Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps he is taking to help ensure that the Government's skills strategy prioritises training and courses that meet the workforce demands for the future.

The department published the ‘Skills for Jobs’ White Paper in January 2021, setting out our blueprint to reform post-16 education and training, focusing on giving people the skills they need in a way that suits them.

The white paper sets out that we are putting employers at the heart of the skills system so that education and training meets their needs. By 2030, almost all technical courses will be on employer-led standards, ensuring that the education and training people receive are directly linked to the skills needed for jobs. This builds on the success of our flagship apprenticeships programme where industry designed standards equip apprentices with the skills employers need and our work on developing new T Levels, which has involved over 250 employers in their design.

It also set out our aim to give employers a central role working with further education colleges, other providers and local stakeholders to develop new Local Skills Improvement Plans as part of the Skills Accelerator, which shape technical skills provision so that it meets local labour market skills needs. These will be launched in a number of trailblazer areas and be led by accredited Chambers of Commerce and other employer representative bodies in collaboration with local providers. We will engage employer and provider groups to ensure we create the most effective models of employer representation before wider rollout.

Following the Wolf Review which found that the content of many qualifications was not valued by employers, the department is streamlining and improving the quality of the post-16 level 3 system. We are strengthening the pathways to progression, creating clearly defined academic and technical routes with qualifications leading to further study, and/or skilled employment. Our proposed landscape – with employers at the heart and a much greater focus on quality – will serve all students better.

We announced in the recent Spending Review that we are investing £3.8 billion in further education and skills, to ensure people can access high-quality training and education that leads to good jobs, addresses current and future skills gaps, boosts productivity, and supports levelling up. This builds on the range of skills policies that we have introduced to improve skills at all levels.

The introduction of T Levels will boost access to high quality technical education for thousands of 16 to 19 year olds, representing a once in a lifetime opportunity to reform technical education in this country, put it on a par with the best in the world and offer young people a real choice of high-quality training that is equal in esteem to traditional academic routes.

We are providing an extra £1.6 billion boost for 16 to 19 year old’s education, including maintaining funding in real terms per student and delivering more hours of teaching for T Levels.

We are committed to supporting more people to benefit from the high-quality training that apprenticeships offer, including those at the start of their career or those looking to retrain, and as my right hon. Friend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, set out at the Spending Review, funding for apprenticeships will grow to £2.7 billion by the 2024/25 financial year, delivering the first increase to employer-led apprenticeships funding since the 2019/20 financial year. We are also investing over £550 million by the 2024/25 financial year to make sure adults can upskill to reach their potential, delivering on the National Skills Fund commitment.

Many people lack the basic numeracy skills they need and that is why we have introduced ‘Multiply’, a new £560 million programme to help people improve their basic numeracy skills through free digital training, flexible courses, and tutoring. Launching in spring 2022, the Multiply programme is in addition to the England-wide statutory entitlement for numeracy and will give people who do not have at least a GCSE grade C/4 or equivalent in mathematics access to free, new and flexible courses to improve their maths skills. This will include a new website with bitesize training and online tutorials, as well as flexible courses.