77 research outputs found
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
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