Most education is still supplier-driven, including at universities, with courses typically reflecting a combination of the pre-ordained sets of knowledge, skills, and abilities deemed achievable by students, and the particular subject expertise of the providers and their academic staff. Arguably, it is a very nineteenth century way of offering provision (at best) to a workforce that largely left behind the standardisation of the Taylorist and Fordist factory decades ago. In our own region, it seems an especially strange way of addressing the dynamic, workplace-driven education and skills needs being identified by the Northern Powerhouse.
Current Trends
A range of private-sector providers and awarding bodies have recognised this and have moved into the space of bite-sized, flexible learning, micro-credentialing and continuing professional development courses that are rooted in specific workplace issues. Given current societal trends and the present regulatory framework, it seems unlikely they will be leaving the field anytime soon.
While longer, prescriptive courses and off-the-peg learning undoubtedly have their uses, alternative supplementary approaches are clearly needed. This, of itself, requires some challenging thinking. The traditional view of the academic as the supplier of subject expertise seems inadequate in a society where most knowledge capital now exists in the workplace itself, rather than the academy. This means that to be truly responsive, higher education providers need to be offering flexible and more personalised courses that situate the academic as being a facilitator of learning (the sources of which may be eclectic) rather than a spoon-feeder of expert knowledge that can be regurgitated in examinations. This in turn, rather changes the power relationships that have become embedded in HE over long periods.
To be fair, a number of universities have attempted to address many of these issues through the creation of more flexible learning frameworks that have moved well beyond traditional modes of learning. They are distinctive and popular with the students and employers that get to know about them too. They have key, distinguishing features that have typically involved:
- Allowing students to create their own pathway of learning in negotiation with the university, reflecting their own needs and those of their workplace (in some case negotiated award titles are available too);
- Enabling students to import prior credits from a range of relevant Continuing Professional Development and training courses, this being far easier when the pathway is negotiable rather than mapped tightly to a pre-designed curriculum;
- Embedding flexible modes of learning so that students can attend face-to-face workshops if they wish, but tailored online learning if they don’t;
- Offering the facilitation of genuine, work-based and experiential learning where the workplace itself can become the curriculum, eg both through the recognition of relevant prior experiential learning at work, and through the incorporation of current work-based projects with negotiable learning outcomes, methods of assessment and so on.
Growth and the Levy
Given this, one way to underpin and encourage the growth of such provision could be straightforward. Indeed, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) for one has already called for it. And that would be to allow the Employer Levy to be used for more intrinsically flexible and responsive forms of learning than apprenticeships. The Levy was arguably one of the better education reforms to have been enacted in recent years, but it needs to be released from what many see as the restrictive shackles currently applied to it. Recently, the Department for Education (DofE) revealed that since 2017-18 well over £2 billion of apprenticeship funding (via digital vouchers) has been returned to the Treasury. In addition, it is claimed that around half of eligible firms have returned unspent levy funds. This is a huge waste of resources and an indication that businesses are not clear that apprenticeship offerings alone meet their professional development and skills needs.
All Change?
Interestingly, both Labour and the Conservatives have been making similar noises about this. Through Sir Keir Starmer and Bridget Phillipson, Labour has recently argued for the Levy to be turned into a ‘Growth and Skills Levy’ (FE News, 27 September, 2022) and that new combined authorities need to be set up to co-ordinate adult education spending. Similarly, new Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has at various points in recent months mooted either reforming the levy to widen its scope, or else abolishing it so that it can be replaced with new incentives that can stimulate investment in skills and professional development for adults.
If higher education providers are genuinely to recognise the workplace as a valid form of knowledge generation – and to provide creative and flexible enhancement for this in ways that can make a material difference to students and businesses – then they clearly need encouragement to do so. And widening the scope of the Levy would be a good place to start. Otherwise the old ways of doing things and the power relationships based on them will remain, and an opportunity to help forge a high-skills economy that can respond quickly to eclectic and changing needs may be lost. So, who will grasp the nettle . . ?
