Education, Training and Jobs ...

8.5 We are disappointed that so few further education establishments responded to our call for evidence. It would have been useful to hear their views on how they are meeting current challenges and where they see a need for change and reform. Having said this, we believe that further education and skills training are of vital importance to the strengthening of the economy and the fulfilment of residents and businesses aspirations.

8.6 Businesses reported a skills gap in the borough, but struggled to articulate their needs in this area. This is perhaps indicative of national difficulties in finding practical solutions to the question of how to ensure skills provision meets the needs of businesses.

8.7 The Council drew our attention to its investment in the Leyton Skills Construction Centre. This has allowed residents to develop the skills needed not just for employment within the borough, but also within the Olympic Park. The House of Lords Olympic and Paralympic Legacy Committee recently highlighted the opportunities that will exist in the Olympic Park and around its fringe. For example, the iCITY at Hackney was cited. The Committee noted that more needed to be done to ensure that residents in host boroughs were equipped to take advantage of these opportunities.12 12 House of Lords Olympic and Paralympic Legacy Committee, Keeping the Flame Alive (November 2013).

8.8 But this is not the only opportunity for future jobs across London.

8.9 We think that there is a need for an evidence-based approach which maps skills training in the borough to current and future job opportunities across the city. This would help to ensure residents can access good job opportunities and grow the local economy. There may also be a need to try and make accessing information on opportunities that exist more straightforward for people.

8.10 We consider that the Council is best positioned to lead a cross-sector approach to developing skills training. It should play a leadership role in bringing business, education and skills providers together to help map current and future skills provision to meet the skills needs of the wider London economy.

8.11 The borough should consider investigating whether a ‘community budget’, which pools the budgets of all public sector providers, might best support the delivery of skills training.

8.12 The Council might also try to actively attract additional specialised training centres to the borough. Waltham Forest could become known as London’s centre of excellence for training and skills centres. This would allow residents to access training opportunities, but also prove attractive to future employers looking for somewhere to base their operations. Attracting a high profile provider in a growth sector could help boost wider efforts to promote and market the borough as a whole.

SKILLS AND JOBS
RECOMMENDATION 16
Local skills providers should work together to ensure that local skills provision matches, as far as possible, current and future job opportunities across London. The Council is best positioned to lead a cross-sector approach and we recommend that they investigate whether a public sector ‘community budget’ might best meet the needs of local people.

SKILLS AND JOBS
RECOMMENDATION 17
A mechanism is needed to secure skills provision that meets local needs and the Council should look at what models have been tried elsewhere.

SKILLS AND JOBS
RECOMMENDATION 18
The Council should try to lever in additional specialised training centres to attract businesses to the borough. It should consider becoming a centre of excellence for training and development in London. This would allow residents to access training opportunities, but also prove attractive to future employers looking for somewhere to base their operations.

SKILLS AND JOBS
RECOMMENDATION 19
The Council needs to work closely with neighbouring authorities on opportunities for jobs growth and training.

A concerted effort is required by all providers of skills training, working with employers and the Council, to raise skills levels.
Evidence submitted by the Skills Funding Agency “ ”

Prof John Perkins, chief scientific adviser at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has identified "a substantial demand for engineers". He has issued "a call to action" to government, industry and educators to "step up" to inspire future engineering talent and address skills shortages.

Business Secretary Vince Cable said too few teenagers were studying science. "Engineers must have a strong foundation in maths and science, especially physics.

Early intervention
"The number of young people choosing these subjects post-16 is relatively low, especially amongst women," said Mr Cable.

In his Review of Engineering Skills, Prof Perkins says the UK already relies on "inward migration" to fill skilled jobs in key sectors such as oil and gas extraction, aerospace, and computer, electronic and optical engineering.

"This should not be our long-term solution.

"We should support the UK's young people by preparing them to compete for highly paid, skilled engineering jobs, improving their career prospects and reducing the need to import engineering skills," says the review. It calls for "purposeful and effective early intervention to enthuse tomorrow's engineers" and ensure they have the "solid academic foundations to engage in the subject".

The report calls for as many young people as possible to study "rigorous curricula in maths and science". In particular it says the UK lags behind its competitors in the number of 16- to 18-year-olds studying maths.

'Misconceptions'
Prof Perkins says the profession suffers "from widespread misconceptions and lack of visibility that deter young people, and especially girls from pursuing it as a career".

The report refers to polling carried out for the Tomorrow's Engineers Week campaign, which suggests that only half of 11- to 14-year olds would consider a career in engineering.

This dropped to 35% among girls and only 24% of parents of girls said they thought engineering was a suitable profession for their daughters.

Prof Perkins draws "some comfort that we are heading in the right direction" with initiatives to inspire future engineers, a focus on maths and science in schools, more apprenticeships and "our continued strength in higher education". His 22 recommendations urge both short and long term action to "get the right messages to young people" - particularly girls, to ensure vocational training is high quality and high status and that "higher education continues to deliver".

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills said it was making available nearly £49m to boost engineering skills.

Long-term task
From January some £30m of this money will allow employers to bid for match-funding for training schemes to address specific engineering skills shortages. Another £18m will fund an elite training facility in Coventry, while Tomorrow's Engineers will get £250,000 to encourage schoolchildren into engineering.

Terry Scuoler, chief executive of EEF, the manufacturers' organisation, which represents almost 6,000 companies, said: "The report rightly shines the spotlight on the need for a pipeline of talented future engineers, with credible recommendations on how this can be achieved. "Whilst this is a long-term task, the message from employers is clear - we are ready to take on the challenge."

• Skills levels in Waltham Forest are very low, as in most of East London. Waltham Forest ranks 377th out of 408 local areas in Great Britain on overall skills and qualifications scores.
  
• Males are more likely to be unemployed, and females are more likely to be economically inactive. Ethnic minorities are more likely to be effected by worklessness.
• Waltham Forest has a higher proportion of small businesses than London, the Host Boroughs and North East London. 2.6% of employers provide 50.1% of jobs in the borough.
• Micro‐businesses (employing 10 or less people) are the most significant employer in Waltham Forest – providing 27.1% of jobs. This is unique to the borough among comparator areas.
• Waltham Forest has the smallest overall production and is the least productive borough in London
• The borough has low skills levels, which is critical to employment risk, and levels of unemployment and economic inactivity
• The profile of those economically inactive ‘Seeking work but unavailable’ are very likely to be young and male in Waltham Forest.
• Men are far more likely to be unemployed in Waltham Forest than women. The differential between rates of unemployment by gender in the borough is the highest is London.
• There are more Asian/Asian British unemployed in Waltham Forest than any other ethnic grouping. Asian/Asian British residents are nearly three times as likely to be unemployed as White residents, and twice as likely as Black/Black British residents.
• Economic inactivity is concentrated in the Asian/Asian British population of the borough, and predominantly amongst women.
• Of those who are economically inactive, the proportion of Asian/Asian British who are “not seeking but want a job” is strikingly low.

• 'Deeply worrying' report shows scale of problems with UK education system
  
• Literacy and numeracy tables show England 22 and 21 out of 24 countries
  
• 'School leavers among the least literate and numerate in developed world'
  
• Government calls them 'Labour’s children force-fed a diet of dumbing down'
  
• Report's author OECD admits research 'doesn’t look good for the UK'
  
• England only country where those retiring have better skills than the young
  
• Labour says years of rising GCSE grades proves they 'drove up standards'
  
• England is the only developed country producing school leavers who are worse at maths and reading than their grandparents, according to a damning report.

Damning report:
An international study has found that the UK's young people are 'among the least literate and numerate in the developed world' The figures showed many Japanese school leavers are more advanced than English university graduates.
The OECD said England was the only country where the oldest age group studied (55-65) had a higher proficiency in literacy and numeracy than the youngest (16-24) after other factors such as sex, socio-economic background and type of occupation were taken into account.  
The organisation warned England would struggle with competitors in global markets unless urgent action was taken.
England was the only country in developed world in which those aged 55-65 performed better than 16-24-year-olds England was the only country in developed world in which those aged 55-65 performed better than 16-24-year-olds

LABOUR'S EDUCATION BILLIONS 'FAILED TO RAISE STANDARDS'
Today's findings show that the billions poured into education by Labour failed to push up standards of literacy and numeracy, critics have said.
The Government has claimed that the OECD's research underlines who 'Labour's children, educated under a Labour government and force-fed a diet of dumbing down and low expectations.'
Official figures from the Office for National Statistics have shown that Labour’s spending on education rose from £35.3billion in 2000 to £63.9billion in 2009.
Yet it appears large numbers left school with no improvements in standards when compared to previous generations.
Last year a different report found despite Tony Blair declaring his priorities as ‘education, education, education’ when he swept to power in 1997, a huge increase in spending on schools led to ‘no improvement in student learning outcomes’.
The OECD study – Education at a Glance – found that expenditure on UK primary and secondary schools and colleges as a percentage of GDP increased from 3.6 per cent in 1995 to 4.5 per cent in 2009, higher than the OECD average of four per cent. At the same time, there has been ‘no improvement in student learning outcomes’, the report said

Spending in the sector soared by 78 per cent from £50billion to £89billion by the time the party lost the election in 2010. During this period, GCSE and A-level grades rose every year, which critics claimed was evidence of dumbing down.
Andreas Schleicher, of the OECD, said young adults had more qualifications than those nearing retirement, but not greater abilities. This indicated that there had been grade inflation and that qualifications did not necessarily mean better skills. The finding ‘doesn’t look good for the UK’, Mr Schleicher said.

The 466-page study was the first carried out by the OECD into the work skills of 16 to 65-year-olds, establishing their abilities in literacy, numeracy and problem solving.
A total of 166,000 were interviewed in 24 countries, including 9,000 in England and Northern Ireland. Scotland and Wales were not covered.
The study found a quarter of adults in England (8.5million) have the maths skills of a ten-year-old, with a large minority only able to perform sums with whole numbers.
Literacy levels are also below average, with 16.4 per cent of adults (5.8million) reading at the level of a child in the penultimate year of primary school.
Just 42.4 per cent of young adults were proficient in problem solving. This was around 8 percentage points less than the average of 50.7 per cent, and 21 behind the best-performing country, South Korea.
England produced 8 per cent of the world’s most highly skilled workers in the late 1960s and 70s. This has dropped to 4 per cent and the trend is expected to continue.
The report said the ‘talent pool of highly skilled adults in England... is likely to shrink relative to that of other countries’ in the next few decades.
The slide could be reversed only if ‘significant action is taken to improve skills proficiency among young people’.
England also lags behind other nations in the proportion of people continuing with education into adulthood. One positive note was that the country has been successful in making good use of its pool of skilled talent, resulting in high productivity and wages.

The Coalition has taken steps to improve education, demanding an end to grade inflation and making courses and exams tougher. The number of top GCSE and A-level grades has now decreased for the past two years.
John Allan, of the Federation of Small Businesses, said: ‘The OECD report highlights what our members tell us – that young people don’t have the literacy and numeracy skills to do the job properly. We need action to improve these crucial basic skills from an early age.’
The shadow education secretary, Tristram Hunt, defended Labour’s record, saying it ‘drove up standards in maths and English across our schools, evident in the huge improvements we saw in GCSE results between 1997 and 2010’.

Mike Harris, of the Institute of Directors, said the report ‘underlines the credibility gap between the picture painted by decades of rises in exam pass rates and employers’ real-world experience of interviewing and employing people’.

Former Labour education and employment secretary David Blunkett questioned the OECD’s methodology and said the report ‘warranted united action, not party political point scoring’.
Education has undergone massive change since Labour began replacing grammar schools with the comprehensive system in 1965.
In 1988 GCSEs replaced O-levels and the National Curriculum was introduced, and in 1997 Labour abolished the Assisted Places Scheme awarding free places at fee-paying schools to gifted children from low or middle-income families.
The academy schools programme began in 2000, with schools funded by the state and made independent of local government control.
In 2010 the Coalition launched free schools, which are similar to academies but can be set up by groups including parents, teachers, charities.

This obvious decline cannot be swept under the carpet any longer”
Rachel Wenstone National Union of Students

But the numbers have been been tumbling for two years and the report says that next year's recruitment figures do not suggest that this downward trend will be reversed.
Professor Thomas, who is vice-chancellor of Bristol University, said: "The reality is that the UK needs more graduates and relies heavily on part-time higher education to meet these fast-changing skills needs in a fast-changing world.
"We ignore part-time study's transformative power for individuals and society at our peril.
"In England in particular, numbers are declining and do not look like rallying."
The report says that the sharp decline in numbers reflects a combination of factors.

'Urgent push'
It calls for part-time courses to be seen as an integral part of higher education and "not as an add-on".
"There needs to be an urgent push at all levels - national, regional and local - to help potential students and employers understand the value of and opportunities for part-time higher education," says the report.

It's shocking that the number of part-time undergraduate students has plummeted over the last two years”
Katja Hall CBI

• Steel fixing
  
• Introduction to general construction
  
• Kerb laying
  
• Drain laying
  
• Paving
  
• Flooring
  
• Work at heights
  
• Introduction to roofing
  
• Roofing
  
• Rail track safety or tunnel skills passport

The courses are run by the National Construction College 
Courses schedule
Steel fixing
This course will introduce the learner to the various types of reinforcement used in the construction industry today. The course will include the different types of ties in everyday use, steel shapes, sizes, basic drawings, schedules and design elements when constructing basic ground beams, floor slabs and retaining walls.
Roofing
This course will introduce delegates to types of roofing used in the construction industry, including the different types of tiles, battening techniques in everyday use and constructing a basic everyday roof.

General Construction Appreciation
This course will introduce the delegate to the various elements of construction. These include kerb laying, block paving and basic drain laying used in the construction industry. The delegate will be taught basic skills and given a basic knowledge of how to use and read drawings and include the different types of techniques used to lay kerbs, lay block paving and lay drains.

How to apply
To find out more about the training places that are available at the NCC East London campus at the Waltham Forest Construction Training Centre please call 0344 994 4433 or visit www.nationalconstructioncollege.co.uk.