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The aim of this paper will be to address wider topics that sometimes tend to get ducked or shunted to one side when education/industry interaction is being debated. In particular, the paper argues that the longstanding failure to achieve any genuine consensus about the rights, roles and responsibilities of state, employers and education and training providers is liable to create significant problems in a world where the gap between policy aspiration and reality, and between the bargaining power of individuals and employers, is growing ever wider. In thinking about what issues to address, it can be argued that education/industry liaison/interactions can be analysed at three ascending orders of magnitude in terms of their scale and significance for the effective functioning of the interface between the education and training system and the labour market: (1) micro - for example, around the identification of successful models for liaison activity, the level of demands being placed on employers by policy, the quality of employer representation and the forms that interaction can take; (2) meso - around employer demands for enhanced employability; zero-sum game competition between employers, occupations and sectors for what are perceived to be scarce pools of talent; patterns of recruitment and selection that send powerful (sometimes perverse) signals to young people; and questions about who, in a post-Leitch era pays for and delivers what types of education and training; and (3) macro - around over-qualification and mis-matches, impoverished and weak demand for skills, lack of employer ambition, and the persistence of low paid, ‘bad’ jobs. This paper will concentrate the bulk of its attention on topics that occur at levels two and three since these are the ones that tend to be relatively neglected, and will build on a number of questions raised in Huddleston and Keep (1999), and Gleeson and Keep (2004), as well as the author’s work on incentives to learn (Keep, 2009; Keep and James, 2010a) and patterns of recruitment and selection (Keep and James, 2010b).

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A considerable and rapidly growing volume of reports on the potential impacts of [Coronavirus Disease 2019] COVID-19 from international and national government agencies, think tanks, management consultancies, and academics is now hitting our in-boxes and desks. What follows is a very modest addition to this burgeoning literature. A version of the paper has been prepared for the 4 Nations College Alliance 'College of the Future' Commission, and what follows is a slightly amended version. It does not attempt to provide a comprehensive analysis, or to duplicate what others have already said. Its main focus is on youth unemployment and wider transitions into work, but it also has some thoughts on adult unemployment and re-training.

This paper is founded upon a basic assumption - namely that if the public money available across all four UK nations to support measures around skills and unemployment is finite, then targeting those most at risk and defining which kinds of measures are the most cost-effective will be important. The information already available (Wilson et al, 2020) suggests that we know reasonably well which sectors, occupations, localities and kinds of people will most likely be hardest hit by the coming recession. The main issues will be deciding: (1) What groups to prioritise, which interventions will work best and most cost-effectively, and also which can be delivered to swiftly address the immediate problems liable to emerge as the furlough scheme is wound down and school, college and university leavers hit a disrupted labour market; and (2) What additional measures will be needed in the longer term as some groups experience extended periods of unemployment.

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One of the central 'big ideas' running through policy development on training and skills in England over the last few years has been employer ownership of skills. This report explores where the concept came from; what employer ownership means, not least from the different perspectives of government and employers; and what the implications of a shift towards greater employer ownership within skills policy might actually be for the various parties involved. The report sets out a range of practical and conceptual questions about the broad concept of employer ownership of skills, with the hope of stimulating debate on these issues and helping employers and those who represent them to think through how they want employer ownership and wider skills policy to evolve in the coming years. A key question posed by the author is whether the apprenticeship levy is a one-off development, or whether it might prove to be the thin end of the wedge and the start of a wider trend towards compelling employers to accept greater direct responsibility for skills formation.

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This research paper explores what we know about the process of transitions from education into the labour market, with a particular focus on the UK. There is strong evidence that even before the current recession, right across the developed world transitions were becoming longer, more complex and conditional than they used to be. The paper explores what structural factors may underlie these changes and their implications for policy makers and those working within the education and training system. The paper suggests that insofar as these developments can be addressed by policy, a major consideration is the role that employers may need to play, not least in terms of the attitudes and behaviours that they display towards the process of recruitment, selection, induction and development of new entrants to the workforce.

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This paper seeks to provide a set of three scenarios for the year 2015 (of which a high skills society is but one), and then see where current policy trajectories might lead in terms of these different projections of what the future might look like. The value of this heuristic device, it will be argued, is that it presents policies as courses of action and choice that become set (path dependency), thereby offering access to certain options while excluding many others. One of the aims of adopting this device is to make it clear where it can be argued current government policies are leading England and what the consequences of this trajectory and its associated destination are liable to be.

The first section outlines three possible scenarios for the year 2015. The direction of current vocational education and training (VET) policies and of other factors that it is sometimes adduced will lead towards a high skills vision are reviewed. The rate and direction of change they are liable to deliver is matched against the demands/achievements outlined in the three scenarios, and some predictions made about where current policy trajectories will lead. The final section offers some brief thoughts about the role of the research community in trying to shift policy trajectories upwards.

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Is England's current system of vocational qualifications (VQs) fit for purpose? The conclusion that the Wolf Review of Vocational Education (2011) came to is that, at least in parts, it is not. The Review's recommendations for reform were accepted in full by the Department for Education (DfE), but little subsequent attention has been given to the long-term implications of this decision. This issues paper will argue that policy makers now face two large-scale and strongly inter-related problems. First, the system of VQs has design flaws and weaknesses that mean that learners in England receive a shallower and narrower package of learning than their counterparts in many other parts of the developed world. Second, the labour market has significant structural problems that make it extremely hard for many VQs to generate any significant wage premia or support job progression. The interplay between these two factors, where one helps sustain the other and vice-versa, creates what policy analysts sometimes refer to as a 'wicked problem' or a form of systems failure.

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The focus of this paper is on the unresolved problem for skills policy, how to improve the ways in which skills, once created, are then effectively used in the economy and within individual organisations and workplaces. Understanding that there are problems with the utilisation of skill represents a considerable step forwards in the conceptualisation of policy, but the challenges that attended this new understanding have centred on the relative absence of established models of policy development to tackle these issues. The challenge facing many UK policy makers is that knowing a problem exists is very different from knowing how best to address it, and a 30-year plus period in which there has been a more or less exclusive focus for skills policy on boosting supply has left a major gap in terms of the institutional capacity, programmatic designs and expertise that might be deployed to address the improvement of skills utilisation. In large measure skills utilisation policy across the UK is relatively unchartered territory and policy makers are embarking on a journey of exploration and discovery. This paper aims to provide some pointers as to where the journey might start and in what direction(s) it might head.

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This article reviews current English vocational education and training (VET) policy. It argues that policy now stands at a decisive juncture, torn between two competing models. The first is traditional, and relies on yet more institutional change and increases in the supply of skills. Its embodiment is the Learning and Skills Council (LSC). The other model for policy comes from the Cabinet Office Performance and Innovation Unit’s (PIU’s] work on workforce development [see PIU report indexed at TD/TNC 70.135]. This posits a need to tackle issues about demand for and use of skills in the workplace, and for marrying skills policies with wider business support and development. The article reviews the prospects for the LSC and identifies a number of weaknesses inherent in its supply-led approach. The article argues that, for a variety of reasons, the PIU’s broader analysis may be likely to gain greater influence, but that it will also need to overcome significant barriers embedded in the current ideological and institutional fabric in England.

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This article examines the causes and consequences of the increasing control of English education and training (E&T) by central government and its agencies. It poses three questions - what are the reasons for national government becoming the dominant player in this area of policy, why is the English system so statist in design and operation, and what factors underlie the continuity of this trend in policy over the last quarter of a century? In seeking answers, it argues that policy has become caught up in a cycle of intervention that is heavily path-dependent, and that this is the result of the interplay between a set of paradoxes about what the state believes it can and cannot do within the labour and product market. E&T has come to act as a substitute for regulation in both these areas. The article concludes that unless and until the state ‘lets go’ of some element of control it will be trapped into having to do more and more, as other actors take a passive role and fail to develop their capacity to act as strong partners in the E&T system.

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Colleges are vital parts of the local education system, are major employers and do much to support the local economy, healthy communities and social cohesion. Yet they have been pushed and pulled by national policy shifts more than any other institutions in education. How localism might best be implemented so that it can provide a more stable, secure and fruitful future for colleges to be able to serve their communities, employers and students, is an important consideration. This project set out to evaluate how this is being developed now and the impact it will have on colleges. Through in-depth research and events, the author has set out the approaches college leaders might consider to ensure localism works well.

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