Training: Standards

(asked on 5th July 2021) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to improve communication at a (1) local, and (2) national, level about best practices in the delivery of adult skills.


Answered by
Baroness Berridge Portrait
Baroness Berridge
This question was answered on 19th July 2021

The steps being taken to improve communication at a local and national level about best practices in the delivery of adult skills were outlined in the white paper, Skills for Jobs: Lifelong Learning for Opportunity and Growth, published in January 2021: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/skills-for-jobs-lifelong-learning-for-opportunity-and-growth.

We are trailblazing new employer-led Local Skills Improvement Plans in a small number of areas in the 2021-22 financial year. They will be created by employer representative bodies working closely with further education colleges, other providers and key local stakeholders and will set out the key changes needed in a local area to make technical skills training more responsive to employers’ skills needs. Alongside the trailblazers, we are legislating to put Local Skills Improvement Plans on a statutory footing as part of the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill.

Local Skills Improvement Plans will provide a framework to help colleges and other providers reshape what they offer, to tackle skills mismatches and ensure that they are responding as effectively as possible to labour market skills needs. We will also make development funding available in the 2021-22 financial year in a number of pilot areas to support colleges to reshape their provision to address local priorities that have been agreed with local employers.

We will reform our funding and accountability systems to better support providers in their role. To this end, The Skills for Jobs: A New Further Education Funding and Accountability System Government Consultation was published on 15 July 2021: https://consult.education.gov.uk/fe-funding/reforms-to-funding-and-accountability/. This consultation proposes a range of steps to improve communication at local and national level about effective skills delivery:

  • Specifying the outcomes we expect through a new published Performance Dashboard
  • Introducing a new skills measure that will feature in the dashboard and capture how well local and national skills needs are met
  • Exploring an enhanced role for Ofsted to inspect how well local and national skills needs are met
  • Enabling the Further Education Commissioner to enhance its existing leadership role, with a renewed focus on driving improvement and championing excellence in colleges
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