WEEKEND READING: A manifesto for rebooting England’s skills ecosystem: delivering inclusive growth and opportunity in every postcode

This blog was kindly authored by Dr Robin Webber-Jones, The Bedford College Group and Alistair Lomax, Arc Universities Group.

Our talent advantage

If Andy Burnham is right that England needs ‘growth in every postcode’, then our skills system must be capable of delivering opportunity in every postcode.

Ask any major company why it invests in the UK and the answer is strikingly consistent: talent. Our deep pool of skilled people, researchers, technicians, entrepreneurs and creative professionals remains one of the country’s greatest competitive advantages. It is the foundation of innovation, productivity and economic growth.

This reputation has not emerged by accident. It has been built through decades of investment, institutional commitment and collaboration between education, industry and government.

Today, however, England faces a new set of challenges. Technological transformation, demographic change, the transition to net zero, growing regional inequalities and persistent skills shortages are reshaping our economy. These are complex, systemic challenges that no single organisation can solve alone.

Despite widespread recognition of the need for a more integrated skills system, the structures that govern post-compulsory education continue to reward competition over collaboration. Funding and accountability regimes have largely reflected neoliberal policy approaches, often at the expense of coordination and coherence. Consequently, the long-standing ambition for a simple, accessible and effectively funded skills system remains unrealised. Our view is that a more collaborative and navigable framework is both achievable and necessary.

Both further education colleges and higher education institutions are expected to drive productivity, support employers, widen participation, promote social mobility and contribute to regional prosperity. However, they often operate within fragmented funding systems, competing accountabilities and regulatory frameworks that encourage institutional self-interest rather than collective action. Despite these constraints, remarkable examples of collaboration already exist.  There are partnerships formed through Uni-connect programmes; validation arrangements; and through regional and college collaborations such as Skills Bedfordshire to cite some examples. The challenge now is to make collaboration the norm rather than the exception.

This manifesto argues for a fundamental shift in how England approaches skills policy: moving from a competitive tertiary market to a collaborative tertiary ecosystem. A system that is better geared towards inclusive growth and one that is more aligned with the priorities of the Modern Industrial Strategy.

Why collaboration matters

The most pressing challenges facing England are not institutional challenges; they are system challenges.

• Skills shortages in construction cannot be solved by a single university.
• Workforce shortages in health and social care cannot be solved by a single college.
• Regional productivity gaps cannot be addressed by organisations working in isolation.

The evidence increasingly points to a simple conclusion: skills are created through ecosystems, not institutions.

Across England, learners need coherent pathways between education and employment. Employers need coordinated responses to workforce demand. Communities need institutions that work together to create prosperity and opportunity.

Why does collaboration matter?

First, it improves learner outcomes. Learners experience education as a journey, not as a series of disconnected sectors. They need clear progression routes, flexible opportunities and seamless transitions between vocational and academic pathways.  This ensures education is lifelong and life-wide.  Collaboration can ensure that transitions across the education sector are better supported, underpinning language skills can be developed and qualification opportunities can be accessed by more people.

Second, it strengthens places. Colleges and universities are anchor institutions within their communities. When they work together, they can support inward investment, improve productivity, attract talent and drive inclusive regional growth.  Duplication of effort in business engagement and curriculum design is costly; resources can be more effectively deployed to strengthen place.

Third, it builds system capacity. The most significant economic and social challenges require collective solutions. Collaboration enables organisations to share intelligence, align provision and respond strategically to changing workforce needs.  The current NEET crisis has been years in the creation.  The solutions to it should not focus on pitting colleges and universities against each other but should focus on convening discussions across the system to ensure that there is capacity to tackle it.

The emerging work of the Skills for Growth Alliance in the Oxford-Cambridge Growth Corridor demonstrates this approach in practice. It recognises that skills challenges can only be solved through collaboration between universities, colleges, employers, local authorities and civic institutions.  Through deep research and modelling on priority sectors, there have been several events bringing together colleges, universities, businesses, sector bodies and local authorities. 

Five recommendations for a new skills settlement

1. Establish Regional Skills and Opportunity Compacts

England should create statutory Regional Skills and Opportunity Compacts bringing together:

• Universities and further education colleges
• Employers and industry
• Combined/ local authorities
• Schools
• Professional bodies
• Skills England

These partnerships should become the principal mechanism for identifying and addressing regional skills priorities.

Each compact should produce:

• A ten-year skills and opportunity strategy
• Shared labour market intelligence
• Progression pathway agreements
• Joint curriculum priorities
• Agreed measures of success

Under current arrangements, colleges and universities are required to approach employers separately. This duplicates effort, creates complexity and promotes isolation. Regional compacts would replace fragmentation with coordination and support long-term workforce planning rather than short-term responses to labour shortages.

2. Create a National Opportunity Intelligence Platform

England cannot plan effectively for the future using fragmented and inconsistent data. While Local Skills Improvement Plans provide valuable local insight, they are often constrained by geography, methodology and a reliance on historic labour market information.

A National Opportunity Intelligence Platform should bring together:

• Labour market forecasting
• Industrial strategy priorities
• Productivity data
• Demographic trends
• Skills demand analysis
• Investment pipelines
• Workforce projections

This platform should support local, regional and national decision-making, enabling policymakers, employers and education providers to anticipate future demand rather than simply react to current shortages.

It would also strengthen the evidence base for investment decisions, productivity forecasts, inward investment opportunities and public spending priorities.

3. Build a National Tertiary Curriculum Framework

England continues to maintain artificial divisions between academic and vocational learning. The future economy will require individuals to move repeatedly between education and employment, acquiring new skills throughout their working lives.

A National Tertiary Curriculum Framework should create a common architecture connecting Levels 3 to 6 and supporting:

• Seamless progression
• Lifelong learning
• Recognition of prior learning
• Flexible study pathways
• Equal esteem for academic and technical education

The objective is not standardisation but coherence. Learners should be able to navigate the education system easily, progressing, retraining and upskilling as economic circumstances evolve.

4. Reform accountability around collective outcomes

Current accountability frameworks focus almost exclusively on individual institutional performance. Yet many of the outcomes government wants – including higher productivity, improved employability and reduced skills shortages – are created collectively.

If government wants collaboration, accountability systems must reward it.

Regulators should therefore assess:

• Quality of partnership working
• Joint planning and delivery
• Regional contribution
• Collaborative progression outcomes
• Shared employer engagement

This would represent a shift from institutional accountability to system accountability.

Colleges and universities should retain their autonomy, but they should also share responsibility for the success of the places they serve.

5. Establish a National Collaboration Leadership Programme

Successful collaboration depends upon leadership, trust and long-term commitment. Research consistently demonstrates that the most effective partnerships are led by individuals who can build relationships, share power, think systemically and prioritise collective outcomes over institutional advantage¹.

England should establish a National Collaboration Leadership Programme supported by organisations such as:

• Advance HE
• The Education and Training Foundation
• Universities UK
• The Association of Colleges
• Local Government Association

The programme should focus on:

• Collaborative leadership
• Systems thinking
• Trust-building
• Civic leadership
• Strategic foresight

Particular emphasis should be placed on developing middle leaders, who are often critical to sustaining successful partnerships across organisational boundaries.

A new definition of success

For too long, educational success has been measured primarily through institutional metrics:

• Recruitment
• Market share
• League-table performance
• Regulatory outcomes
• Organisational growth

These measures remain important, but they are no longer sufficient.

A modern skills ecosystem should also ask:

• Are learners progressing successfully?
• Are employers accessing the skills they need?
• Are regional workforce gaps closing?
• Are communities becoming more prosperous?
• Are institutions creating opportunity?
• Are partnerships generating public value?

The future requires a broader definition of excellence – one that values collective impact alongside institutional achievement.

From competition to stewardship

England does not need another cycle of structural reform. It needs a new settlement built on collaboration, coordination and shared responsibility.

The central question is not whether colleges should become more like universities, or universities more like colleges. The challenge is how both sectors can act together as stewards of opportunity, prosperity and place.

The evidence from practitioners, researchers, employers and regional partnerships points in the same direction. Collaboration is seen as powerful, but it needs proper and sustained structures to encourage it to grow. Time is needed to nurture collaborations, along with theory of change models to break cycles of mistrust that exist. Collaborative skills ecosystems deliver better outcomes for learners, stronger outcomes for employers and greater prosperity for communities.

The Skills for Growth Alliance in the Oxford-Cambridge Growth Corridor has already begun to demonstrate what this future can look like. Similar approaches are emerging across Greater Manchester and other devolved regions. The foundations exist; what is needed now is the policy framework to scale and sustain them.

The question for policymakers is no longer whether collaboration matters. The evidence is overwhelming that it does. The real challenge is whether we are prepared to redesign the system so that collaboration becomes the rule rather than the exception.

If we truly want growth in every postcode, we must also create opportunity in every postcode. England will not build the skills ecosystem it needs through competition alone. The guiding star must be collaboration, and the system needs to be changed to realise the opportunity. Collaboration should also guide the way that a new skills system is overseen and the way that it could be funded.

Implementation 

The launch of Skills England in 2024 recognised the importance of talent and skills to the UK’s future prosperity. The next step is for Skills England to become the principal convenor of a cross-government skills agenda, working alongside relevant departments through a taskforce model. The Covid-19 response demonstrated the power of coordinated action in delivering national priorities. There is every reason to apply the same approach to addressing the country’s skills challenges.

With a reset of government, comes an opportunity to reboot Skills England as a powerful, independent and interconnected convening body, linking skills clearly to other policy priorities such as inclusivity, growth in all its forms (housing and communities, inward investment, industrial strategy 8).

Who will pay for a new approach? 

We will need to incentivise greater collaboration by creating rewards and incentives, giving devolution the greatest chance.  There is already a system of gathering funding associated with planning. The promotion of our skills base could be written into funding distribution agreements so that the result is more inclusive growth, connecting regional and local growth, wherever it takes place, to prosperity.  After all, the creation of taxation relies on growth and jobs.  The next phase needs to be designed around incentives.

If we are looking for growth in every postcode, the skills ecosystem, when so many of the component parts of a system are already in place, is a good place to start. Bottom of Form

1.  Webber-Jones, R, (2025), Collaboration between the Further and Higher Education sectors in England: antecedents and a pathway to systemic change, [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Lincoln Bishop University