The chancellor Gordon Brown and education secretary Alan Johnson have called on employers to sign up to a ‘skills pledge’ to ensure all their employees reach a skills level equivalent to five good GCSEs.
Open to all employers, the skills pledge is designed to stimulate demand for training and help support a culture where gaining skills is taken as a matter of course.
It follows December’s Leitch Report, which highlighted the need to achieve world-class skills by 2020.
Gordon Brown said: “In the future skills will be the only route to prosperity and jobs. Of 3.4 million unskilled jobs today, by 2020 we will need only 600,000. So if the UK is to continue to succeed in the new global economy we will need to be more ambitious with more people training and employers, employees and government each meeting their responsibilities.
“This will only succeed if the British people themselves are involved in discussing and agreeing this priority to invest in education and skills. This way we can build the consensus essential if today’s working men and women are going to achieve better-paid jobs and a better future for their children.”
One of the aspirations in the Leitch Report was to have at least 90 per cent of working age adults qualified to level two – the vocational equivalent to five good GCSEs – by 2020.
Employers making the skills pledge would commit to a training plan built on the needs of their business. The plan would show timescales for training all staff to level two as well as committing resources and setting priorities.
As such, the skills pledge is a commitment to raise the skill levels of all employees, giving staff certified competence in the workplace together with literacy, numeracy and employability skills.
The government says the benefit for employers is increased competitiveness through the ability to draw on a skilled labour force.
One Response
Education – whose job is it?
…and at the same time this Government is looking into making education to the age of 18 compulsory. Am i missing something here but whose responsibility is basic (i.e. GCSE level)education?
We are told by the Government that educational standards are getting higher (no grade inflation here!) yet it seems to me that the gist of the article is that the balance of responsibility for getting the next generation educated in order to compete in the global marketplace is moving from the state funded education sector to the employer.
The Government wants to get involved in certifying the competence of individual companies’ training and say that the benefit is for employers through increased competitiveness. Government be careful here – I can be very competitive by recruiting and employing excellent staff from the EU and further afield. They are already at a higher level of education than 5 GCSEs and they are multilingual too.
I think that the benefit is more for the Government whose constant meddling and tinkering with the education system has resulted in such things as an “aspiration” in the Leitch Report of 90% of working adults qualified to the level of 5 GCSEs by 2020 – a lamentably low standard if we are looking to be a knowledge economy competing with the BRIC economies.
We have reached a tipping point here. The Government’s massive investment (through our taxes) in the education system is failing to produce, what we in the private sector would call a reasonable ROI, and they are looking to push the responsibility, emphasis and cost somewhere else – the employers.
Employers should press for a quid pro quo – we will educate our staff for the failings of the state education system and in return the Government should give tax breaks and incentives to fund training and research & development (at a level higher that 5 GCSEs I would add!!!).