We Need a Genuinely Demand-Led Skills System

Anyone coming to the skills sector for the first time will swiftly find a baffling array of government "initiatives" and quangos. These latter bodies invariably claim to represent employer need, increase the status of vocational education or deliver best practice (delete as appropriate). The result is that the skills system as it currently stands has lost the confidence of those that use it and work within it. Constant change and upheaval has created "reform fatigue". The author argues that more fundamental change, dramatically paring down the role of the state and boosting the Adult Safeguarded Learning budget, will be needed if the skills system is to break out of the vicious cycle of ineffective reform after ineffective reform, initiative after initiative, government diktat followed by government diktat.