How did skills take over higher education? One short history

Over the weekend HEPI published blogs on the freezing of student loan thresholds, and the Westminster Hall debates on duty of care.

This blog was kindly authored by Dr. Josh Patel, Senior Education and Policy Researcher, Edge Foundation. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the foundation.

In 2025 the discourse of ‘skills’ dominated education policy, from the post-16 white paper to Skills England’s UK Standard Skills Classification. Skills in this context act as bureaucratic proxies for specific human capacities. Precisely defining and ranking skills makes it possible to identify ‘shortages’, ‘gaps’, and ‘deficits’ relative to political and economic priorities, and to frame them as problems requiring action. These may be specific: last March, Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced building 1.5 million homes would require 60,000 more ‘engineers, brickies, sparkies, and chippies’ by 2029. They may also be general: NFER projections for demand for six ‘Essential Employment Skills’ to 2035 aim to align provision with ‘high growth areas’.

These developments are deeply contested. Ronald Barnett describes the contemporary fascination with skills as a form of ‘bewitchment’ (others have put it more strongly elsewhere). The language of skills encourages a narrow focus on capacities linked to discrete tasks. When individuals are defined in this way, they become more easily interchangeable in the labour market, increasing workers’ vulnerability. At the same time, prioritising skills training sidelines education that enables learners to understand, question, and transform the world as citizens. This cements inequality and disadvantage. As Barnett has put it even more forcefully, ‘current movements, if left uncontained, herald a new kind of techno-fascism descending onto higher education’.

Years of this line of criticism have, however, hardly troubled the advance of the skills agenda; indeed, the intensification of criticisms like Barnett’s has coincided with its peak over the last 30 years. This is likely because the historic and ideational mechanisms sustaining skills discourse are not foremost concerned with education or training, or even knowledge, at all. Instead, skills discourse is primarily concerned with public accountability. More specifically, they are a response to questions about what counts as acceptable evidence of accountability, and how learners and university leaders can provide this evidence. I explore these underlying mechanisms in my new book, Universities and the Purpose of Higher Education and here consider how they precipitated the emergence of skills.

Liberal education, skills, and massification

Contemporary skills discourse rests on institutional and conceptual arrangements that took shape during the mass expansion of higher education after the Second World War.  At that time, the prevailing governing idea was ‘liberal education’. Social leadership was entrusted to a small cadre of elites bound by a ‘common culture’, based in the study of the virtues of the Classics or literature, and transmitted through a limited number of universities. These elites were revered as possessing the judgement necessary for responsible governance. However, some commentators, like C.P. Snow and later Martin Wiener, were sceptical. They worried that social leaders were afraid of the transformative power of modern technologies as demonstrated by the war. Protective of their own power, they resisted reform, even if this led to national ‘decline’. This was evident in the continued restriction of access to higher education and the denigration of applied studies.

By the early 1960s, massification was underway. The Robbins Report (1963) cited in its appendices public returns from investment in higher education of 9 percent per annum, yet the report itself warned that overreliance on incomplete measures would undervalue higher education. The full impact of higher education was too complex to be fully measured. Any attempt to do so would necessarily fail to capture higher education’s wider, more subtle, but critical benefits to a free and prosperous society, which I examine in the book. If governments relied too heavily on such measures when allocating resources, they risked underinvesting in higher education and overlooking its full value.  Robbins (an eminent LSE economist) therefore refused to provide a precise accounting. The financial arrangements proposed were, (as Michael Shattock described them) a ‘fudge’. However, Robbins’ judgement in support of expansion, grounded in elite authority still capable of commanding deference, was sufficient to legitimise growth.

This settlement unravelled as massification continued, and pressure intensified following the social and economic crises of the 1970s. As public finances came under the scrutiny of an expanded political class, universities were seen as failing on several counts: complicit in class and gender inequality (later racial too), and inattentive to national needs (increasingly market-defined). The distribution of national resources could no longer depend on fallible judgment of an elite that was too often self-interested and inefficient.

Remarkably, Robbins’ 1932 redefinition of economics as a science of scarcity and trade-offs offered a tool for his successors. Although Robbins himself insisted on its strict limits, even incomplete calculations of returns based on inexactly but explicitly defined variables proved politically invaluable. They enabled higher education and the state to apparently eschew judgment and mechanically calculate and evidence their contribution to enumerated political objectives. In an economising climate, it was a short step to try and identify which elements of an education’s most relevant constituent capacities could be isolated and measured (though a step the history of which still needs to be fully told). Atomised skills emerged as the preferred idea of governance.

Judgment and accountability

The problem is that this did not eschew judgment – it simply obscured it. It is not that it is wrong to make judgments about what defined variables in education (which skills) can be said to most explicitly serve the social goal we choose. It is also not necessarily the case that we should become bogged down in debates about the technical limits of current metrics. Such measures will always be defended as prudent and necessary in the circumstances.

Instead, it is important to recognise that when judgments are made about what a skill is and how we use it, that this is never the end of the discussion: making a judgment, as Bill Readings argued, is to surrender the capacity to have the final say and open a dialogue to others to evaluate the grounds on that which your judgment was made. Skills discourses generally prioritise narrowly defined and short-term political ends. Audit and accountability cultures have repeatedly struggled to serve the common good.

The deeper deficit lies in a political system that now struggles to produce compelling holistic judgments of long-term public value. The turn to skills is best understood as a consequence of this erosion, rather than as its origin. Higher education is not just subject to these regimes. It is where the intellectual tools of governance are formed. Its responsibility extends beyond tinkering with these models to supporting more credible public judgment about the use of shared resources.