Inside Story: What we learnt about two decades of Whitehall policy that has failed to shif

Inside Story: What we learnt about two decades of Whitehall policy that has failed to shift the dial on improving UK productivity and skillsProfessor Tom Bewick talks to FE News about a recent major UK skills review he co-authored with the independent researcher, Matilda Gosling, called Running to Stand Still. In this interview he gave us the inside track on the report; and why he thinks it speaks truth to power about what has gone wrong, under successive governments, to solve the UK productivity puzzle.Q1. WHY DID YOU WRITE THE REPORT?TB: About a year ago now, the chancellor of the exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, announced that he was asking Sir Michael Barber to undertake a another government skills review. The FE sector got very excited about the prospect of influencing the agenda. Yet, here we are all these months on, and the sector is still non the wiser as to what Sir Michael is actually working on; and there has been absolutely no public consultation about it with any experts in the sector.Faced with the realisation that, once again, Whitehall would just ignore the people who work in and care about the future of skills and prosperity in this country, we decided to conduct and publish a skills review of our own. This was independently commissioned and financed by the Federation of Awarding Bodies (FAB), which included in-depth interviews with 25 experts from across the FE and skills sector. Matilda Gosling audited the recommendations of all the previous government skills reviews, tracking back to the Leitch Review of Skills, conducted by HM Treasury in 2006. And what we found – in terms of repeated and failed attempts to meet the scale of the skills ambition, was extraordinary. We also discovered that Whitehall doesn’t even implement many of the recommendations it has asked for from various government commissioned skills advisers.Q2. WHAT IS YOUR BASIC ARGUMENT?TB: Our basic argument is that despite two decades of policy hyper-activity in the skills arena, with many different quangos that have come and gone, as well as various government skills initiatives under successive governments; we found that none of these things have really translated into improving average real earnings for most working people. In fact, what has happened, since around 2005, is that living standards have flatlined and people feel poorer because despite the skills they have acquired and practiced in the workforce, this has not translated into higher take home pay. It’s why we called the report, Running to Stand Still…Q3. WHAT DATA SURPRISED YOU THE MOST?TB: In amongst some of the gloomy productivity statistics, we discovered some positive things about the impact of education policy in recent decades. For example, thanks to the focus on improving school standards, the UK has made great strides in virtually eradicating the number of young people who enter the workforce with no qualifications. This is paying back dividends, in terms of the data analysis we did on the wage returns, which found that Level 2 and Level 3 qualifications hold quite a bit of currency in the labour market; which is counter to what you’ll often hear some ministers and government skills advisers saying, who tend to denigrate lower level qualifications as “low-value”.When we looked into the ONS data on real earnings growth and training hours invested by employers, for example, we were surprised to see that all categories of workers have seen stagnating pay and declining training opportunities, except those on National Minimum Wage, who tend to have these lower level qualification. In other words, perhaps contrary to the received wisdom, workers at the bottom of the labour market have seen more protection in terms of inflation adjusted pay rises than many middle-income groups.As a close Whitehall skills observer, however, probably the most shocking data discovery was the fact nearly all the 2006 Leitch Review skills targets were missed, with only the higher education participation targe...