Is Skills England improving skills in England?

When the UK government announced the creation of Skills England in July 2024, a few weeks after the general election that saw Labour take control from the Conservatives for the first time in 14 years, newly-elected prime minister Keir Starmer stated that England’s skills system was “in a mess”. But Starmer’s premiership is already over, amid a sense that he hasn’t moved quickly enough to effect the change he promised. And skills policy is seen by some as a case in point.

According to the government’s press release announcing Skills England, skills shortages doubled in the country between 2017 and 2022, accounting for 36 per cent of job vacancies. Meanwhile, the post-16 skills system was widely regarded as “fractured”, and employer needs were often seen as disconnected from courses and degrees on offer.

Responsibility for fixing that mess was handed to the new body – initially an executive agency within the Department for Education (DfE) but moved last September to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). Skills England was given an ambitious remit to bring together employers, education providers, local governments and policymakers as part of a wider goal to “boost the nation’s skills”.

The agency’s leadership reflects that cross-sectoral agenda: its chair is former Cisco UK & Ireland CEO and chair Phil Smith, and his deputy is University of Sunderland vice-chancellor and former DfE permanent secretary David Bell. But from the start, there was widespread scepticism about what the body could achieve – particularly given its lack of independence from the government and questions about its authority.

Almost two years on from that initial announcement and one year on from Skills England’s official launch, experts believe the body has produced some useful work, but there remains little optimism that it is capable of moving the needle on England’s complex skills crisis.

“They’ve been great at writing reports,” said Dani Payne, head of education and social mobility at the Social Market Foundation. “They’ve also been very good…at that kind of stakeholder engagement side, so they’ve been doing loads of round tables and outreach to different parts of the skills system, and lots of engagement with colleges and universities and membership bodies and so on.”

Stephen Evans, chief executive of the Learning and Work Institute, agreed that the body had produced some “helpful” market intelligence on skills needs. But it hadn’t necessarily thought through “who’s going to do what” with that data.

Meanwhile, Andy Forbes, director of the Centre for the Advancement of Lifelong Learning at Ruskin College in Oxford, credited Skills England with doing some useful work “under the bonnet”, including successfully beginning “to tidy up our messy data around skills and labour market”. But “as many people feared…it’s difficult at the moment to see what influence or what impact that work is having or has had”, he said. “You’d hope that what they’re doing would begin to influence, inform, inject some sort of rationality into government policy but, at the moment, it’s difficult to see much sign of that.”

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One counter-example the body’s defenders might point to is the government’s decision to remove funding from level 7 apprenticeships. The idea was raised in September 2024, alongside the announcement that the apprenticeship levy would be replaced by a “growth and skills levy” and the publication of Skills England’s first annual skills report. Ministers were clear that they wanted apprenticeship funding – levied on larger employers – to be redirected towards younger learners, including via new “foundation apprenticeships” especially for them, and Skills England was subsequently tasked with providing evidence on the impact of defunding apprenticeships at master’s level.

After speaking to employers, the body concluded that the sectors that used the apprenticeships were “very supportive of the product”. But its report implied that the removal of funding may have been a foregone decision, noting during engagement sessions “stakeholders discussed various ways to mitigate the risks associated with defunding level 7 apprenticeships”.

Forbes’ observation is that Skills England is “an agency buried within [government] with…not a very strong independent profile. So it sometimes sounds – and this is being slightly unfair – like [a] sort of propaganda machine for the [government], whereas what you’d be looking for is an independent or at least semi-independent authoritative voice that says things that people pay attention to.”

Some commentators contrasted Skills England’s under-the-radar work with Alan Milburn’s ongoing review of youth unemployment. When the former health secretary’s interim report was released in May, it dominated headlines and prompted Starmer to respond in The Times. Payne is unclear that Skills England has “much relevance, clout or attention…outside of people who are already interested in skills policy”.

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Those people have not always included higher education leaders. Writing for Times Higher Education last year, Bell conceded that “for universities, there is always the concern that politicians and policymakers – and, indeed, the wider public – see skills as the preserve of further education and private training providers. But…universities play a vital role in educating students in a wide range of skills that fuel our economy [and] generate the research and knowledge that will create new skills requirements in the future.”

He advised universities that “visible engagement with skills will clearly support the government’s ambitions for higher education, which include driving economic growth, promoting national capability and delivering regional impact”. He urged the importance of universities’ “influencing regional thinking about skills requirements” and ability to “speak with one voice on the role they can play in challenging the perception of a skills system that is top-down and insensitive to local circumstances”.

And even amid the crackdown on level 7 apprenticeships, “some institutions will see an opportunity in offering more apprenticeships and other shorter-course training and education that is directly targeted towards employers”, he added.

Amid mounting questions about graduate employment, student debt levels and the government’s focus on tackling unemployment among non-graduates, it can feel like Skills England is one of the only voices advocating for the importance of universities and high-level skills. In its latest annual skills report, for instance, it notes that “demand for key occupations in industrial strategy priority sectors is expected to increase by nearly a quarter over the next decade” and that most of these occupations require higher-level qualifications.

But Payne said she didn’t believe the market intelligence that Skills England is producing is influencing universities’ course offerings. “Because the higher education system is…based on student demand, I don’t get the sense that there’s any real alignment between course provision and what Skills England are saying we’ll need graduates in,” she said. “There’s no lever, really, that Skills England can pull to incentivise universities to do that in a meaningful way when there’s this broader context of financial uncertainty and stress.”

That said, the government announced earlier this week that ministers will soon unveil “plans to crack down on poor‑quality university courses and shift investment further towards youth apprenticeships, as part of a ‘new deal for young people’”. The release asserted that “the outdated belief that university is the only path to success has led to a ‘degree by default’ mindset – resulting in too many young people working tirelessly for degrees that don’t unlock the best opportunities to make the most of their talent and hard work.”

It also noted that the new foundation apprenticeships are expanding and that “the government has directed Skills England to review funding rates for the apprenticeship standards used mostly by young people, to better prioritise how this funding is used. It will report in the autumn on whether the rates need to be changed to further shift provision towards young people and rebuild the apprenticeship ladder for the next generation.”

But, again, this seems like a case of Skills England being tasked with the detail of policy already decided elsewhere in government, rather than devising it or driving its implementation.

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Education policy analyst Tom Richmond said you can “hardly blame sector leaders for not engaging” with Skills England “given how little influence [it] appears to have on major decisions being made by ministers in areas such as higher education regulation and apprenticeship funding…Unless Skills England is given a greater role in policymaking, I doubt the higher education sector will see any value in it.”

More broadly, there is little sense that Skills England has made any progress so far towards creating a more joined-up skills system.

Lesley Giles, director of Work Advance, said the decision to move the body to the DWP from September 2025 further undermined its ability to do this. “We’ve ended up with a positive of having a post-16 skills strategy and we’re starting to think about how further education works with higher education, and yet then we stick skills in the DWP.”

But Skills England has not been written off altogether. While it may be far from solving the country’s skills challenges, it could perhaps make a dent.

The Learning and Work Institute’s Evans suggested the body should focus on translating research into action by working more closely with employers, local authorities and mayors – who are being given increasing control of spending and skills planning. “I think there’s lots more that they could do even within the relatively narrow remit that the government’s given them,” he said.

Ruskin College’s Forbes added that, to have an impact, Skills England needs to be seen as the “voice of reason” around skills policy, removed from reactive policy decisions. But “I don’t know if they have…enough headroom within the confines of the [government] to do that,” he added.

The DWP was contacted for comment.