Economy and Fair Work Committee [Draft]

Meeting date: Wednesday, September 27, 2023

Official Report 735KB pdf

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Skills Delivery Landscape

Our next item of business is an evidence session on the independent review of the skills delivery landscape report by James Withers. I welcome James Withers to the committee. I would be grateful if members and the witness could be as concise as possible with questions and answers.

The report was published in June. How do you feel about the Government’s response to the report and will you update us on whether there were any discussions with the Government over the summer about implementation?

Sure, okay. Good morning, everyone. Thanks, convener, for the invitation.

The report was published back in May. I met the Minister for Higher and Further Education; and Minister for Veterans last week, to get an update as to where things are. I characterise my view of where things are by saying that I have been pretty heartened by the response. There have been some initial moves around commitments to a single funding body and the future of skills planning. From my perspective, it was quite good to hear that before the recess, so that there was not a vacuum over the summer.

My sense is that the Scottish Government ministers are taking their time to consider all the implications of what I have set out in the report. I am conscious that I have landed them with a significant reform job. I made some criticisms of the skills system as it stands, and its complexity means that the reform itself will be complex.

I will keep my answer concise. I felt that reforms were needed in delivery elements—big structural reforms in how the whole system is set up. More than that, however, we need cultural reforms in how we think about a learning system as a whole. We must try to move beyond what I concluded was a chasm—a false divide—existing between education on the one hand and vocation on the other. The reform job is significant and will take a few years. My gut feeling is that the response has been heartening in terms of support for the direction of travel, but it will take some time to work through the detail.

Thank you. I recognise that the report made a point of saying that it is not a rear-view mirror—it is not an appraisal of past performance—but you mentioned significant critiques of the system and a real need for cultural reform and big structural reform. Are those reforms overdue? Has there been a lack of direction and leadership from the Government or other agencies? It is a critical report and the structural reforms that are outlined are fairly significant. Are those overdue? Has there been a lack of attention from the Government in those areas?

The review was evidence-led. I have had 15 or 20 years’ experience of the skills system, but through the fairly narrow lens of a business and an employer. It became clear to me when starting the work how complex and broad the system is and how complex the customer base is. Among the hundreds of people I interacted with during the review, I did not meet a single person, either with delivery responsibilities within the system or as a customer of the system, who felt that it was working optimally.

Given the scale of economic transformation that is coming to Scotland—and, I suppose, the world—in terms of the race to net zero, digitalisation, automation and the impact of artificial intelligence, even if the system were working optimally, I do not believe that it would be fit for the future. There has been a lack of leadership from the Government and the system has been allowed to evolve. Systems evolve naturally, but they do not reform themselves.

There is no clear description of what “good” looks like for the system. When I started the review, my first question was whether, if we were going to build a system for 10 years’ time, we had agreed on what “good” looks like. In reality, there were many different definitions, depending on what part of the skills system you were in.

There has been too passive an approach by the Government over the years to allow the system to reform. It needs much clearer leadership and a much clearer vision if all parts of the system are going to work collectively. They are not doing that, in my view. They all work within their individual areas and they do not view themselves collaboratively as working as a single system.

As a final point, there is a terrific amount of good in the system. I met none but passionate individuals who were keen to make a difference in skills delivery. However, the way in which the system is structured and set up has embedded fragmentation.

You note that setting out how to implement your recommendations was beyond the scope of the review. Nonetheless, you have been immersed in and have a good in-depth knowledge of the system. What is the biggest single barrier to successfully realising the vision for Scotland’s skills system that you have outlined?

There is not a single agreed vision or definition of success for the system. There is no north star that everyone is pointed towards. Those involved in colleges and universities, or those involved in the delivery of apprenticeships and training, will have different view of success. Even strategic guidance letters—that goes to Government—are focused on individual agencies and what they are expected to deliver. That makes sense, but it does not treat the agencies as though they are part of a coherent system.

Saying that implementation was beyond my remit sounds like a little bit of a cop-out, but I took a whole-system view. My concern was that I could see, from previous attempts to reform other parts of the public sector, that it is easy to go down rabbit holes of short-term efficiencies and head counts. My view was that I needed to step back and look at the system as a whole and think about what it should try to deliver for the customer base. The downside of that approach is that it does not get into the nitty-gritty or the practicality of how you move functions between one part of the public sector and another.

To your question, a clear definition of success is critical. For me, the system has to consider itself as a single learning system, not a system that is built around a huge fork in the road where you go down either the education and learning route or the vocation and skills route, because that is leaving people behind.

You say that there is no single barrier to the realisation of the vision, but that it might be different for component parts. If that is so and if the vision is different for the component parts, will that not lead to fragmentation? There should be one vision. The barriers should be fairly self-evident within that. How do you avoid the fragmentation that comes with having your universities here and your Skills Development Scotland there and so on? How do you see that coming together?

I suppose that this is where the structural reform comes in. I saw five clear moving parts to that. As things stand, we have funding split across two different agencies. We have qualifications split across at least two different agencies with others feeding into that. We have university and college qualification development set up entirely separately from our apprenticeship framework. It is not a surprise to me that apprenticeships remain distinct from the core learning system. They are over there, shoved into a separate agency with separate annualised uncertain budgets, caps and numbers. They are not embedded in the heart of the system.

It is my view that there should be a single funding agency covering all post-16 learning. There should be a single qualifications body—a new qualifications body—that should take a view beyond what happens at schools, into apprenticeship development and other vocational training.

Then enterprise agencies need to take a crystal-clear lead on business support. At the moment, if you are a business looking at workforce development, you might go to your local enterprise agency or Jobcentre. You might go to a local authority. You might go to SDS. Having clarity on what different agencies have responsibility for across the entire system is critical.

The system is incredibly complex and I heard a lot of evidence from people bewildered by the complexity. I was not inherently concerned about complexity. The system needs to be complex because the customer base is incredibly complex with people of different ages, aspirations, backgrounds and barriers and from different parts of the country. The issue is not complexity. It is a lack of clarity and confusion about who is doing what, even within the system itself. I did not meet anyone within the skills system who had an overview of every moving part.

To bring you back to the original question, what barriers are there to realising the changes?

The barriers to realising the changes, aside from being clear on the vision that we are trying to achieve, are probably similar to other elements of public sector reform. It needs time and tolerance. I am not entirely sure those two things are offered often in public sector reform because of the desire to see benefits quickly. The benefits of this will not be seen particularly quickly. They will be longer-term. The lack of short-term wins and benefits will be seized upon by those in the system who are opposed to change. That is a critical barrier and it will require a strong ministerial and political stomach and, hopefully, cross-party support to drive it through.

I see the barrier as political rather than a lack of ability to build a system. That can be done. Other countries have systems that work in different ways. I did not see anything in place elsewhere for Scotland to lift, but I have no doubt that we have the building blocks to build a skills system that will be a competitive advantage for Scotland. The barriers are most likely to be similar to those in other areas of public sector reform.

Good morning, James. Thanks for being here this morning and also for all the work that has gone into this report.

I want to pick up on your points about the possible complexities of our future economy. You mentioned net zero, artificial intelligence, digitisation and all that. As you have outlined, one of the challenges is that nobody has an overview of all the moving parts.

So many different streams and possibilities are coming into the net zero skills and training space. I heard what you said to Colin Beattie about how implementation is not your game, but how can we ensure that we get an implementation that aligns? As you were speaking, I was reminded in some ways of the work of Mariana Mazzucato and the challenge-based and mission-based, rather than Government-department-based, approach. How can we move into that overall systems-based approach that takes account of the different ages, demographics and geographies in the net zero space at the moment? What do we need to look at?

There are some real challenges around the net zero space. Almost every day I was involved in this, I heard reference multiple times to “green skills”. You then ask what these green skills are, and there is a gap. There is a real need to understand what we are talking about in that sense.

We could have a good go at it but, because of the scale of the change that is coming, no one can predict with real accuracy what our economy and society will look like in 10 years. We therefore need to focus on a workforce that is agile. Whether they are called microcredentials, metaskills or whatever the jargon might be, the ability to build in the core building-block skills of problem-solving, communication and innovation, will be critical.

I predict that we will have multiple different types of jobs that will require to be filled by multiple different types of people. My concern about the skills system at the moment is that there is something of a war going on between those who advocate for full-time education—the so-called golden pathway to university—and those who ask why we warehouse people in years of endless university education when we need to knock them into the workplace as soon as possible. In reality, we will need both.

10:45  

However, the skills system is set up in a way that agencies advocate for those different parts. I met them all and they could all made a compelling case for why we should take funding from one part to and give it to another. I could have taken an easy step and said, “We need more money for apprenticeships”, but if you move money from one part of a fragmented system to another, you are still left with a fragmented system.

A difficult onus that I have put on the Government is the need for better prioritisation. Scotland probably needs to set two, three or four national priorities for skills development. We should ask all regions to respond to that. I have copped out by not naming those priorities but ministerial, political and parliamentary leadership should come in to identify them and there will be judgment calls to be made on that. Beyond those top two or three priorities, the regions and local areas need to be released so that they can crack on, and they should be given greater autonomy and control over funding to determine the potential priorities for their areas beyond the bigger national priorities.

Can I unpick that a little bit and ask you to name what might be a priority area? Is there a danger of replicating the same kind of compartmentalisation and silo effect that currently exists by doing exactly that and saying “You over here can do this. You over there can do that”, when we need them to talk to each other? We need to break down all those silos.

We see it in macroeconomic structures such as the European Union, where specialisations of economic activity led to weaknesses. How do we ensure that we do not reproduce that in the skills space, net zero, AI or whatever it is, in Scotland more generally?

It is a risk. Most people support prioritisation until they realise they are not a priority or they pick the wrong priority; that is absolutely a risk.

There is a tension within the system around what should be done nationally and what should be done regionally. I am sure that that is true across a number of areas of public sector delivery. Scotland will have some competitive advantages, opportunities or distinct workforce challenges that will require a national approach, and the execution of that national approach might be tweaked slightly differently in regional areas.

I will take the college sector as an example. I have to say that I was blown away by it. I had an outdated view of the college sector and, until I did this, I had not spent much time inside our colleges. They are a phenomenal asset and yet they are so often constrained. The national agency will need permission to determine whether it can shift some apprenticeship places from one framework to another. Those places are often rooted in communities and connected to businesses and schools. It strikes me that if these institutions are there, receiving not far short of £1 billion a year, we can trust them to determine some of the priorities beneath the big national big-ticket items.

Okay. I have a quick final point on your point. The definitions of green skills and low-carbon or net-zero jobs have been a frustration for many of us. They are not necessarily just in construction or energy or those kinds of industries. We can talk about care work and the more vocational elements that you highlighted. Is that an opportunity for us to bring together the golden pathway that you describe, in a way?

Yes. There is a real need for more work-based learning opportunities from as early an age as possible. My remit was not to look into schools but I felt that I could not do the review without looking at careers services in schools and how foundation apprenticeships work. At times, I worked fairly closely with Louise Hayward, who is also doing a review of qualifications.

It struck me that I did not see a distinct divide between vocation and education. I will take a graduate apprenticeship—a poor name that does not describe what it is—or a degree apprenticeship, as they call them south of the border, which is a better name for it, as a classic example. You bring the worlds of work and tertiary education together through a single fantastic vehicle. The fact that universities down south will do more in a single year than all Scotland combined suggests that we have greater potential in that area. That is an example of how you can bring the two worlds together and not see them as somehow separate.

To follow on from Maggie Chapman talking about the green economy, I will also throw in the blue economy, if you do not mind. We all recognise the massive opportunity in skills development for the blue economy in Scotland, but I am concerned that we are not weaving those skills and that potential for our pupils into our schools. For example, the construction industry needs an extra 22,500 tradespeople and engineers by 2028 if we are to hit the Government’s 2030 targets. In reality, that will not happen.

I believe that, when we talk about green skills, we are speaking to a lot of people who think we are talking about people planting trees rather than software engineers and what not.

I am also pleased to hear you talk about the further education sector in the way that you do, but our FE sector has unfilled apprenticeship places and our engineering companies are screaming for engineers. We do not bring the two together. That is where I am going. Did you look at how we can weave future needs into our education system at the earliest possible opportunity?

Yes. It is a critical area and it is where I saw the potential to embed a truly national careers service.

It was interesting that, when I spoke to colleges, some were overwhelmed with demand from people who want to go into the beauty industry or hairdressing. When I met the commission on land-based learning, I found that it did not have that same demand from people who want to go into forestry. There is a whole piece around that. You cannot be what you cannot see. Everyone goes to the hairdresser and people see them as real, but not everyone has experience of an engineering firm or jobs.

I recommended that SDS should lose a significant number of its functions while recasting itself as that careers agency, which is not the same as it doing everything, but it provides momentum to embed it into communities and local areas. That means providing greater opportunity to see the career and economic opportunities for individuals. There is a gap between the career options that people see when they are at school and the opportunities that exist in the workplace. If they could see that, it is more likely that they will eventually be that. That disconnect is challenging.

My final point is that this whole area around skills has felt a little bit like death by review. There has been the Muir report, and Graham Smith did brilliant work on careers. I have done my review, and what Louise Hayward has looked at on the future of the qualification curriculum is interesting. Beyond individual subject highers and other qualifications, there could be a general Scottish diploma or a baccalaureate for Scotland. The third part, which is work-based or community-based learning, would provide opportunities for raising greater awareness of the future in engineering and green jobs as well as blue economy jobs. That disconnect exists.

I spoke to school pupils who still viewed the careers service as the place where they are sent if they are failing academically. That is where our system is still failing. An agency that has our future skills needs as an arrow focus stands more chance of getting that right, as challenging as it is.

I am at a loss with the idea of how a national framework devolves down into the local economy. The obvious one is the transition from oil and gas to a green economy, although I imagine that that will be predominantly in the north-east, where the decisions on that will be made.

On Monday, I was with a group that works with children who were disenfranchised from school but who now go to school two days a week and go to the group three days a week. It is a complex landscape out there. How do we create a national framework that allows all that good work still to happen?

I have talked about national prioritisation and so I will not mention that again. I have suggested that the function of skills planning sits within the Scottish Government and comes out of a mix of the Scottish Funding Council and Skills Development Scotland. That requires a consistent regional template and approach to skills planning, not to have regional skills planning done by the Government. Scotland is not big enough to justify having lots of different frameworks for how we do skills planning.

The question is about where we do that skills planning, and that is not easy to answer. My instinct says that our eight city region areas might be the vehicles for that, but they need to get a proper representation of people around the table. I heard from some colleges that were not around the table, and small and medium-sized enterprises also often feel that they are not at the table. However, if they are the right geographic areas, city regions are the best model that I have seen yet for that skills planning. If we can trust those partnerships—which in many cases do not have a constitutional body as such but are collaborations of people—with steering billions of pounds of capital investment, we can trust them with the skills planning that sits alongside that.

Good morning, James. I am interested in the boundaries of city region deals, given that my area, the Borders, is in two, including in one in the north of England, but I will not go there at the moment.

I want to highlight the issue that you raise about the cluttered landscape where several organisations often have overlapping responsibilities and there is no one-stop shop for the customer base. You do not suggest decluttering the number of players in the landscape. Instead, you recommend building collaboration into the design of the bodies. How do we do that, given the fact that we have been here before with the enterprise and skills review in 2016 and interagency competition is probably worse now than it was before that review?

You are right. I suppose that there was no bonfire of agencies within my review. It was about getting much greater clarity into their roles and so, in a sense, giving Skills Development Scotland a much narrower, tighter, clearer focus on careers. It does brilliant work in delivering that at the moment, but I felt that there was an inherent conflict in Skills Development Scotland’s ability to deliver impartial skills advice while at the same time being the advocate and delivery agent for apprenticeships, which are only one part of the skills system. To provide proper impartial advice on skills to people of all ages, you need to have no skin in the game on any part of that particular system.

In a sense, it might be naive to call for that collaboration between the agencies to just happen, but I come back to my point about being crystal clear about what the whole system is trying to achieve and then getting people in their lanes. Funding should be dealt with by one body, qualifications by another and careers by another, while business support is led by one body and skills planning is led by yet another. That requires an inherent amount of collaboration and I am not sure that amalgamating all that into a giant agency would necessarily deliver that collaboration. It is a cultural point more than a structural point about ministers being robust in holding agencies to account for how they deliver that skills system.

My review took it as read that the three education institutions that the Muir report had recommended were established were set up and that ministers had announced that. If I had gone for real amalgamation, I would probably have had to stretch well into areas that reviews had covered previously. My view was that, if we could achieve the prize of clarity first, that would address a huge number of the issues with the current skills system. That is not to say that, in 10 years, someone’s door will be chapped and we will be asked whether we should amalgamate agencies if their roles are clearer.

There will still be agencies that will effectively have overlapping responsibilities. That is the nature of South of Scotland Enterprise. Even local authorities will still have an element of overlapping responsibilities.

How far do we need to go? Do we need to change those responsibilities? Can we put in place any other mechanism to ensure that somebody at least takes the lead? Often the experience in regional economic partnerships, for example, is that several organisations have similar responsibilities but nobody takes a lead. What mechanism do we need to put in place to make sure that somebody is delivering and taking the lead on that when they have that overlapping responsibility? Some of those responsibilities are quite general and they are not often specific.

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The Government is responsible for ensuring that skills planning happens. The population of a regional skills plan is devolved down to a city region, but the prize of greater autonomy over funding and establishing educational provision in an area are won by demonstrating a clear regional skills plan and, crucially, a clear delivery plan. That plan sets who will do what and when. Having clarity on who does what would win you the prize of greater autonomy over funding, which largely does not exist at the moment. My hope is that that acts as a catalyst to provide greater clarity as to who does what.

However, I completely accept that there will be overlapping responsibilities between what an enterprise agency does and what a local authority does. My point was that the enterprise agencies should be the first port of call for workforce development in business because SDS has that responsibility at the moment. Scottish Enterprise has a broader responsibility for business innovation, but where is the line between workforce development and business innovation? It was becoming too blurred. Even the enterprise agencies would say that there was neither clarity nor sufficient collaboration in how they worked with Skills Development Scotland to work through that. In a sense, without that good collaboration, the overlaps become barriers rather than good opportunities for strategic collaboration.

Good morning. I will go back to some of the answers that James Withers gave to Maggie Chapman on apprenticeships. Your report has a lot on apprenticeships and apprenticeship funding, and you have expressed your view on graduate apprenticeships, which are an exciting development for people who want to experience work and also get a qualification.

One frustration that I find when I speak to employers is that they offer apprenticeships but feel that they do not get any funding support from the public sector. When I speak to Skills Development Scotland about that issue, they recognise it and they say that apprenticeship places are oversubscribed.

I hear what you say about funding, but is it fair to say that apprenticeships have become the poor relation in the skills landscape? Do we need to do more to level up the funding for apprenticeships?

This is where the parity of esteem question comes in. Apprenticeships have been the poor relation. I say that not so much as a statement on funding, although there are real issues around funding levels and the ability to meet the demands, but as a statement on how we view apprenticeships.

Let us consider the foundation apprenticeship, which is another vehicle that is brilliant—it has a terrible name, but we will put that to one side. A level 6 foundation apprenticeship has the same parity of esteem as a level 6 higher, but we call them different things and they are treated differently by different people. Pupils and parents have the perception that a foundation apprenticeship is one of the better second-best options if someone does not go to university. There is a cultural issue around how we perceive apprenticeships.

We have the ability to do more by not hiving off the whole apprenticeship system into a separate agency with separate funding. That cements the separation of apprenticeships from the learning system. They should be absolutely embedded into the heart of qualifications development in the same way as secondary school qualifications and other forms of vocational training qualifications are.

The funding should sit in the same agency. I would like to see universities having the freedom to utilise the core funding that they get from the Scottish Funding Council to deliver degrees through either apprenticeships or full-time study. Why do we have that separated off, capped and uncertain? It is not surprising that they are seen as something separate that you can do if you do not follow the mainstream. If we want to change that and make apprenticeships part of the mainstream, we need to put them into the heart of it.

There are some real challenges around funding. It was not for me to take a view on the future of tuition fees but, when you have £1 billion going into funding free tuition, it massively limits your ability to do other things. The amount that is spent on skills is £3.2 billion, and it would be good to provide greater flexibility to use funding. Crucially, in local areas, if there is demand for apprenticeships, giving institutions greater freedom, trust and autonomy to build provision and use funding might start freeing things up. We need more apprenticeships and we need more work-based learning.

It was too simplistic for me to say, “Put more money into apprenticeships,” because the current system would deem that as taking money from university or college full-time education provision to put into apprenticeships. That would continue the spirit of fragmentation, and the two worlds are too divided.

That is helpful.

On funding, did you look at all at the apprenticeship levy and how that is allocated? I hear from UK-wide employers that south of the border, there is much more transparency around the apprenticeship levy and how employers can access it. In Scotland, the levy seems to go into the block grant. I have asked parliamentary questions to try to understand how much of the apprenticeship levy money goes into actually funding apprenticeships. Trying to understand that is like getting through treacle. Were you any more successful in understanding where that funding goes?

In all honesty, I did not spend much time on the apprenticeship levy. I viewed it as a policy question, so I ducked it, in a sense. In my experience—going back to my old job in businesses—who pays the levy and where it goes is certainly cloudy at best.

My wider concern about the apprenticeship levy is that it has probably dented the business community’s faith in the wider skills system. If we can provide a clearer system and a stronger career system, which truly emphasises the opportunities across a whole set of industries and different types of roles, we can build greater employer engagement in the system.

At the moment, there is good employer engagement in apprenticeship development frameworks. SDS and the Scottish Apprenticeship Advisory Board have done that well, but that is only one part of the system. Building a better business voice in shaping the entire learning system will, I hope, help to overcome some of the scars that there are in the apprenticeship levy system. Certainly businesses in Scotland that have paid into it do not have a huge amount of faith that they have got value back out of it.

Kevin Stewart, would you like to ask a question?

I have a brief question about the green skills aspect, which we have touched on already. Many of the jobs and courses that we have fit well with the green skills agenda. From talking to an oil and gas company last night at Scottish Renewables, I know that a direct move could be made from the work that they do now in oil and gas to the work in renewables.

Does the skills sector—whether that be SDS, the colleges or the universities—recognise that that is the case and that some of the adaptation that needs to be undertaken is pretty small indeed?

The delivery parts of the skills system broadly understand how that adaptation and that economic evolution will manifest. The use of data, labour market intelligence and business intelligence is still too weak to understand exactly what that will look like. There are good models out there that could be expanded.

The Glasgow city region intelligence hub uses good data—which is not just churned out of a computer but informed by businesses on the ground—on the skills requirement and the provision that is needed to meet that. A lot of labour market intelligence that is done centrally still does not speak to particular sectors and does not necessarily seem that accurate. I remember looking at that in my old job in food and drink. Again, greater responsibility, power and autonomy for regions and places to determine how to respond would be better.

Broadly, there is an understanding that evolution is taking place and that there are probably some quick wins and steps that be taken to tap into that. I have done a whole-system review of this area, and pilots could be done to trial different things in different places that could, I hope, provide a model to follow.

You mentioned the Glasgow aspect of data gathering. In my own patch in the north-east of Scotland, Opportunity North East does similar things.

The intelligence and the data are good, but are some of our institutions talking enough and—this is probably more important—are they listening to businesses about their future needs?

That is not happening sufficiently or in a way that represents the full business base. Some big business employers have the resources to engage with the institutions, and SDS has good relationships with some of the bigger employers in Scotland. The voices of smaller businesses and even medium-sized businesses are lost in the system.

The Developing the Young Workforce network has real potential to be accelerated and become that employer voice. I have other views about how the DYW network could potentially evolve, but putting that employer voice into the heart of the system would be inherently good.

That is different from the system being set up to serve employers. One concern is that I saw parts of the system looking as though they existed to serve the needs of businesses more than the needs of employees, users and learners of all ages. Again, balance is needed in there.

Thank you for your indulgence, convener. I will have to leave the committee soon, I am afraid.

Good morning, James. I want to go back to apprenticeships, which Murdo Fraser touched on. Two of the 12 essential pillars for success for post-school learning relate to employers, which is great. However, I noticed from your comments this morning that you want to take skills planning from SDS and put it in the Scottish Government. There is the apprenticeship approvals group, which is made up of employers and is responsible for approving all Scottish apprenticeships, and there is the Scottish Apprenticeship Advisory Board, which your report says does

“excellent work in influencing the shape of apprenticeships”.

How can we retain that employer expertise within the system if we are going to devolve it down to city regions?

That is where the DYW network has a real opportunity. SAAB has done really good work in helping to naturalise the concept of apprenticeships, inform their development, and identify the frameworks that should be developed. However, I go back to my point that the very structures that were required to build our apprenticeship family—a dedicated focus, a dedicated agency and dedicated structures were required—are now holding apprenticeships back. They keep them separate from the rest of the learning system and the rest of the funding system. By putting apprenticeship development into a qualifications body, we would be putting apprenticeship funding into a funding body along with other types of learning.

The same principle applies to how employers shape the learning system. It cannot just be about an apprenticeship group that is separate from the rest of the system. DYW could potentially put greater resource into, and focus on, informing all parts of the learning system, including apprenticeships. If you were the SAAB with my report suggesting that you should be wound up, my message to you would be that it is partly because of the work that you have done that we want to see the same principles embedded across all parts of the learning system and in all parts of the country.

I have also suggested that there should be, above that DYW network—in effect, I suppose this is currently the DYW chairs group—the national employers board, which can help to inform the national priorities that we talked about earlier. I see the opportunity to accelerate the employer voice, not dismantle it, and particularly to put apprenticeships back in the mainstream, because they are too important to be carved out separately.

11:15  

You mentioned Developing the Young Workforce. I was pleased to see that your report talked about the armed forces and veterans and the need for lifelong learning and retraining. There are three Army barracks in my constituency. Much of the current system quite rightly focuses on young people and positive destinations to break the generational unemployment situation that we have had over a number of years. Given the state of the financial situation and the public funds, how can we get the balance right so that we maintain positive destinations for young folk and also introduce lifelong learning? Do you see efficiencies that would help that in the reorganisation?

Again, that is about ensuring a broad perspective on skills delivery. I would like to see the “Y” dropped from DYW. I would like to see a developing workforce network for people of all ages. That is not because generational and youth unemployment is not still an intransigent issue in many areas. Looking back over the past three or four years, DYW and the young person’s guarantee have been brilliant initiatives with a brilliant focus, but a lot of that was predicated on a post-pandemic situation, which was going to be a generation of unemployed young people. That has not come to pass. The pandemic has not had that impact.

We are in a country with a shrinking workforce. The Office for National Statistics forecasts that our population in Scotland will shrink faster than the population in any other part of the UK. Immigration will not be the answer. That is more challenging now than it was when we were in the EU. The need for us to tap into every shred of potential of our people is more critical than it ever has been. I have seen some numbers. If in the region of 400,000 people in Scotland are economically inactive and could be active—we are not talking about the long-term ill or people who are unable to work, but people who could be active—one of the most critical parts of the future system is having an all-age focus.

Okay. I have a final point to ask you about. You mentioned in your report that apprentices

“struggled to have their voices and opinions listened to within the system.”

Unless I missed it, I did not see how you think we should be able to address that.

I spent time in a number of colleges, and apprenticeships moving through that process certainly seemed to be well supported in the college network. I was quite taken with how that worked and how, on meeting people, they felt they were able to shape the immediate short-term environment of the courses that were on-going. The question for me is how they shape the future of that.

How structures are built in to do that is open to some question. If a DYW network, including DYW co-ordinators working hand in hand with careers advisers—currently the SDS advisers—in schools, works closely with those who are going through apprenticeships, those who have come out of the back of them and those who might be going into them, that might, I hope, capture the voice.

I felt that that could be strengthened. It was not a fundamental weakness in the system. Other areas flashed more red lights for me. However, there is definitely potential to capture their views on their experiences of the system and how it could be more attractive to them.

When you talked about hairdressing, engineering and forestry earlier, it struck me that those roles are traditionally gendered ones. We know from the discussion about the modern apprenticeships system that it is very male dominated.

You have talked about the need for structural reform. Do you see the structural reform that you have suggested in any way addressing inequalities in the system? How can we address occupational segregation issues, particularly in relation to gender, although we can apply the same approach to disability? You will know that the committee has done a short piece of work on the disability employment gap. Do you see inequalities? How will we address inequalities through the reforms that you have suggested?

I spent some time with a whole range of third sector bodies that advocate for gender-based reform or represent marginalised communities. There was talk about veterans reintegrating back out of military service. I talked with Ima Jackson in Glasgow about migrants coming to the country and how we properly profile their skills and match them to the frameworks that we already have.

There is no single vision for what good looks like in the system. In the absence of that, I wrote my own. It was not perfect, but my view was that every individual in Scotland should have an equitable opportunity to access the learning that they need to thrive. For me, that equity bit should be built right at the heart of it.

You cannot be what you cannot see. That goes back to the need for state-of-the-art careers advice and provision in schools. From my experience of talking to groups, some gender bias or unconscious bias or reality in some occupations was ingrained at a really early stage. How we talk about the opportunities will be important.

Post my review, I have seen some pretty amazing edtech platforms that have been built. One is called myglobalbridge; another is called Skillzminer. They match people’s skills and potential to jobs that are on offer. They are fuelled by AI, and they are completely anonymous in relation to issues of gender, race, background, age and all of that. That is a really interesting potential approach. If unconscious bias sits within any part of the employer community, it gets around some of that. Some of that edtech investment could be really valuable.

Okay. Thank you very much. That brings us to the end of the evidence session. I thank James Withers for his attendance at the meeting. We will now move into private session.

11:21 Meeting continued in private until 11:47.