National Retraining Scheme

(asked on 29th June 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what assessment he has made of the test phase of the National Retraining Programme, announced in October 2019.


Answered by
Gillian Keegan Portrait
Gillian Keegan
Secretary of State for Education
This question was answered on 7th July 2020

The aim of the National Retraining Scheme is to help prepare adults for future changes to the economy, including those brought about by automation, and help them retrain into better jobs.

We have taken a user centred, test and learn approach to developing the National Retraining Scheme, starting small and developing products iteratively. Through this approach we have used a small proportion of the initial multi-year £100 million investment which started in financial year 2019-20 to develop the scheme, including exploring online training and in-work technical training alongside testing the first part of the scheme, Get Help to Retrain.

To date, nearly 2000 users have accessed Get Help to Retrain. The digital service helps users to understand their current skills, explore alternative occupations that they could do and sign up to the training they need to access opportunities for a broad range of good jobs.

Alongside developing Get Help to Retrain, we have undertaken extensive user research and testing whilst developing the National Retraining Scheme. This research and the pilots we have conducted will provide valuable evidence about how we can support adults and employers and will help inform the design of future adult skills provision.

We are continuing to explore the relationship between the National Retraining Scheme, the recently announced £2.5 billion National Skills Fund and other recent reforms to adult skills provision and funding. We will provide a further update in the next Spending Review.

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