Professor Ewart Keep
DfE, DWP, and DSIT. 2025. Post-16 Education and Skills, CP 1412, London: HMSO.
This will probably not go down in history as a great white paper. In a decade’s time, if it is remembered at all, it will be recalled as yet another lost opportunity to drag skills policy on a step or two.
Anyone hoping for fresh or radical thinking will have been disappointed. The white paper raises few hopes and offers only a set of rather tired, shop-soiled ‘answers’, often based on lines of policy development that have been tried several times over the last 30-40 years – for example reform of 16-19 vocational qualifications. Most of the higher profile ‘answers’ aim to tackle second order issues.
Moreover, the white paper provides no over-arching analysis of why we are where we are and what the underlying causes of the latest iteration of the UK’s skills problem might be. The lack of a coherent analysis of why earlier policies have failed to shift the dial is almost certainly intentional as to undertake such an exercise would have undermined the white paper’s reliance on recycled policy tropes that come ‘pre-doomed’.
It is also clear from the outset that despite the involvement of the Department for Science Innovation and Technology (DSIT) in writing this document, this is a very traditional supply side only model of policy that has nothing of significance to say about why employer demand for skills is often muted and why many UK organisations appear, if the productivity figures are to be believed, to make such poor usage of skills once they are created. As a result it addresses only one third of the problem.
It’s a ‘system’ when we want it to be, but really it’s a market…..
The largest yawning conceptual void in the Post-16 white paper is its insistence on trying to pretend that we have a skills system made up of two ‘sectors’ (FE and HE). The word system is used 131 times in the white paper. The words market or quasi-market appear not at all in relation to E&T (though market is used in relation to labour markets). The focus on a fantasy system that we do not possess – there is no systems architecture, no system-leaders just some regulators, and the incentives created by institutional competition and individual student choice hardly make for coordination and cooperation – exists in the white paper because policy makers now realise that markets and quasi-markets come with real drawbacks.
However, rather than confront this reality head on their answer is to spray a thin rhetorical veneer of system on top of what is and will remain a set of quasi-markets. It is as though endlessly repeating the word system will in some magical fashion change reality, thereby removing the need to dismantle the underlying model of marketisation. As commentators from Wonkhe have noted (McVitty and Leach, 2025) the incentives created by a market model and by the strictures of regulators such as Office for Students (OfS) and the Competition and Market (CMA) are liable to undermine the white paper’s intentions to see a more joined up model of provision become predominant. What cooperation and local coordination does emerge will do so despite rather than because of the incentive structures that DfE continue to cling to.
Plans, plans, plans
The white paper makes a big thing of the notion of skills planning via Skills England forecasts, Sectoral Job Plans (especially for the 10 priority sectors), Local Skills Improvement Plans, Local Growth Plans, Get Britain Working Plans, plus skills plans and forecasts attached to other government ministries – defence, construction/housing, green skills, etc. These are meant to meet up, be reconciled and then drive the pattern of provision thereby aligning supply with demand, and minimising skills shortages and recruitment difficulties (and as a result, the need for large volumes of migrant labour).
We have been here before. The author produced an article in 2002 that surveyed the very similar model of skills planning then being put in place by the New Labour government and the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) and noted that this ‘policy technology’ was inherently fragile and problematic. Plus ca change. The cruel reality is that what did for New Labour’s model will now almost inevitably do for the current government’s hopes for a technocratic ‘fix’, and no amount of web scraping by forecasters in Skills England will change this.
There are many potential problems. First of all, the many different plans will not synchronise – competing localities and sectors will be chasing the same limited pool of individuals who are interested in/have the prior qualifications (e.g. in Science Technology Engineering and Maths – STEM) to enable them to fulfil the roles identified in the forecasts. Second, knowing that you need 1,000 widget polishers next week is not the same thing as getting them next week. There are lead times and lags in recruiting and then training potential candidates and by the time they have been produced the figure really needed might be 1,200 or 800. Also provision is not driven by forecasts or by government’s desires – in our learning markets it is driven by individual student choice (of institution, course and then of career). Just because someone trains as a widget polisher does not mean that they might not ultimately decide to go off and be a firefighter or a salesperson. For further details of the problems of planning, see Keep, 2002; and Keep, 2023.
Employers – missing in (in)action (again)
The white paper follows in the now long-established tradition of not really knowing what it can usefully say about employers and their role in the skills system. The white paper’s authors boldly state their expectation that employers will now have to finally get out their wallets – “We will ask businesses to fund the education and training their employees need to increase workforce productivity…” (2025: 10) but have nothing to say about what might happen if, as is almost inevitable, many employers fail to do this. If there is no stick to frighten employers into action, there are also few carrots – in fact just two. First, the tweeking of the apprenticeship levy into the skills and growth levy and the arrival of levy-fundable short courses (labelled as ‘apprenticeship units’). Second, yet another go at government ‘making the case for training’ to employers. On the latter, we have tried this for the last 30 years or more and on every occasion it has failed to produce any measurable impact. It is utterly unclear what new information or sales message is now going to transform things.
One indicator that DfE may not themselves be all that convinced that they can get employers to do or spend more comes in the fact that at the end of the white paper its authors set out the measures by which the success of its policies will be gauged. Increased employer investment in skills is not one of them!
Goodbye lifelong learning
Since 2010 Lifelong Learning has dwindled in importance within the UK Government’s overall suite of educational policies. This reflects the imposition of austerity and large-scale cuts to the adult E&T budget, which mean that the vast bulk of public funding is now concentrated on initial education and budgetary pressures (from fields such as health, social care, defence and housing) mean that this is unlikely to change for the foreseeable future. Indeed, the Adult Skills Fund has just sustained a cut of 3.7 per cent, shrinking what was already a diminished adult budget (down 30 per cent in real terms since 2010).
The Post-16 white paper implicitly announces (by virtue of the absence of any meaningful mention of wider lifelong learning) the quiet abandonment of a comprehensive national lifelong learning strategy. The central and almost exclusive focus of the white paper’s adult elements is learning for work either to enable unemployed or economically inactive individuals to access employment or for those already in employment to upgrade their skills in order to progress in or change their occupation or employer. Wider societal or social goals concerning learning across the life course receive no serious coverage.
The main response to the need to re-skill the adult workforce comes in the shape of the Lifelong Learning Entitlement (LLE). This was originally touted, not least by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, as the answer to funding a revolution in adult skills investment. However, as the white paper underlines, ambitions have shrunk (in part one suspects as a result of a disastrous piloting of LLEs – see CRAC, 2024) and rather than deliver the hoped-for bite-sized chunks of learning supported by micro-credentials, what has emerged is a very limited offer. This comprises large chunks of learning (30 credits or around 300 hours) that are costly (£2,310) and cover, at least initially, a limited range of subjects linked to the government’s Industrial Strategy. There are good reasons to doubt how appealing LLE financing of learning will be to its intended audience (Thomson, 2023). As it is the centrepiece of the white paper’s plans to up and re-skill the adult working population, these reservations matter and it will be interesting to see how the LLE evolves.
Reform of vocational qualifications (VQs) – another throw of the dice
The white paper’s enthusiasm for VQ reform is another example of not learning much from history. We have been here before – remember Certificate of Continuing Education (CEE), Certificate of Pre-Vocational Education (CPVE), General National Vocational Qualifications (GNVQs), the 14-19 Diplomas, and T levels. But, as ever, this time it will be different and V levels will be a triumph.
Leaving aside a history of partial or total failure in qualification reform, the question that might be asked is why does this matter so much to policy makers? The author of this paper would not put systemic problems with 16-19 VQs and simplification of the qualification offer in his Top 20 problems and issues for skills policy. There are much more fundamental issues that need to be addressed before VQ re-design stands much of a chance of delivering significantly better results. The policy obsession can best be read as a form of displacement activity.
Work employment and skills
The one major plus in the white paper is the belated recognition that if many of those who are unemployed or economically inactive are to be brought back into the labour market then an integrated package of employment support, skills and health support will be needed. The two challenges that this policy shift will face are the limited financial resources available to deliver change relative to the scale of the population that need help (there are 1.7 million unemployed in the UK, and 9.1 million economically inactive individuals), and the variable quality of the support provision that is liable to occur given the range of contractors who will be engaged to deliver this.
Notable other absences and the setting up of scapegoats
There is nothing about a return to social partnership arrangements or the reinstatement of the Union Learning Fund. The institutional vacuum created by the abolition of the UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES) and the de-funding of the sector skills councils (SSCs) and Union Learn is not addressed and this means that the kind of intermediary institutions that play a central role in making skills systems function in most OECD countries remain weak and very fragmented in England. This, coupled with many of the points made above, suggest that the long shadow of the previous government’s thinking continues to set the limits of the possible in terms of what skills policy can and cannot encompass. This, in turn, reflects the fact that Labour arrived back in office after 14 years in opposition with few well-formed ideas about what it wanted to do on areas of education and training (E&T) policy beyond schools. The resultant vacuum has been filled by the dominant orthodoxy within DfE.
Overall, the Post-16 white paper is yet another in a long series of missed opportunities to disrupt and challenge the traditional policy narrative around skills and the resultant supply-side policy moves that tend to follow. Even judged as a menu for supply side interventions that are liable to shift the dial on filling skills gaps and shortages it is not particularly strong, mainly because there is insufficient public funding to support major interventions. It is in many ways yet more of the same, but with very limited financial resources behind it.
The final point to make in this brief overview is that the authors of the white paper have taken care to set up potential recipients for any blame for possible failure. The main ‘fall guy’ predictably turns out to be Skills England, now conveniently transferred to the Department for Work and Pensions’ (DWP) realm. Skills England has been handed a bracing list of ticking policy packages and objectives that it must deliver, despite a lack of resources or policy levers to pull. Its life expectancy as an executive agency may not be all that long.
