Future Ready: the Path to Growth
Developing a skilled workforce
In 2023, the DfE’s Labour market and skills projection for the UK showed that demand for those educated beyond a bachelor’s degree will increase by 53% between 2023 and 2035, the biggest increase for any qualification level.
Whilst skills needs will vary across industrial sectors and places, provision of high-level skills will be crucial to delivering economic growth and securing the UK’s future global competitiveness.
"To deliver a long-term industrial strategy universities, industry and the public sector should convene more frequently and intentionally, to identify and share the thorniest challenges and greatest opportunities where high-skilled research can bring outsized returns. Future funding and support should be targeted with these areas in mind."
Lucy Yu, CEO, Centre for Net Zero (Octopus Energy Group)
Delivering skills through education partnerships
Research-intensive universities engage with employers in a number of ways, including directly recruiting students onto graduate programmes, offering industry placements, collaborating on programme design, offering degree apprenticeships and establishing apprenticeship placements. This is supporting critical skills pipelines in key growth sectors such as clean energy industries.
The current apprenticeship levy is a mechanism for employers to invest in the training and upskilling of their workforce, but since 2011, average training investment per employee has fallen by 19% (in real terms). Skills England should look to work with employers, universities and FE colleges to identify high-value courses, responding to industry needs, that could be funded by a more flexible Growth and Skills Levy.
Boosting the UK’s research-skills pipeline
Research-active staff will be central to harnessing emerging technologies and solving complex challenges such as climate change. However, the number of new researchers starting a postgraduate qualification in the UK decreased by 12% between 2018/19 and 2022/23.
We would like to see Skills England including postgraduate researchers in their mapping of current and expected skills gaps and for this to feed into the Industrial Strategy. Close working between UKRI, the national academies, industry and universities is needed to understand how best to incentivise talent to enter and remain in the wider research sector.
Designing support for reskilling and lifelong learning
Widening and increasing participation in higher education has a broad range of benefits for high innovation and productivity-driven economies. Partnerships between universities and industry to deliver lifelong learning will be even more important after 2030 when demographic changes mean the number of 18-year-olds in the population will decline.
We support government’s vision to incentivise flexible learning, but the current design of the Lifelong Learning Entitlement needs re-thinking. Any system of lifelong learning needs to be flexible enough to meet the needs of learners at every stage of their skills journey, from basic skills to completing a postgraduate professional qualification.
Solutions
What can research-intensive universities offer?
- Work with Skills England and industry to help provide evidence to support the development of a unified skills framework and map pathways for local skills infrastructure.
- Build on best practice models and establish new partnerships with industry, working more closely to better understand current and future skills needs to strengthen local economies.
- Continue to work with UKRI, industry and others to secure a skilled pipeline of research talent for the UK.
What can the government do?
- Set out its national skills vision through Skills England, ensuring skills assessments are aligned with Industrial Strategy growth-driving sectors and sub-sectors (although not to the exclusion of other disciplines) and recognising the role that research-intensive universities can play.
- Work collaboratively with employers and apprenticeship providers to introduce the Growth and Skills Levy, ensuring it continues to support
higher-level apprenticeships for all ages. - Ensure the design and implementation of the Lifelong Learning Entitlement incentivises universities to innovate with new course offerings and to
deliver the high-level training, upskilling and reskilling needed.