1. Concerns that training providers do not deliver the skills required by business and industry have dominated UK Government policies for training and enterprise for several decades. There is considerable dissatisfaction that the enormous investment in the development of education and training systems over the past two decades has failed to stimulate economic growth and regeneration. The lack of responsiveness to industrial and commercial needs is a major characteristic of these complaints.
2. They led the Government, in its White Paper Employment for the 1990s (Employment Department 1989), to propose the establishment of Training and Enterprise Councils (TECs), with key functions to include the examination of local labour markets, and the assessment of skill needs, prospects for expanded job growth and the adequacy of existing training opportunities. The TECs were set up across the United Kingdom (except Northern Ireland) in 1991. They were required to base their activities on a corporate plan, and this plan had to be built upon a local Labour Market Assessment. These were required to have two key components:
- an analysis of the needs of businesses and individuals; and- an analysis of how far those needs were being met, so that gaps and areas for improvement could be highlighted.
3. Before this, while the Employment Department produced national and regional employment data, local labour market information depended on private surveys for employers or the initiatives of local authorities. Where these authorities established Economic Development Units there was frequently good quality information, but no nationwide systematic analysis of local labour markets existed. The TEC Labour Market Assessments were undertaken mainly by local consultants. Each TEC tackled the work according to its own local circumstances, but most involved participation from local community groups, using a variety of information gathering techniques. They looked at:
a) changing demands for skills, including changing production techniques, patterns of employment growth and decline; and the impact of existing local public sector initiatives;b) skill supply, including demographic trends, migration and travel to work patterns, and the contributions of firms to skill development by size and sector;
c) support for new and expanding firms, in terms of the rates at which new businesses were generated, the place of small firms in the local economy and their links to large enterprises, the support for ethnic minority businesses, and the potential for increasing the generation of new or expanded enterprises;
d) skill shortages, the factors behind them and ways they might be overcome;
e) the needs of unemployed people, their demographic characteristics, geographic distribution and links between local unemployment and economic trends;
f) geographical areas or groups with special needs (eg people with disabilities, lone parents, ethnic minorities) requiring targeted help;
g) training and vocational education provision, including support for small businesses and training provided by employers on their own premises; and
h) the take-up of that provision, its relevance to customers' needs and the adequacy of supportive information, advice and guidance.
5. The surveys found that existing labour market information was both dated and organised in ways which made it difficult for practical use to be made of it, a problem highlighted in an Employment Department-funded research project at that time (Gray & Williams, 1989). The TEC labour market assessments were analyzed by Barnes (1992). Four sets of issues arose from them. The research found that the local job structures failed to provide sufficient employment opportunities for significant groups of workers with special needs, who needed targeted assistance. It also found that in a number of TEC areas start-up and survival rates for new businesses were disturbingly low. Most companies felt that their growth and development was impeded by skills shortages, while the systems for enterprise support were confusing and inadequate. However, training provision was perceived to be poorly focused or inappropriate for local needs, while firms themselves gave low priority to training, focusing their resources on short term issues.
6. The TECs now undertake these assessments annually, and are required to publish these. They draw on a variety of sources, including:
- information from the local authorities, development corporations, Employment Service and Careers Service;- statistics on trade and VAT registrations/deregistrations from the Employment Department;
- their own skills surveys in specific areas or industrial sectors;
- information from private sector organisations including Chambers of Commerce and Local; employer networks; from trade unions and voluntary bodies; and from other government departments including the Department for Trade & Industry.
7. Each TEC has been supplied with the framework for a computer-assisted local labour market in formation system (CALLMI) by the Employment Department. This uses information collected from visits to a sample of employers, and is linked to a national 'On-Line Manpower Information System' (NOMIS), providing on-line statistical information on population, employment, unemployment and job vacancies (Training Agency, 1989).
8. At a national level, the Employment Department has recently published a guide to training providers which draws attention to national historical data and trends analyses in order to help them plan provision at a local level (Employment Department 1994). The key signals and indicators used by the Department include:
- historical data - workforce trends over the past decade;- changes in the types of employment, together with projections of employment prospects for the next seven or eight years, including analyses of the prospects by industrial sector and occupational groups;
- labour force analyses by age distribution, comparisons of activity rates by gender, the characteristic demographic differentiators for unemployed people, and variations in retirement patterns by occupational group, in order to highlight the absolute needs for new workers over the next decade by occupational group and industrial sector.
9. From this evidence, demands for new skills can then be projected. In turn these demands are related to current provision. The analysis goes on to point out to the further education colleges, as prime providers of these skills, the significance of current trends towards more full-time study, higher participation levels, and the shift from traditional subjects. If providers are to improve their links with the labour market they need structured procedures for sampling the opinions, attitudes and needs of employers. They also need to ascertain the views and expectations of the community and the students they serve. These form important elements of the management information systems with which institutional managers can monitor their responsiveness internally and externally.
10. The national training targets, set by the Government in 1991, emphasise skills upgrading. The further education sector is exhorted to supplement this national labour market analysis with its own local analyses, using data from the TECs, local authorities and careers services. Colleges should use this evidence not only in reviewing and re-designing where necessary their curriculum provision, but also in guiding applicants to courses with employment potential.
11. Many colleges are already well down this route. Some years before the TECs undertook their labour market assessments, simple structured data collection techniques for sampling employer and student opinions were developed by the Employment Department-funded 'Responsive College Programme', designed by and disseminated to colleges throughout the United Kingdom (Theodossin, 1989). These are used extensively in British colleges, adapted to local needs as part of a portfolio of measures whereby institutions seek to test the relevance of their activities, and thereby tune provision more closely to client needs. As such they are now incorporated with quality assessment surveys in line with the move towards external quality 'kitemarks' such as the Employment Department's "Investor in People" standard, and the requirements of the 'Students Charter'. They complement, therefore, the less structured findings from work placement visits, job fairs and employer advisory committees. They have also been adapted by UK consultants for use in developing countries.
12. The colleges are also now making use of census data. With the 1991 local detailed statistics now becoming available on disk, they are able to manipulate the data in ways previously impossible, In this way, one of the major limitations of the local TEC information can be overcome - the lack of contiguity between the TEC area for which their data is published and the catchment areas of the college. These newer statistical analyses are combined with the more traditional 'soft' methods using key informants, whether through formal employer advisory committees in each industrial sector served by a college or more informal contacts through training managers and students on day-release and work-experience attachments.
13. It is important for providers and users to be able first to identify specific skills needs, then to be able to differentiate between skills both by level and by type. Over the past decade in the UK the system of National Vocational Qualifications has attempted to categorise skills (or competences) in five levels, determined by employer-led 'Industry Lead Bodies'. The analysis of skills by type, distinguishing between generic skills and vocational skills and specific job-related skills has underpinned much national curriculum development. The Employment Department supported the analysis of generic or core skills for vocational education (Levy, 1987), and this framework has been used to distinguish between off-job and work-based learning strategies in both selecting and training craft operatives in a major recently privatised British company (Grundy, 1991). A process of 'core analysis' was used to assess skills needed for competent work performance, and thereby identify both core and job-specific skill enhancement needs. These and other skills analyses are now used as the basis for determining the core skills at the heart of the new national (England & Wales) General National Vocational Qualifications (GNVQs).
