The importance of lifelong learning and reskilling

In the News

The Learning and Work Institute’s Lifelong Learning Week took place earlier this month, highlighting the importance of lifelong learning and encouraging providers to increase opportunities for lifelong learning. This comes after the Chancellor announced in his Autumn budget a new £560 million ‘Multiply’ programme, whereby all areas of the UK, from Spring 2022, will be able to access funding for programmes to provide free maths courses. Such efforts are considered part of the Government’s “skills revolution” and Rishi Sunak has recently stated: “Our future economic success depends not just on the education we give to our children but the lifelong learning we offer to adults… giving people the skills they need to earn more and get on in life”.

Why is lifelong learning so important?

The importance of lifelong learning and people’s ability to ‘reskill’ was reinforced by the pandemic, according to Andreas Schleicher. It created huge demands for just-in-time adult learning, with people losing jobs in one sector and finding a new job in another, underlining lifelong learning’s role in solving the skills gaps many countries suffer from, especially the UK.

Lifelong learning also has the potential to deliver the goal of levelling up, according to a report by the ResPublica Lifelong Education Commission, chaired by former Universities Minister Chris Skidmore. This is echoed by Dr Diana Beach, a member of the Lifelong Learning Commission, who feels that in London especially, lifelong learning can help people “to skill, upskill, and reskill into work”. She feels that while many may holder a HE qualification, technological change may have made their skills redundant, and as London adopts a ‘green agenda’ the need for ‘green’ skills to retrofit the city’s estates and infrastructure will grow.

Are currents efforts to improve lifelong learning provision enough?

Following the announcement of the new Multiply programme, along with other increases in spending for education, reaction was somewhat mixed:

• “This [investment] only restores some of the previous cuts and so won’t be enough to transform Britain into a skills superpower – Stephan Evans, Learning and Work Institute

• “Pleased there is a new programme to tackle… poor numeracy. However, maths is only one part of the challenge” – Simon Parkinson, Workers Educational Association

• “We need more clarity over whether the… commitments to the sector are new, or merely a rehash of funding that was already allocated” – Kirstie Donnelly, City & Guilds Group

Kirstie Donnelly spoke further on the need for more short-term and modular digital learning opportunities “to meet the needs of adults who will need to constantly upskill and reskill over five-decade careers”, and a number of groups, led by the Market Research Society (MRS), called for the Government to fund specific industry-led qualifications, with MRS CEO Jane Frost stating “reskilling older workers is vital”.

Interview

For the November edition of The Mark, we spoke to Emily Jones, Head of Research at the Learning and Work Institute, about the importance of lifelong learning, whether the Chancellor’s recent fiscal commitments are enough, and what measures are needed to further develop lifelong learning provision.

Why is the provision of lifelong learning so important?

It is important at multiple levels. Obviously it's important for individuals, in terms of being able to access and progress in work. The pandemic, but also Brexit, has shown the importance for people to be flexible and mobile around the labour market and to make sure they are resilient to economic changes.

It’s also about changes to work, advances in technology and automation. People are working longer; you don't just have one career anymore. So I think making sure that you've got those opportunities throughout your life, to make sure your skills are current and relevant and then be able to change careers. That then has benefits for employers, making sure they have access to a skilled workforce, and for the wider economy. We've heard a lot from the Government wanting a high wage, high productivity economy. If we're going to get that, we need to invest in lifelong learning.

What is it that has held people back from lifelong learning and the means to re-skill that could have improved productivity and skills in the past?

Barriers to learning are longstanding issues, not new problems. Our annual Adult Participation in Learning Survey, which we’ve run for the last 25 years, enables us to see who's most or least likely to learn, their motivations and what the barriers are. While evidence shows that time and cost are the main barriers to learning – having to balance work and caring responsibilities, course costs, childcare and travel – for those least likely to take part, the problem is dispositional or attitudinal.

They may have had negative experiences of education; be unaware of opportunities; feel too old to learn or simply not have the confidence. To engage more adults in lifelong learning, we need to promote the value of learning and change some of those perceptions. Removing barriers is vital, but you can't just assume that if you remove all barriers that somehow people will just turn up. You have to give them a reason to think that learning could make a difference.

Do you feel that the Chancellor’s fiscal commitments to the Skills and Training sector, outlined in the recent spending review, are enough to bring about a permanent boost in lifelong learning?

The investment is really welcome, especially as the adult education budget has effectively been halved over the last decade, leading adult participation in learning to plummet. L&W has previously argued for an extra £1.9 billion per year, so I would say the Chancellor’s budget only gets us part way there.

How this money is invested is just as important. The Government's new Multiply Programme focuses on numeracy skills and that's greatly needed. But it's one of many programmes the Government has announced, and we need to know both if we are investing in the right places, and who specifically we are targeting.

Apprenticeships are a great example of this. With reforms from 2015, apprenticeships were seen as the answer to youth transition into the labour market and aiding social mobility, but also about workforce up-skilling. Those are big, but also very different challenges, and expecting one programme to fix that is difficult.

Investment gets us part way there, but we also need a strategy. I think there’s an opportunity with a new secretary of state for reviews to ensure we have coherency and a clear strategy.

What further measures are there that you feel could broaden provision even further?

Exploring different measures is important, but you first have to have that strategy, otherwise you risk creating programme after programme. It's about looking at who is participating and who isn't, because if lifelong learning is going to address social justice, social mobility and levelling up, then we need to look at who is missing out and what it is they need.

With the national skills fund for example, it’s great to see the level 3 entitlement. But we need to think about what the level 2 route through is as well, as not everybody would be able to start at a level 3. We need to make sure those pathways are there.

Rather than just multiplying the number of programmes, we need to look at where the gaps are at the moment, and develop a clear strategy to address them.

How should any expanded provision be delivered? Through FE colleges? Should universities become more involved? Could businesses provide specific 'adult apprenticeships' for those looking to reskill?

It's not about one part of the system growing more than others. The adult education sector is messy; that also means there's flexibility in the system. We should support the full range of providers, and if anyone says one type of provider should get more expansion than another, they're probably biased.

At a local level, providers should be encouraged to collaborate and play to their strengths. This came through the Skills for Jobs white paper earlier this year we are getting some of the way there with the strategic development fund, the college business centres, and the local skills improvement plans. Connecting with employers too, which I think is really important. As an organisation, we are really interested in understanding what works. What makes these local partnerships work and how do you share that best practice?

On apprenticeships, we've seen greater adult take-up driven in part by the levy and having an employer-led system. It's absolutely rational that employers would use that money to upskill their workforce, but how do we use them to think about re-training and re-skilling? On the flipside, we also need to think about how we get more young people into apprenticeships too.

Opinion

In the first of two opinions for the November edition of The Mark, Andreas Schleicher, Director for the Directorate of Education and Skills and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the Secretary-General at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), argues we need to identify the right skills to promote for lifelong learning, ensuring not just people, but the wider economy, will benefit.

Lifelong Education is Essential in the Digital Age

These days we are finding out that we need to update our vaccination to win the fight against Coronavirus. The need to update our skills is no less urgent if we want to win the race with technology. Modern labour markets will evaluate us less and less by the degrees we once obtained and more and more by what we can do and our capacity to learn, unlearn and relearn when the context changes. We used to learn to do the work, now learning is the work.

To succeed with converting education into better jobs and lives, we need to better understand what those skills are that drive outcomes, ensure that the right skill mix is being learned at the right moment, and help economies extract good value from those skills. We also know that learning is far more effective if the world of learning and the world of work are integrated. Compared to purely government-designed curricula taught exclusively in educational institutions, learning at the workplace helps people to develop “hard” skills on modern equipment, and “soft” skills such as teamwork, communication, and negotiation through real-world experience. Hands-on workplace training is also an effective way to motivate disengaged adults to re-engage with education.

A wide spectrum of full- or part-time lifelong-learning activities needs to be available to address the skills gap: from work-related employee training, formal education for adults, second-chance courses to obtain a minimum qualification or basic literacy and numeracy skills, language training for immigrants, and labour-market training programs for job-seekers, to learning activities for self-improvement or leisure. There is much that can be done to dismantle barriers to participation in continued education and training: 

First, making the returns on lifelong learning more transparent can help to increase the motivation of users to invest in adult education and training. Governments can provide better information about the economic benefits (including wages net of taxes, employment and productivity) and noneconomic benefits (including self-esteem and increased social interaction) of adult learning.

Second, less-educated individuals tend to be less aware of learning opportunities. A combination of easily searchable, up-to-date online information and personal guidance to help individuals define their own training needs and identify the appropriate programs is needed, as is information about possible funding sources.

Third, clear certification of learning outcomes and recognition of nonformal learning are also incentives for training. Transparent standards, embedded in a framework of national qualifications, should be developed alongside reliable assessment procedures. Recognition of prior learning can also reduce the time needed to obtain a certain qualification and thus the cost of foregone earnings.

And not least, it is important to ensure that programs are relevant to users and are flexible enough, both in content and in how they are delivered to adapt to adults’ needs.

Opinion

The November edition’s second opinion comes from Kirstie Donnelly, Chief Executive of the City & Guilds Group, who argues the recent budget did not go far enough on the road to creating sustainable adult learning for the future.

The Urgent Need for Lifelong Learning and Flexibility

Lifelong learning has arguably never been more important than it is today. People leaving education today will most likely be working for the next five decades and will need to retrain throughout their careers to stay abreast of changing skills needs.

There are huge disruptors at play that are set to radically reshape the labour market, such as the need for ‘green skills’ and Artificial Intelligence. It’s perhaps no wonder then that Chancellor Rishi Sunak recently stated that the future economic success of the country depends on “the lifelong learning we offer to adults”.

The autumn budget did not go far enough to fund the creation of a long term sustainable lifelong learning skills system needed to upskill and reskill potentially tens of millions of adults in the decades ahead. Particularly when you consider the impact of over a decade of chronic underfunding in the Further Education sector and the decimation of the numbers of part time learners.

Currently, our education system is geared towards large training interventions that take people out of work for months or even years of classroom-based study. To meet our future skills needs we need more flexible modular study programmes, available either in blended learning formats or entirely online so that people can study around their other life commitments.

As skills needs continue to evolve at lightning speed in the decades ahead, we need a more agile skills system that is able to respond quickly to changing needs. To allow this to happen, more targeted Government funding will be needed to substantially overhaul the post-18 education and training system. Alongside greater investment in online learning and assessment solutions to create more blended solutions that can adapt where, when and how people need to learn.

We will undoubtedly also need employers to invest more in the ongoing training of their employees in the future. City & Guilds collaborated with the CBI on a piece of research in 2018 that proposed a possible solution, that the apprenticeship levy become a skills levy with more paid into the pot by a larger number of employers, but with much greater flexibility about the types of training that is funded, to allow employers to meet their ongoing and emerging skills needs.

We also need to help people realise the benefit of paying for their own training. In 2020, City & Guilds’ Skills Index found that only six per cent of people in the UK felt that they should be responsible for funding their own workplace study despite almost two thirds of people (61 per cent) stating that they did not believe they had the skills they needed to do their job over the next five years.

In essence, we are going to face significant changes in how often we need to reskill, how we fund adult education and indeed how we will access skills over the next decade. It’s vital that we are bold and take this opportunity to radically reshape our skills education system in the years ahead for a long-term sustainable impact.