Lore and the herding of cats
When it comes to green skills delivery, we've observed a few different models. The best? It depends.
A preliminary sweep of the recently-released manifestos give us, as we might expect, scant clue regarding the direction green skills delivery will take after 4th July. The Conservatives tell us they’ll continue to expand the Skills Bootcamps and will swap out a bunch of poor-quality university degrees with 100,000 new apprenticeships; so presumably the Green Skills Bootcamps we’ve reported on previously and the King’s own Low Carbon Heating Technician apprentices will be bundled in there somewhere. Labour is even vaguer, but assures us it will get busy devolving funding so local areas can ‘shape a joined-up work, health, and skills offer for local people’, alongside putting employers at the heart of our skills system. Nice words, but policy certainty so that the green skills process can crack on? Hmm, not for retrofitting skills at least – the Parties are tripping over themselves to assure Britain’s homeowners and landlords that:
Nobody will be forced to rip out their boiler as a result of our plans (Labour Party Manifesto 2024)
…never forcing people to rip out their existing boiler and replace it with a heat pump (Conservative and Unionist Party Manifesto 2024)
And Reform UK? Well, Net Zero’s off as far as they’re concerned, so hazarding a wild guess we don’t see green skills delivery as being high on their priority list – although, in fairness, they do identify that Britain ‘needs skilled workers in engineering, construction, IT and high demand sectors’. That presumably includes sectors involved in actions for sustainability, like the circular economy so ably identified last year by the Chartered Institute for Wastes Management.
We were, of course, expecting something substantial from the Green Jobs Delivery Group by now, which might have pointed to how England could go about putting together a coordinated green skills delivery effort. But, alas no, seems the Group might have been caught up in this year’s chapter of political revolving doors. Oh well. At least Scotland and Wales have some plans in place.
But wait! The ball is undoubtedly rolling, and we’ve had the opportunity to talk to quite a few movers and shakers over the past couple of years or so. We’ve seen how, at local levels, a core part of the green skills delivery response has been built around further education (FE) colleges working with other local providers. And we’ve observed how these networks might also take in universities, private providers and third sector organisations, forming partnerships and coalitions to handle the potentially huge level of demand whilst recognising the need to optimise the availability of contested funding and to reduce duplication of effort.
We’ve also seen a few different green skills deployment models developing, and through some of the work we’re currently involved in we’re taking a strong interest in which models work best for different parts of the green economy. Here are a few.
Image: TGE
The ‘LoLo’ (Local-Local) model
LoLo is all about finding the best way to meet the immediate local green skills around the big carbon emitters like buildings and transport. The programmes we’ve seen tend to be biased around skills for things like retrofitting. They’re limited to meeting local demand, with little thought being given to the potential for a wider offer outside the box that other local areas might draw upon.
Even if such things might be happening on the doorstep, the LoLo option has no immediate larger-scale driver; these might be developments in wind or solar, or perhaps CCUS or green hydrogen. These larger capital programme-based elements would nearly always push the LoLo perspective to become one of the other models we describe below.
Examples we’ve seen include the City of Portsmouth College’s Net Zero Hub and the Renewable Energy Centre at Chelmsford College.
The ‘LoRe’ (Local-Regional) model
LoRe applies where the local provision has the potential to serve a wider demand for green skills because of some local specialism, like clean energy. This specialism presents the opportunity to build a Centre of Excellence. It might also emerge in places where there are significant private investments in exploiting local geographies: the coasts are great for this, with offshore wind in, say, the North East and maritime down in the West Country.
Places focusing on manufacturing low carbon technologies can also spin their own bit of LoRe. In the case of heat pumps, for example, most of the major manufacturers have committed to building training centres to handle large levels of skills demand, either regional or – more often – national. There are, of course, limitations when it comes to national provision side because of the cost of attendance, particularly around the distance to travel for short courses. But, nonetheless, these places are springing up examples being Dorset’s Green Skills Hub, NE Scotland’s New Energy Transition Skills Hub, and the Retrofit Skills Centre in South London.
The ‘LoReNa’ (Local-Regional-National) model
This version of the LoRe model on acid occurs when nationally-recognised centres emerge from the local or regional models, perhaps through engagement with national steering groups or by making LoLo or LoRe curricula suitable for national consumption.
We’d point to Scotland’s Green Jobs Workforce Academy as being a good example of the emergent LoReNa model.
The National model
That just leaves us with the national specialist option: a true UK Centre of Excellence built around things like offshore wind, energy systems, and high value manufacturing. We’re talking about the Catapults here, of course. We’d also include in this the planned (we hope) National Net Zero Training Centre at CATCH in Stallingborough and the online work-in-progress Electric Revolution Skills Hub from Coventry University.
Image: TGE using DeepAI
Whatever the model, though, many times more often than not there needs to be a leader – person or organisation – to drive and manage the process. This cat herder engages the clowder, shapes its vision, mission and goals and drives its actions. It may need to guide the clowder through the funding process – perhaps disentangling the spaghetti of the various contested bids and figuring out how to leverage the raft of funding opportunities in the best way. Like the joint actions of some of the local housing associations we’ve seen in places like Manchester, Leeds, and Portsmouth, or local energy schemes like the one being promoted by Tomato Energy.
Something else we’ve noted is the importance of building a strong stakeholder engagement process, bringing in key expert organisations – often national bodies – as part of the team. Local authorities (LAs) are also key: they bring convening power, access and perhaps direct control over funding streams, and a responsibility to carry their communities along with them. We’ve seen strong examples where LAs have shaped engagement, demand and uptake of low carbon solutions like heat pumps or the setting up of community energy groups.
There is huge potential for green skills delivery. There is also growing demand for it: we see this wherever we look, like the Climate Change Committee’s assertion that around 20% of all jobs will be directly impacted by the transition to net zero, with a further 20% indirectly impacted. And that’s before we even start to think about the more general sustainability and net zero education for citizens. But what is needed perhaps more than anything is policy stability and certainty. We can only hope that whichever government we elect in July can provide that.