Why higher education must step forward on skills: Local Skills Improvement Plans

This blog was kindly authored by John Harrison, Yorkshire Universities Associate on Skills.

If you have ever tried to map the skills policy landscape, you will know that it is a bit like assembling flat‑pack furniture without the instructions – you can do it, but only after several cups of tea, a moment of existential doubt and the creeping suspicion that half the pieces are missing. Between Local Skills Improvement Plans (LSIPs), employer‑led priorities, national frameworks, regional strategies and the ever‑shifting sands of post‑16 reform, the system is complex enough to make even seasoned policy professionals reach for a whiteboard and a lie‑down.

And yet, within this complexity lies an opportunity that higher education institutionsare uniquely placed to seize. Higher education institutions understand long‑term skills pipelines, work with employers at scale and, crucially, can translate policy turbulence into something resembling a coherent plan. In a world where everyone is shouting about skills shortages, higher education is one of the few actors capable of stepping back and asking the more strategic question: What kind of system are we actually trying to build?

Yorkshire Universities’ recent LSIP roundtables highlighted why higher education must play a more central role in the skills system. Not because LSIPs are the latest acronym to land on our desks, but because they offer a way to drill down into what employers really need, what learners experience and where collaboration is currently more aspiration than reality. LSIPs give us a chance to move beyond polite panel discussions and force us to confront the growing disconnect between employer demand and the realities many learners experience in navigating a fast-moving labour market. Used well, LSIPs can embolden higher education’s role and create the conditions for genuine innovation in workforce development and curriculum design.

In short: LSIPs are not just another policy hoop to jump through. They are a test of whether higher education is willing to lead, convene and innovate in a skills system that desperately needs all three.

Roundtable insights: what we heard (and what we can no longer pretend not to know)

The LSIP roundtables were a reminder that, beneath the alphabet soup of policy initiatives, there are some very real and very human challenges playing out across Yorkshire. Employers spoke candidly about persistent skills gaps and the difficulty of navigating multiple overlapping initiatives. Providers highlighted the pressure to respond at pace while still maintaining quality and meaningful learner support. And learners, when we actually stop and listen to them, tell us that the system feels fragmented and is too often designed around institutional convenience rather than their lived experience.

A few themes cut through the noise:

• The demand for higher‑level skills is rising faster than the system can adapt. Employers are not just asking for technical competence; they want analytical capability, professional behaviours, digital fluency and the ability to operate in complex regulated environments. In other words, employers want the very things that higher education does well, but too often undersells.
• Collaboration is still more fragile than we like to admit. Everyone agrees it is important, but the funding structures and accountability frameworks rarely reward it. LSIPs provide a legitimate reason to test new models – shared diagnostics, shared curriculum development, shared employer engagement – without waiting for perfect conditions.
• Innovation is happening, but it is patchy. Some providers are experimenting with micro‑credentials, accelerated pathways and employer‑designed modules. Others are still wrestling with the basics. The sector needs a more coherent approach to scaling what works rather than reinventing the wheel in 12 slightly different ways.
• Higher education’s role is both under‑recognised and under‑leveraged. Universities are central to talent pipelines, research, innovation and regional growth, yet LSIP conversations often default to a narrow view of post‑16 provision. The roundtables showed that when higher education steps into the space confidently, the system becomes more ambitious, more strategic, and frankly, more grown‑up.

Putting graduates at the centre of a system that finally works for them

If the LSIP roundtables taught us anything, it is that the skills system is not short of ambition – it is short of alignment. We have employers calling for higher‑level capability, providers trying to innovate within tight constraints and policymakers rearranging the furniture every six months. But at the heart of all this activity sits the one group we talk about constantly yet design around surprisingly little: graduates.

Graduates are the people who will carry the ambitions of our regions into reality. They are the future engineers who will decarbonise our infrastructure, the analysts who will make sense of our data‑rich world, the clinicians who will keep our health system standing, the creatives who will shape our cultural identity and the leaders who will navigate whatever policy acronym arrives next. If LSIPs are to mean anything, they must help us build a system where graduates do not just fit into the labour market but help shape it.

That is why higher education’s role cannot be peripheral. Universities are where learners develop the higher‑order thinking, professional behaviours and adaptive capabilities that employers repeatedly tell us they need. They are where much of our future workforce is formed. If we are serious about a skills system that works, then graduates must be placed at the centre of LSIP implementation, not as an afterthought, but as the anchor.

Ultimately, LSIPs are not about documents, diagnostics, or diagrams. They are about people, and graduates deserve a system that is as ambitious, agile and future‑focused as they are.