Booting up for green
What progress might Green Skills Bootcamps make through the LSIP process? Discuss.
As we’ve already mentioned, we were delighted to be invited to talk recently at a City Region/Combined Authorities Green Skills Network meeting convened and hosted by Ashden. Regular readers of The Green Edge may recall that in our presentation we pointed out that, according to the data we’ve seen, amid what seems to be a relatively slow deployment of Green Skills Bootcamps in FE colleges across the country, the North East appears to be doing rather better than most.
Coincidentally, as it turned out, we were followed at the Ashden event by a presentation from the North East, which helped us understand a little more of the meat around the bones of data we’d observed. So we resolved to look further, and afterwards we found on the North East Evidence Hub that the region’s Green Skills Bootcamps ball had got rolling with what the Hub called a ‘rapid review’ of the skills impact on its green sector.
Image: NE Evidence Hub
With a wide demographic and large surface area covering a bunch of local authorities across a big chunk of England from the borders of Scotland in the North, the Tees Valley in the South and Cumbria to the West, we read that the green sector identified in the rapid review covered three key segments: energy generation, with a particular focus on offshore wind where the North East has a comparative advantage and specialism; buildings, including energy efficiency and green construction; and surface transport, in particular electric vehicles and batteries/storage.
We can see that the Green Skills Bootcamps are being delivered through a set of FE colleges across the region – including Gateshead College, New College Durham and the Education Partnership NorthEast – and this has been running through 2022 and 2023, with something like 800 people aged 19 and over coming though the various courses. That’s obviously being seen as a good start: we note additional funding being granted for expansion into segments like advanced manufacturing in the not-too-distant future.
The places to look for the wider skills needs across England – including and beyond Skills Bootcamps – are, of course the Local Skills Improvements Plans (LSIPs). These are all published now, and we wondered to what extent the North East’s dive into green skills had been adopted or adapted in the two LSIPs carried out in the region.
Without explicitly mentioning the rapid research, the North of Tyne LSIP does put Construction and Green Energy at the top of its priority list. For Construction, though, it reports ‘there is a lack of onsite training schemes in the North of Tyne, with the exception of Skills Bootcamps which…make the onsite training available as part of the programme’. Meanwhile, for Green Energy, the LSIP talks about a lack of experienced people with specialist skills like high and low voltage engineers, wind turbine technicians and wind turbine welders, and further notes that ‘employers identified a gap in the further education offer related to high level technical skills with integrated opportunities for workplace experience and industry-experienced trainers’. All beyond the bootcamp level, we fancy.
Interestingly, while the North of Tyne LSIP identifies digital skills as one of its ‘cross cutting’ themes – noting that they are ‘a requirement in all sectors of the economy’ – the other LSIP for the region, the North East LSIP (NELSIP) sticks Digital right up there at the top. Given that the NELSIP was delivered by the North East Automotive Alliance, rather than a local Chamber of Commerce more conventionally chosen by the DfE in its LSIP awards in 2022, this is perhaps no surprise: the Alliance is a broad group of automotive players including, of course, Nissan, together with others such as the Digital Catapult and Weardale Lithium, which is prospecting for 21st Century oil where once they mined coal and lead. For the same reason, we’re not too surprised to see Advanced Manufacturing as NELSIP’s number two priority.
Construction does make it in at number three, though. But, while the NE Digital Bootcamps get a shout out in connection with NELSIP’s number one priority to ‘provide essential digital skills required by all learners at the appropriate level, including upskilling and reskilling support for employers and adult learners’, the Green Skills Bootcamps don’t seem to get the same attention. In fairness, though, NELSIP does say that employer-led workstreams on retrofit and others, in place within the North East Institute of Technology (NEIoT), need to be retained. NEIoT includes the aforementioned New College Durham as one of its partners, so perhaps the Green Skills Bootcamps are implicitly included in this way.
But this then got us thinking further. We can kind of see how the good folks in the North East are kind of singing from the same – or at least a similar – hymn sheet when it comes to defining what the region needs across the board in terms of green skills provision. But how many other regions around England are doing likewise, either through their LSIPs or in other ways? More to the point, how many regions have done ‘green deep dives’ as part of their LSIP work? We guess we won’t know that for sure until someone with a bit of foresight and a great deal of patience locates, downloads and inwardly digests all 38 LSIPs, and then normalises them into a format where we can compare apples with apples – something DfE didn’t seem to think about when it set the LSIP ball rolling with plenty of guidance on process and reporting in the style of a school essay (not exceeding 30 pages, please) but little if anything on delivery of actionable data.
We are aware of some green deep dives around the LSIP pool, though. We were even involved ourselves earlier this year in a short down-in-the-weeds dip into the non-nuclear clean energy sector for the Cumbria LSIP. Another green skills plunge we’re aware of was made by Surrey, which noted in its LSIP (which also covered the non-Solent-y bits of Hampshire) that ‘the strength of the green economy is a unique feature of this LSIP area and has significant growth potential’. It then went further to commission a study by WPI Economics and Lightcast that produced a data-rich annex to the LSIP, identifying something like 35,000 green jobs across the LSIP area. We get the sense that this is the kind of data regions could work with.
Image: Surrey CC
Coincidentally – again – another presentation at the aforementioned Ashden City Region/Combined Authorities Green Skills Network meeting was made by Luke McCarthy, who is Green Economy lead at Surrey County Council. We noted in a podcast recently that as the LEP network starts to dissolve (or perhaps, in some cases, morph), we’re seeing local authorities starting to take on the skills and careers agenda. Surrey CC is an early example of this. So, we grabbed a chance to talk with Luke to find out about the basis for Surrey’s LSIP deep green dive.
Luke told us about his role as a dedicated resource for Surrey CC particularly focused on green skills: “I haven’t come across [my equivalent] elsewhere. There are lots of people focused on green business and lots of people focused on skills, but not specifically on green skills”.
On the LSIP study with WPI Economics and Lightcast, he commented, “We seconded somebody from our economic development team over to Surrey Chambers, which was the Employer Representative Body developing the LSIP. So we jointly commissioned it, with some budget coming from the County Council's green skills budget. I don't think either of us would have had quite enough budget to do that independently”.
We’ve written many times on The Green Edge about the importance of collaborations, coalitions and consortia to the sustainability effort, and in our chat with Luke McCarthy, he also described a partnership Surrey CC has with the Retrofit Academy. The partnership covers work to understand the skills gaps, the demand from local businesses and the current retrofit skills training in place in Surrey, and then to develop a retrofit skills training plan. Further down the line there’ll be engagement with colleges or training providers to do the needful in terms of delivering the necessary retrofit skills training and qualifications. We see a few partnerships like this with local authorities on the Academy’s partnership page, plus a few with FE providers such as the aforementioned Education Partnership NorthEast.
Note to selves to find out more about these for a future post, perhaps.