A sip at the LSIP fountain
For a change, The Green Edge is working instead of simply commenting on the (often fine) work of others. Now, that's worth a post!
Image: YouTube
Ahead of the anticipated publication in late-Spring of the 38 English Local Skills Improvement Plans (LSIPs), The Green Edge has recently been afforded the opportunity to observe some of the work going on to develop said LSIPs – by doing some of it ourselves!
Admittedly it’s a small piece. In early February, Cumbria LSIP led by the Cumbria Chamber of Commerce issued a call for submissions for a deep dive ‘to research into the future skills required for the non-nuclear elements of the Clean Energy Sector’. Led by our friends at Thomas Jardine & Co in Carlisle, we were delighted to have our proposal selected through due process. Our part within the overall LSIP development is described in Cumbria LSIP’s latest progress update.
Our work is still in progress and we assume our findings will be incorporated into the final LSIP report. But, as we take a brief pause from it to write this post, we’re thinking about similar – perhaps even identical – work that may be going on around the LSIPsphere. Ideally, of course, it would be a grand thing if we could go to DfE’s LSIP pages and read a dynamic update of who is doing what, but so far we’ve found nothing and would be grateful someone might be able to let us know where we might find that.
Thinking first about deep dives themselves, we’re aware of a few others. We can see, for example, that British Aviation Group is doing an aviation deep dive. We have to say we’re unclear about which LSIP(s) this deep dive is representing, although the link from BAG’s page to the LSIP Future Skills Hub shows that Surrey and Hampshire Chambers of Commerce – designated Employer Representative Bodies (ERBs) for the Enterprise M3 and Solent LSIPs respectively – are being active during March with a series of focus group events in the IT/Digital, Construction, Creative Industries, Professional Services, Advanced Manufacturing & Engineering, and College and Training Provider sectors. Hopefully the IT/Digital focus event will take a look at the deep dive into digital already done by Sussex as part of its original trailblazer LSIP.
An important point here is that the LSIP funding pot for deep dives like this are not necessarily that huge and, with much of the funding already allocated to the mainstream LSIP work, some fiscal juggling may be needed. Indeed, we note from the call for submissions that our deep dive in Cumbria ‘[is] funded through money made available separately by the Department for Education to Cumbria LEP to support the LSIP, which is being transferred to the Chamber for this piece of work’. Our due thanks, therefore, to the DfE and Cumbria LEP for this.
We also found it interesting to go back to the original statutory guidance from DfE to see what guidance there might be for deep dives like ours. Starting on page 20 of the document we find a few pages on the process for developing LSIPs and, amid a fair amount of boilerplate statements like ‘developing effective and agile ways to engage with a broad range of employers’ and ‘gather[ing] insights and evidence on employer skills and training needs’ we find the assertion that ‘[m]uch of the underpinning evidence needed already exists locally and does not require further new analysis or extensive employer surveys. However, where there is a lack of underpinning evidence and when additional data can add to the evidence base, ERBs can collect or commission their own evidence’. Hence, we feel, Cumbria’s decision, again given in the call for submissions, that ‘[w]e therefore need to commission a number of complementary in depth pieces of work on the energy sector “starting from scratch” rather than building on the pilot1’.
With our green hats on, if funding can be found in or around the LSIPs we could envisage a number of deep dives around national Net Zero-related priorities: green construction (Cumbria, Greater Manchester, LCR and 19 other LSIPs); electric and hybrid vehicles2 (20+ LSIPs); and waste management (London and, slightly surprisingly, New Anglia), for example. It might also make a lot of sense, we feel, to pile some additional funding into certain LSIPs leading each deep dive – for example, we already know about Sussex’s IT/Digital deep dive, so would that make it a good candidate to lead a ‘same-as-except’ study across the other digital-priority LSIPs like Lancashire, Cheshire and Warrington, West Midlands, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Heart of South West, Solent, Thames Valley, C2C, Kent, London, Herts, Essex, SE Midlands, and (pause for breath) South Yorks.
Another point here is whether – and how – the various national industry groups fit in with the LSIP deep-dive movers and shakers. We’ve already mentioned the BAG-powered aviation deep dive, and certainly some sectors seem to be better than others at stitching together national generalities with local specificities. When we posted on the Electrical Contractors’ Association (ECA) back in Sep-22, we noted ECA’s challenge here, despite being a national body with a regional structure. So, is there a structural delink between aspects of the skills system and the sources and flows of relevant data? How can they be better linked? Building some kind of skills intelligence map – who knows about what and where – might be a useful task for the DfE Future Skills Unit perhaps? Not forgetting others who are unearthing new skills through their work, thinking in particular here about IfATE’s Green Advisory Panel which, we feel, might share its work a little more beyond the summaries of the reviews it’s done against each of IfATE’s occupational maps. It would, for example, be useful to know why some new ‘green’ occupations have been added to IfATE’s list while others we could think of have not.
Of course, we’re only viewing the LSIP stage show from our late-entry seats at the far left of the upper circle next to a pillar. All of this may already be going on at least to some extent and we’d be delighted to hear about how and where it is. But the next question becomes this: to what extent can a deep dive done in one place be applied to another?
Certainly, there are differences. If we think, for instance, of the IT/digital deep dives, the proportion of people with the requisite right-brain skills identified for a region majoring on UX and human-centred design can be very different to the deep technical skills required for regions focusing more on, say, cyber security. But we feel much of the core recommendations could be replicable across the regions, such as this one from the Sussex deep dive (references to Sussex itself removed):
Recommendation: Attract a diverse range of people into Digital careers:
Lead a campaign and offer support for all schools and colleges to offer extra curricular clubs in Digital from the age of 10 upwards;
Target a wider and more diverse range of adults to access training and work experience opportunities through careers campaign, lobbying for funding reform and supporting existing Diversity initiatives;
Support for older career changers or unemployed to access opportunities for training, experience or employment;
Support for businesses to better understand and meet the needs of a neurodiverse workforce.
Certainly, as we build the output for our work with Cumbria, some of the data sources that we’re finding useful on things like numbers of candidate businesses of various types, and advertised jobs, we think could be useful sources for other areas and other deep dives. If the deep dive teams are aware that those data sources exist, of course. One example is The Data City, who we featured in our recent podcast along with WPI Economics and Lightcast, and has proved to be an excellent source of data for us. We show here an example of the type and granularity of the data it has provided.
Numbers of advertised jobs for the North West by SOC4 and sector. Chart: TGE using data from The Data City (numbers removed).
Again, it has to be said that the LSIP guidelines from DfE have not been much help in pointing to potential data sources, other than the aforementioned assertion that much of the evidence is available locally (it wasn’t, as Cumbria probably already knew). The guidelines do tell us that ‘jobs and skills data released by the Unit for Future Skills can also support in developing this analysis.’ But perhaps this signposting was a little premature; although the dashboarded UFS data is helpfully arranged to be filterable by LEP, MCA and LSIP, the data comes with a heavy caveat saying ‘these statistics should be treated as experimental, as they are still subject to testing the ability to meet user needs’. Best wait a little on that, then.
Other sources exist, of course. ONS, Nomis (fed by ONS), and so on. But the argument goes that in the LSIP work, data needs to recognise specific features of local economies and not just be lumped into broad, historic categories like SIC sectors.
So, what are we saying here? Well, we’re not claiming to be doing anything ground-breaking, simply a small piece of work, deep diving into the offshore wind skills needs of a single LSIP. It’s not even the main part of the energy work going on in this phase of Cumbria’s LSIP development. With an obvious focus on nuclear, that’s being led by Energus, a specialist skills development outfit up there in the Lake District.
But we do talk a lot on The Green Edge about the need for joined-up thinking, collaboration and avoiding duplication of effort in the ever-more urgent transition to Net Zero. So, in that spirit – and with apologies if we sound like we’re over-egging our little piece – here we are, saying “this is what we’re doing, if anyone else is interested”. Hopefully, others more entrenched in the LSIP process are saying the same thing, while others are listening and saying “Hey, we could use some of that”.
Another point to note is that Cumbria was also one of the trailblazer LSIPs, so is hitting the ground running this time with, presumably, the opportunity to extend their trailblazer in a way that many of the other LSIPs are not.
Especially, we would suggest, the battery and fuel cell components.