The pages of the BBC's education news on the web include a small and overlooked debate between Chris Humphries - Skills guru and Director General of City and Guilds - and the spokespeople of the DfES on the ultimate meaning of the Leitch report.
Chris is concerned that the new demographic time bomb (low birth rates in the 1990s) and the economically inactive will combine to create a "workforce black hole" in 2020. He feels the demographic issue was missed by Leitch, giving a fundamental flaw. DfES are naturally defending Leitch and the money and time that work took, but also point out that forecasting the size of the workforce of the future is difficult, while asserting that Leitch felt the inflow of young people would not be enough to meet future skills needs.
Both sides have good points to make and neither is essentially wrong. Chris is right to say that we need to be engaging with the economically inactive - while unemployment has gone down significantly in the past 10 years, the numbers employed and economically inactive have both gone up. It is the inactive group that are hard to engage with, that don't want to improve their skills, that don't seem to want to put themselves out for their own good or for that of society. Don't get me started on what they might be doing with their time instead!!
Chris also has a slightly vested interest in highlighting the changes in the numbers of young people - City and Guilds provide an awful lot of qualifications to an awful lot of young people, and as the BBC has also pointed out recently, a substantial part of a college budget can be eaten up in examination fees to the likes of City and Guilds.
Leitch in many ways started from the premise that a lot of attention was being paid to the skills and education of young people, but what about the rest of the population? A core part of his fundamental argument was that the majority of the working age population of 2020 (and excluding for the moment issues of changes in pensionable age) were ALREADY in the working age bracket, hence the need to focus on their skills, rather than that of youth. This is not contrary to what Chris Humphries is saying.
Of course the whole argument could be a way of bringing the issue back to centre stage and developing media, academic and policy debate about how to engage with the economically inactive. If that is the case, to this interested observer, I think they have missed out with the timings as Scottish election results, the Northern Ireland government and the climax of the northern hemisphere football season (not to mention the Lord's Test next week) are all rather more fascinating currently.
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