Furthering the green cause

Green skills Further Education academies are starting to appear. What will it take to make them grow?

With what many see as a general lack of Government strategy¹ around the delivery of national green skills, there’s a growing body of evidence pointing to Further Education (FE) colleges and their local stakeholders self-organising for Net Zero. While no destination may in site, at least the immediate path ahead can be charted and, to an extent, trodden.

But, while not quite a postcode lottery, the distance local FE bodies can walk along this particular path does have a feel of location, location, location about it. Alongside other, more learned commentators than us, The Green Edge has argued previously that devolution is critical to ensure an aligned and co-ordinated approach to building local green skills value chains. And devolution for green transitions is not limited to skills; comparing the transitions away from coal in Germany’s Ruhr Valley and the Welsh valleys, the Economy 2030 Inquiry observed:

By contrast with the successful structural adjustment programmes that significantly improved the Ruhr’s economic resilience, a lack of a unified regional strategy and funding hampered the ability of the Welsh valleys to respond to structural economic change.

Source: Resolution Foundation

Education and training providers need to co-operate to assure coverage of their areas’ future green skills needs and to effectively use the Adult Education Budget. And here’s where the Combined Authorities (CAs) have a head start.

Among the best placed right now must be colleges in the CAs who can control their own adult education budgets. Perhaps no more so than in London, where, as part of a larger pandemic recovery effort, the Mayor and others have tipped in £44 million to the Mayor Academies Programme (MAP). With the stated purpose of ‘coordinating and quality marking training in London (including adult education) and providing bespoke support to help newly skilled people into work in our priority sectors’, MAP tells us it’s awarded funding for the establishment and delivery of hubs to the green economy, creative industries, digital, health and hospitality sectors.

So, let’s take a look at what MAP is doing to skill up for the green economy. Here, we find five green skill hubs, mostly with a range of same-as-except themes. There’s London South Bank University, focusing on green construction and retrofit, green transport, energy waste/recycling, infrastructure and transport; West London (energy efficiency, circular economy, low carbon transport and green spaces); South London (green construction, recycling and waste, gas engineering, energy and resource advice and electrical installation); and Capital City (construction, waste and recycling management, off-site manufacturing and pre-fabrication, gas engineering, heating/plumbing and EV charging). The only one that stands apart from the other four is the pan-London Green Space Skills Hub for BAME Londoners, women and young people.

That the first four green skills academies in our list have similar themes should be, of course, no surprise. Energy efficiency and retrofit, EV maintenance and infrastructure, and waste management are – or will be soon – huge priorities. And since the colleges cover different parts of London, it’s only right and proper that Londoners shouldn’t have to travel a couple of hours each way to get to their chosen course². But it’s still early days for the academies; they’re still in startup mode, so the details of what will be on offer is sparse. In terms of webwords at least we found Capital City to be furthest ahead in its thinking, describing courses ranging from introductory levels (2-10 weeks), through flexible modular training at levels 2 and 3 qualifications, through to masterclasses which presumably involve some of their corporate collaborators like Peabody.

So, £44 million of devolved money is certainly helping here, although we do note that this is likely to be spread pretty thinly. Capital City, for example, got a slim £1.5 million from the pot and is using that to set up four skills academies; in Creative, Digital and Hospitality alongside the Green hub we mentioned above. Perhaps, in time, other mayoral authorities with smaller geographic spread like Andy Burnham’s Manchester, which got more control over skills as part of its new devolution deal in March and has already opened its Green Skills Academy at Trafford Park, may prove to be better resourced.

Outside these ‘trailblazing’ areas, though, it seems that the rest of the FE colleges are competing for scarce – often contested – funding. For example, when we posted a few weeks ago on City of Portsmouth College (COPC) and its Net Zero Training Hub, we noted that a chunk of the hub’s setup funding came from a 24-hour turnround to write a proposal for some of Portsmouth City Council’s Community Renewal Fund (CRF) Programme allocation. It seemed to us that COPC acted pretty entrepreneurially there, as perhaps we might find has been the case with some of the other green skills academies that are showing the first signs of appearing, like at Windsor Forest and Bridgwater & Taunton.

At the very least, though, FE colleges have to spend their allocated adult education funds to a strict set of rules, and if they’re to build effective and responsive local green skills systems, they’ll need more control over their own budgets. We do note that some colleges have successfully bid for Bootcamp funding, which gives them funding that is more geared towards local employer demand and without reference to the normal rules. But, as of the latest update in March 2023, not too many seem to have put their name down for Green Skills Bootcamps. New College Durham seems to be pretty much on the green bootcamp ball, though. Well done up there in the land of the Prince Bishops.

English FE colleges registered to provide green skills bootcamps. Image: TGE with data from HM Gov.

We would hope that the Local Skills Improvement Plans (LSIPs) might help the FE funding process in the longer run. In almost all cases, LSIP funding – for creating the plans themselves, at least – has been channelled through Chambers of Commerce, with colleges named as delivery partners and some portions of LSIP funding being earmarked for those colleges to invest in specialised facilities. We would hope that the LSIP process has also enhanced collaboration between groups of colleges. Looking forward, with each LSIP nominating its own set of sector or technology focus areas – many of which are green – it would be good to see some goodly slices of LSIP implementation funding (if there is to be any) eventually channelled into more of the green skills academies we’re seeing in embryonic form at the moment. Cue another map…

English LSIPs with sector or technology focus. Image: TGE with data from HM Gov. Click map for downloadable version in the Green Edge Data Portal.

Here’s a final thought. In 2050, a young person who is now 18 and perhaps taking advantage of one of the fine FE courses currently on offer will be 45, with perhaps with another 23 years to work. Hopefully, that person will see the achievement of Net Zero. But, as our population pyramids below shows, while the UK population is projected to rise by around 4 million between 2023 and 2050, the number of younger people actually falls. And counting on our fingers and toes like the amateur demographers we are - which means, please don’t quote us on it – we calculate the number of young people of FE college age could drop by as many as three to four hundred thousand between now and then.

Source: PopulationPyramid.net

Some folks who are much better qualified than us to comment on the way the UK working population is changing work at the Institute for Employment Studies (IES) in Brighton. Its estimable new report, Work in Progress (July 2023), paints a picture of a changing working population, with nearly two million more people in their 50s and 60s than there were a decade ago, and a working age to retirement age ratio plummeting from 4:1 thirty years ago to 2:1 projected for the 2050s. Putting this together with the report’s statement that ‘the UK remains almost unique in the developed world in having more people out of work now than before the pandemic, while nearly three quarters of employers with vacancies report that they have jobs that they cannot fill’, certain implications for FE seem clear:

With longer working lives and a changing labour market [there needs to be] more flexible and adaptable support for people through all stages of their lives [including] better access to careers guidance and training in later life to support older people to move jobs but stay in work.

Source: IES.

Need we say more? See you in College!

1. …and perhaps even a sneaking suspicion that the current government is sitting back, thinking it may as well wait to throw rocks at the efforts of the next one. If so, that’s another year gone.

2. We have to say, though, that the webmakers at london.gov.uk really need to take a course or two in Leaflet and sort out their unusable adult learning opportunities near you map.