WEEKEND READING: Knowledge and skills in higher education: coherence, conflict or confusion?
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This blog was kindly authored by Dr Adam Matthews, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham.
Skills have dominated the policy and political discourse in recent years. In a recent HEPI blog, Professor Ronald Barnett observed how the education policy world has been dominated by the language of skills, whilst academic discourse has focused on education and knowledge. Professor Barnett argues that these two discourses are speaking past each other, disconnected and polarising.
In this blog I look at how skills have come to dominate policy, political and institutional discourse, present some speculations and provocations as to why this might be, and call for precision in language when it comes to knowledge and skills policy. Here, in both simple and more philosophical terms, we are looking at discursive binaries which are concerned with doing (skills) and knowing (knowledge) in higher education.
The 2025 Post-16 Education and Skills whitepaper is clear in its opening:
Skills are at the heart of our plan to deliver the defining mission of this government – growth.
The skills turn in policy and political discourse has, in many cases, sidelined or muted knowledge. This is not the case in academic literature. The Oxford Review of Education, recently published a special issue Knowledge crises and democratic deficit in education.
Where does this then leave many universities who are, and have been for centuries producers, co-producers and distributors of knowledge? Burton Clark summed up a universities’ core mission well in 1983:
If it could be said that a carpenter goes around with a hammer looking for nails to hit, then a professor goes around with a bundle of knowledge, general or specific, looking for ways to augment it or teach it to others. However broadly or narrowly we define it, knowledge is the material. Research and teaching are the main technologies.
This is despite many universities starting life in the 20th century as civic institutions with a focus on the training of professions. Immanuel Kant described these two sides as a Conflict of the Faculties in 1798. In The Conflict of the Faculties, Kant argues that universities contain a necessary tension between “higher” faculties that serve the state’s skills needs and train professionals, and the “lower” faculty of philosophy, which must remain autonomous to pursue knowledge through free inquiry.
The Post-16 Education and Skills Government white paper, uses the word ‘skills’ 438 times and ‘knowledge’ just 24 times. So, what has happened to knowledge in higher education? Professor Barnett thinks that there is something else going on other than the traditional liberal (education and knowledge) and vocational (skills) polarisation.
With all of this in mind, I was interested in how universities described their teaching practice in the 2023 TEF submissions (a corpus of 1,637,362 words and 127 qualitative provider submissions). The pattern of a focus on skills continued. Across the whole corpus, in total, ‘skills’ was used 4,785 times, and ‘knowledge’ 1284 times – that means that skills trumped knowledge by a ratio of 3.7.
I wondered if it made a difference about the type of institution. We might think large, research-intensive universities would be more interested in knowledge in educational terms or, be more balanced on knowledge and skills. So, I divided those numbers up by institution type using the handy, KEF classifications.
| Cluster | Skills (per thousand) | Knowledge (per thousand) | Ratio difference |
| All | 4785 (2.92) | 1284 (0.78) | 3.7 |
| ARTS (Specialist) | 648 (2.28) | 220 (0.77) | 2.9 |
| STEM (Specialist) | 384 (4.27) | 89 (0.99) | 4.31 |
| E (Large broad disciplines) | 1243 (2.94) | 350 (0.82) | 3.55 |
| J (Mid-size teaching focus) | 411 (2.74) | 109 (0.72) | 3.77 |
| V (Very large, research-intensive) | 745 (3.28) | 184 (0.81) | 4.05 |
| M (Smaller with teaching focus) | 672 (2.9) | 197 (0.85) | 3.41 |
| X (Large, research-intensive, broad discipline) | 682 (2.93) | 135 (0.58) | 5.05 |
As shown above, the pattern holds – skills are being written about more than knowledge. Institutions in the clusters X and V (large and very large, broad-discipline and research-intensive) show the widest disparity in the balance between knowledge and skills (with the balance in favour of skills). This is surprising as these are the institutions, one might think are more interested in knowledge production alongside and integrated with education.
Taking a slightly different line of inquiry, the shift does not appear to be drawn within political party lines. In 2022, Minister for Skills, Apprenticeships and Higher Education, Robert Halfon spoke at the Times Higher Education Conference as Minister for Skills, Apprenticeships and Higher Education (no ‘knowledge’ in his job title) and used the word ‘knowledge’ just once.
At the turn of the century, the political discourse was dominated by knowledge and a knowledge economy, and then Prime Minister, Tony Blair claimed in 2002 that this was the route to prosperity:
This new, knowledge-driven economy is a major change. I believe it is the equivalent of the machine-driven economy of the industrial revolution.
This was just as the internet became accessible to all and globalisation dominated, promising an opening up and democratising of knowledge. As we enter the AI revolution, why have skills become the dominant policy and political narrative? Skills-based or knowledge-rich curricula debate has been linked to the emergence of AI technologies.
Ideologically, knowledge and skills have produced dividing lines in education systems politically. Moreover, knowledge and skills are hotly contested in binary terms in schooling.
In 2016, the Conservative Party held that knowledge was the route to economic growth, arguing that higher education played a key part in achieving success as a knowledge economy. In the same year, the UK voted to leave the European Union, kicking off a decade of political instability, coinciding with political orders being disrupted globally.
During the liberal consensus of the Blair to Cameron era, governments in England aimed to keep taxes low and markets open, whilst expanding the nation’s knowledge capabilities through graduates and research. They had a broad faith in the benefits of growing knowledge and stimulating enterprise, rather than shaping the economy. They also expected communications technologies to empower citizens in a climate of open debate.
Now, as we enter 2026, the pendulum has swung firmly toward skills dominating policy and political discourse. Rather than swinging between the two polarising discourses, it is important to develop a practical coherence between skills and knowledge.
Professor Barnett calls for a rebalancing in debates, our language and our practice. Surely, it’s reasonable for educators, students, researchers, policy makers and politicians to expect higher education to consider doing (skills) and knowing (knowledge) as equals rather than sides to be taken. It can be argued that separating these two very human capabilities is not possible at all. However, Skills England have developed a new classifications for skills which could prove useful but needs careful integration with higher education curriculum, knowledge production and pedagogy.
The question of why the pendulum has swung towards skills at this current moment, I can only speculate and offer provocations to be picked up in the HEPI blog and beyond:
- The push towards a knowledge economy and 50% of young people attending university failed to result in economic growth (we might argue that the 2008 financial crash, Brexit, pandemic and many other things could have contributed too).
- Liberalism, globalisation and knowledge came together within the notion of a knowledge economy and society. A populist backlash to knowledge and liberal higher education has resulted in a shift towards skills.
- A genuine attempt to remedy a left behind 50% of the population who do not pursue a knowledge based academic degree.
- The internet did not deliver on social or economic positives and growth – as Peter Thiel famously said “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters”.
- Artificial intelligence is, or could disrupt knowledge and white collar work.
- Often, knowledge and skills are used as synonyms for each other leading, to confusion.
Knowing (knowledge) and doing (skills) should be at the heart of economic growth, social change and flourishing societies and not two binaries to be fought over. Precision in the language we use to make these cases needs to be sharpened and made clearer in order to avoid confusion and aid policy and practice.
Comments
Kalpna says:
Really insightful read on the challenges of aligning knowledge and skills in higher education! I’ve found similar guidance helpful on Study in UK
for navigating academic and career pathways abroad.
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Gavin Moodie says:
Thanx for this.
I do not accept, let alone promote, a dualism of knowledge and skills. I prefer Guile and Unwin’s (2019, p. 28) conceptualisation of expertise that encompasses both theory and practice:
‘First, and foremost, the concept of expertise embodies both the practical and theoretical components involved in the performance of work of all kinds. This universality enables us to examine how expertise is conceived and developed across occupational boundaries and national systems.’
Gule and Unwin elaborate their conception of expertise on pages 29 to 30.
Guile, D., & Unwin, L. (2019). VET, expertise, and work: Situating the challenge for the twenty‐first century. In D Guile & L Unwin (Eds.), The Wiley handbook of vocational education and training, 17-40. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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Adam Matthews says:
Thanks Gavin, very useful. From the reference, it feels as though that is situated in a vocational domain of education? Praxis, I like but a little esoteric for policy and practice. There’s usually a German word, Bildung comes close but less towards vocation. Craft, might also be an option but possibly too close to a specialist practice.
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Jonathan Alltimes says:
Because employers require application in practice, that is skills. Information and knowledge are the same entity. Memorising Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is what is causally true and therefore has predictable effects from a series of actions. Knowledge must include meaning and therefore understanding about the constitution of the world, as meaning gives purpose to knowledge, that is, a theory why. Information has intrinsic meaning, but must interpreted with a background of understanding. Meanings and understandings could be shared and yet different, which implies the expression of skills could be different even with uniform education and training. Employers pay for reliable performance based on an expectation of predictability and distinctiveness, even novelty and originality. Knowledge is only made known in shared context-dependent practices and not in the expression of shared meanings and understandings.
I hope that makes sense. What is knowledge?
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Chris Stevens says:
Thanks. Very thought provoking.
There is, I believe, a debate to be had about the relationship between endogenous skills (those required to study a “subject” or a “field of study”) and exogenous skills (those required for participation in society as a whole or in the job market).
When I was an history undergraduate, the endogenous skills set was implicit; the value of the degree appeared to rest in the knowledge it produced rather than in the skills required to achieve that knowledge. The learning and teaching ”revolution” forced on universities in the 1990s had the benefit of foregrounding competences and skills. This had the additional benefit of identifying how those skills could be assessed directly rather than in the production of knowledge and it could identify whether the range of endogenous skills should be increased. (For example, I went to University able to do differential calculus but completely ignorant of statistics, a deficit that was never rectified).
Prior to the 1990s, Universities were geared towards filtering their graduates into a relatively small range of professional and middle-class jobs. Where these were vocational – law, architecture, medicine, engineering – the endogenous skill set was vocational and geared towards employment, but there was also an elective affinity between the endogenous skill set of humanities subjects, such as history, literature and classics and the “generalist” culture that dominated the senior civil service and enabled indirect entrance into the law and other professions. My father who in the 1980s ran a graduate entry scheme for an insurance company used to say that he wanted his entrants to know how to think and to know how to evaluate evidence and that it was up to his company to deliver necessary vocational knowledge.
If that attitude still exists, it is likely to be confined to a small number of élite roles. A combination of factors – the transformation of the traditional professions, the expansion of universities, the dissolution of the post-war economy, the need to train for jobs that have not yet been invented, and the disinvestment of business in direct education and training – has shifted the skills locus from endogenous to exogenous skills. Higher level learning has increasingly been seen as an essential ingredient of economic success, both for the individual and for society as a whole. That economic activity, however, now requires a skill set that is incompatible with the endogenous skills delivered that are core to the academic disciples that remain popular among undergraduates – perhaps because their historic role of confirming entrance into the UK middle-class still has residual currency, perhaps because it suits the non-vocational narrowness of school specialism between sixteen and eighteen.
The consequence of this is that universities are expected to ensure that their students have the exogenous skill set required to function in the unpredictable job market of the twenty first century. The dilemma remains, however, as to whether this can be achieved by a combination of shoehorning exogenous into the endogenous skill sets of traditional degrees and developing skills-focused bolt-on modules, or whether it requires a mixed-economy of higher education institutions and a fundamental re-think of what a university is, to produce programmes for which a full range of employability skills are endogenous.
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Jonathan Alltimes says:
Thank you.
How can we replace apprenticeships and on-the-job training in manufacturing?
The purpose of the communities of study in Oxford, Paris, Padua, and Bologna was to teach students for a fee so that they could be employed by the church, the government, medicine or the law, while the communities existed independently and autonomously alongside the church and the government. The guild of the college provided for the community of study and its charitable functions, such as poor scholars. The university protected the college from the town as it was an authorised transactional form for the common ownership of assets, which defined its legal rights and duties. The masters were practitioners, you did not teach about what you did not know directly from experience, as texts were rare and materials costly, so you spoke about what you knew and students worked with their masters like apprentices. Is there a one-to-one mapping of degree skills to graduate jobs?
The universities have accepted payment for fees from the government provided student loans, but students, governments and their administrations, regulators, Universities UK and most universities are unclear about what legal obligations and duties can be enforced, as academic judgments are non-justiciable and academic degrees are not causally the same as a product or a service. So universities must give account for how they spend.
What the government got wrong in their expansion of the universities is their belief that graduate-level jobs would grow in the economy and there are markets for higher education, which is not the same as competing for student fees: economists at the LSE and elsewhere imagined a false analogy.
In 1995, the OECD thought they had the answer for economic growth and employment, the future would be new digital industries, life long learning, and intangible investments such as R&D, that is the policy the government enacted after 1997 and is being re-enacted again. What they misunderstood is the distinction between personal knowledge and tacit knowledge. They got the first concept, but misinterpreted the second. Tacit knowledge is the hermeneutical concept based on Heidegger’s ‘being-in-the-world’ or variously interpreted as our cultural heritage and mode of life. What that has got to do economic growth is worth discussing.
Research is the other major work changing what can be taught.
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