What incentives to learn at the bottom end of the labour market?

UK policymakers desire to see more and better jobs in the labour market mirrors deepening concern that the quality of much employment is poor, wages are low and opportunities to progress are limited. The result is social inequality, growing and highly persistent income inequality and a lack of social mobility. The focus of current policy is on the need to ensure that those at the lower end of the labour market invest in their human capital through re-engaging with learning, which is assumed to enable progress into better-paid employment. This paper argues that a set of mutually reinforcing factors reduces the incentives acting on individuals and in many cases employers, to participate and invest in education and training. Each of these factors, on their own, would be sufficient to cause problems at the lower end of the labour market. Acting in concert, as a mutually reinforcing matrix, they produce powerful reasons why many individuals perceive that the incentives to learn are weak. Our argument suggests that the fundamental causes of low pay and rotten jobs have been misdiagnosed and policy interventions that inject more workers supplied with lower level vocational qualifications into the labour pool are unlikely to produce a shock to the system that would be sufficient to engender lasting and widespread change

One step forward, two steps back? Skills policy in England under the coalition government

Traditionally, skills policies in the UK have focused primarily upon boosting the supply of skills as a route to improved economic prosperity as well as social inclusion/mobility. However, some academic commentators have argued that this approach is insufficient and that more attention needs to be given to addressing problems of weak employer demand for, and utilisation of, skills. Recently, some of these ideas have begun to be taken up by sections of the policy community. Issues around skills demand and utilisation figured prominently in Scotland’s 2007 skills strategy, and are now beginning to inform new forms of policy experimentation. The UK Commission for Employment and Skills has also argued that ‘the future employment and skills system will need to invest as much effort on raising employer ambition, on stimulating demand, as it does on enhancing skills supply’. In light of these developments, the paper examines some of the challenges confronting skills policy in England under the new Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition government, and considers the prospects for a more integrative and holistic approach to tackling the ‘skills problem’. It argues that the political and ideological space for such an approach is limited in England with skills policy likely to focus mainly upon skills supply, albeit with vastly diminished state funding/subsidy