Tony Blair once famously declared that education and employment were the best economic policies Labour has. He was right. Under the last Conservative Government, youth and long-term unemployment was estimated to cost the country £44 billion a year – a huge waste of human potential.
Labour’s education and employment policies have turned out to be far more radical. The Government has introduced all the measures it said it would, including a standards crusade in our schools. Similarly, the New Deal for the young and long-term unemployed has successfully got the pledged number of people back to work.
In large measure due to the work of the Government’s National Skills Task Force, we now know more about the real social and economic benefits to be gained. For example, if we could close the productivity gap with Germany, our economy could generate an additional £50 billion more in output each year.
In the coming century, it really will be no exaggeration to say that the more people learn, the more they will earn. The Skills Task Force estimates that by 2010 nearly 75 percent of jobs will require someone with skills equivalent to A-level or the vocational equivalent. Today, only 41 percent of 25 to 28 year-olds are skilled to this level.
This, then, is the challenge if Labour wins a second term. Once the new post-16 institutional framework has settled in, there will be a pressing need to turn the focus away from structures and onto the individual. This was clearly the aspiration in 1997 with the pledge to introduce Individual Learning Accounts (ILAs). But these have not achieved anything like their full potential. Only 500,000 accounts have been opened so far, compared to a manifesto commitment of one million. The accounts are not real in the sense that they use smart card technology or allow learners to ‘purchase’ learning in the same way as we pay for fitness classes at the local gym.
For individuals in and out of work, ILAs could be better utilised to bring more coherence to the myriad of financial support now available to a growing number of students bewildered by the complex financial support on offer to them.
This is a minor setback, of course, because ILAs still have the potential to become a part of the 21st century learning society. By building on the principles of access, entitlements, rights and responsibilities, Labour has the opportunity to reinvigorate ILAs.
With the new Learning and Skills Council about to commence work in England, it is time for Labour to have a serious debate about how best to allocate its £6 billion of public funding. Do we continue to channel 100 percent support to the learner via institutional structures, or are these accounts Labour’s way of securing greater equality of opportunity in the learning market of a new century?
As a first step, the next manifesto could state a firm commitment to universalise ILAs for all 16 year-olds leaving school. Once in the hands of the individual, ILAs become a transparent mechanism in which the state, employers and individuals can share the investment of lifelong learning.
They enable a Government committed to opportunity for all to end the funding inequities that currently exist between full-time and part-time students, and between those already rich in skills and life chances and those who are not.
Investment in training by industry could be more effectively increased if ILAs were used as the vehicle for increasing contributions from employers, particularly those who do not take the issue of investing in their workforce seriously. Similarly, students’ loans and support could be channelled via ILAs, thereby bringing on board the private banks to a scheme that, so far, they have been unwilling to support. How far is the next manifesto prepared to go?