« In Praise of the Heart of Birmingham Health Trust | Home | New Trouble in the Balkans? »
Training for Adults
By Andy | November 19, 2007
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been spending some time pondering the announcement, at the end of last, week about the expansion of training programmes.
I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the “British Jobs for British people” notion and I see that this has been enough for some people to write off the initiative. But this new plan may well be very significant indeed.
One of the puzzling thing about our government’s training policy has been its obsession with young people. For the last ten years it has been clear that there are major challenges in re-skilling and up-skilling the older workforce. Yet every training and vocational initiative concentrated on the under 25s even when the demographics in many areas were showing that this was less and less an issue.
The Treasury (and therefore Gordon Brown) were always supposed to be behind this youth-centered approach. As a result provision for adults has just dwindled away. Much expensive vocation provision dried up, in areas such as building which demands expensive practical support; not everything can be delivered in a reasonably cheap classroom setting. And an insistence on Accredited VQ training meant that many unemployed and low paid people couldn’t take advantage of targeted courses that would have un-locked work. For example, IT programmes in Network Management and the like can almost guarantee a job. These courses tend to be run by the major companies who distribute the products - Adobe/Novell, etc. They are expensive courses, well beyond the reach of many people. Many LSCs and Colleges have wanted to embrace this worl but have found their regime too tightly defined.
The new initiative promises to open up a greater range of training opportunities for adults, and this must be applauded. Frustratingly No.10 mya have used the British] jobs spin, but it may just be that with this policy we are seeing the first fruits of bringing John Denham back into government. Like Johnson, Denham seems to be a politician that is good as actually governing rather than spinning or simply campaigning. We need more like him.
The policy also seems to recognise that we can’t rely on eastern labour to fill many of our skilled jobs. There are already signs that skilled workers are either returning home or thinking about doing so. After all, Europe’s most dramatic growth is in the East. Despite everything that tabloids say Polish plumbers would quite like to be able to work in Poland.
We need far more flexibility and innovation in adult training. we need to be able to help people meet local labour markets needs and, also, to help them cope with service sector demands. And these days it is probably more important to help people develop their own trades and business rather than simply hope than manufacturing will return with a vengeance.
I hope that these are the issues that the new policies are designed to tackle. But I’m not sure, not least, because we seem to obscure things so much with such bizarre spin.
Denham is a breath of fresh air. But I wonder whether he shouldn’t have been given the old Education and Training portfolio, rather than giving him the low-key part of the new, split department.
Still, I think this is good news.
Topics: Education |
