Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what steps he is taking to ensure the availability of digital marketing skills to businesses.

Through the 3-year Help to Grow: Digital scheme, a learning platform to help SMEs understand their technology needs and successfully adopt them into their business will be created, alongside support for eligible SMEs to receive a voucher worth up to £5000 and providing a 50% discount on e-commerce software, as well as CRM and accounting technology.

The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport continues to support Digital Boost which is providing much-needed digital support for small businesses and charities in the UK that have been impacted by the Covid-19 crisis. The platform is building a community of skilled digital expert volunteers, who are providing free one-to-one mentoring to small businesses and charities to help them improve their digital capability, build sustainable incomes through digital channels, and stay competitive during the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond. Digital Boost is also providing free workshops, courses and content on all topics of digitisation to help small businesses and charities understand digital better. Digital Boost has conducted more than 2800 mentoring sessions on digital marketing related topics. They have also held many workshops on these topics, attracting more than 500 participants.

Digital skills are as important to employability and participation in society as English and maths, yet an estimated one in five adults lack basic digital skills.

In order to address this, from August 2020, alongside the existing legal entitlements to English and maths, the Department for Education introduced a new digital entitlement for adults with no or low digital skills to undertake specified digital qualifications, up to Level 1, free of charge. We also support the provision of basic digital skills training for adults in community settings through the Adult Education Budget.

The Government is also investing £138 million to fund in-demand technical courses for adults, and to expand the employer-led bootcamp training model, in high value areas such as digital and technical skills. The £138 million investment will come from the £2.5 billion National Skills Fund, and will include £95 million funding for a new Level 3 adult offer and £43 million for Skills Bootcamps.

The Level 3 adult offer, available from April 2021, will support any adult aged 24 and over, who wants to achieve their first full level 3 qualification to access around 400 fully funded courses. The offer includes a range of qualifications that are valuable across the economy in multiple sectors. The qualifications list currently includes 33 digital qualifications in areas such as cyber security, coding, network architecture, systems support, and aspects of digital design for the creative industries. We will keep this list under review to ensure it adapts to the changing needs of the economy.

Complementing the Level 3 adult offer, Skills Bootcamps offer free, flexible courses of up to 16 weeks, giving people the opportunity to build up specific skills and fast-track to an interview with a local employer. Skills Bootcamps offer digital skills training in areas such as software development, digital marketing and data analytics, and also technical skills training. We have introduced the Skills Bootcamps in six local areas so far, and we are investing a further £43 million from the National Skills Fund to extend them across England.

We have also introduced the Skills Toolkit, an online platform providing free courses to help individuals build the skills that are most sought after by employers. People can now choose from over 70 courses, covering digital and coding, adult numeracy, employability and work readiness skills, which have been identified as the skills employers need the most. These courses will help people stay in work, or take up new jobs and opportunities.