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.
We need a more agile skills system that is able to respond quickly to changing needs
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.