Yesterday afternoon the new Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills announced the Government response to the Leitch report (see previous blogs!) in the Commons. He announced an adult careers service, individual skills accounts, called on colleges to be more responsive to learners and employers, and called for a "skills revolution", with training for what local people or businesses wanted.
The cynic in me says that a lot of this has been spoken about before and my views on the practicability of the skills accounts are generally unprintable currently - having lived through the ILA (individual learning account) fiasco a few years ago. The responses reported by the BBC are also fairly mimsy for the moment - though it was the responses from the National Union of Students and the University and College Union that prompted this blog, as both questioned the balance between employer demands and individual development.
Someone somewhere seems to think that vocational qualifications and skills are very easily defined - well one could argue that the National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) covers this I guess. So why are people pushed to non-vocational qualifications and the plethora of A levels and GCSEs in the academic route? Unless they are also vocational in that you need a relevant A level if you want to follow a particular occupation? But we don't have particularly strict vocational entry requirements, so I am confident that there are accountants out there without Maths A level (sorry to pick on accountants but it seemed a good example).
Then there are the leisure courses that are so derided - yoga, basket weaving, pottery, country crafts. Should they be pushed down the priority list as they don't have any employment or vocation attached to them? Well, how do you know you want to teach yoga if you don't start learning yoga somewhere yourself? I have a friend who was an accountant, did a series of evening pottery classes, decided she loved it so did an arts foundation course and last heard of, was running community arts projects in the Midlands. Basket weaving and country crafts - how do you know whether you are good at them until you try a course. How many farmers' wives are now running successful micro businesses to diversify the farm income?
Similarly a number of years ago I was working with Warwickshire CVS, and foolishly mentioned sewing classes as perhaps being leisure oriented, only to be told that half of the sewing circle that was running in Nuneaton had found jobs in the clothing industry as a result of their involvement in the sewing circle!
The vision that is lacking in all of this therefore is the ability to unlock the hidden potential and desires within the individual. Fine, let an employer pay for CNC setting training for today/tomorrow among their workforce, but will those same skills be relevant a year or more down the line and will the employer still have that worker and need the same skills?
We are told that there is no job for life any longer and my household is a prime example of that, but will an adult careers service have the time, funding, vision and skills to help an individual find the niche where they will be happy and will have the aptitude and skills to succeed? At my grammar school in the seventies, the options were university or the banks - anything else was considered a waste of talent. The personal assessments and the labour market and economic information were missing then - will they be there now for adults?
Comments