice must do three things. First, it must be a truly lifelong service, focused on people of all ages, not just the young at the start of their careers. This is a huge priority given our aging population and current economic pressures.

Second, it needs to be genuinely impartial and focused on individuals’ needs. And third, it must be truly universal and appealing. We need careers advice people can turn to whatever their circumstances. We must not stigmatise careers advice by suggesting it is only for certain groups, like those out of work.

Without high quality careers advice, provided by well-informed organisations able to tailor their support to individual needs and reflect expertly the way the economy’s skill demands are developing, the population will be less well-prepared to adapt than the country needs them to be.