Skills in the UK are lagging behind its competitors, with 5 million adults illiterate, 17 million lacking numeric skills and one in six people leaving school unable to read and write properly. This is the verdict of the Leitch Review of Skills: Prosperity for all in the Global Economy – World Class Skills. According to the review, the UK will have to achieve a number of targets by 2020 if it wants to remain economically secure and if businesses wish to prosper.
The review recommends that employers train staff and encourage higher level qualifications with the view to ensure that 90% of adults are educated to GCSE level or a vocational equivalent, and 40% of adults are skilled to graduate level or above, by 2020. Leitch estimates that the economy will see a net benefit of £80bn over 30 years if the targets are met.
In 2004, the government commissioned Lord Sandy Leitch to undertake an independent review of the UK’s long-term skills needs. Leitch is chairman of BUPA, a non-executive director of Lloyds TSB, United Business Media and Paternoster and was previously chairman and chief executive of Zurich Financial Services.
Climate change may be dominating the UK political debate right now, but a close second ought to be skills.
Those with long memories will remember the Labour government in the 1970s appointing business leaders to the Manpower Services Commission board. Then the Tories set up business-led training and enterprise councils (TECs) in the 1980s. Labour back in power ditched TECs and went for learning and skills councils, trying for a more ‘joined-up’ approach.
Behind all these organisational changes was the fundamental reality that business creates the demand for basic skills and the public sector controls the supply. And over 30 years, no-one has found a way of bringing the two quite into balance. So, we can only wish Sandy Leitch and his team well – and observe with interest the attempt we report in London, that most dynamic of the United Kingdom’s economic regions, to devise its own business-led approach.
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