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Colleges `fail to deliver skills'

24/11/06

INDUSTRY chiefs accuse the Government of wasting millions of pounds on an alphabet soup of quangos and colleges which fail to provide skilled workers.

They dismiss the provision of skills and training as dysfunctional and irrelevant to meeting the needs of business.

The report, by the Confederation of British Industry, says the Government has squandered £3 billion on further education colleges.

It says the number of vocational qualifications has swollen to nearly 6,000, but claims many have been designed by consultants rather than employers, making them of doubtful economic value.

In a blow to Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, who has made skills training one of his priority areas, the CBI says fewer than half of employers have received useful information from the Government's 49 skills bodies.

The employers want the Government to scrap ring-fenced funding for further education colleges, forcing them to compete for money with employer provided training. They also say they should be put in the driving seat, designing qualifications to their needs and that of the economy.

Under Mr Brown the Treasury has pumped money into training budgets.

The first initiative, Individual Learning Accounts, which he announced in his 1999 Budget to provide lifelong learning opportunities for everyone in the workforce had to be abandoned after more than £1 million was siphoned off by fraudsters.

The careers service was re-launched as Connexions, the £450 million a year quango which spent a large amount of its budget on advertising but was condemned by schools as unhelpful and is about to shut down.

Then the complex bureaucracy of, the Learning and Skills Council, made up of 47 local branches distributing £9 billion a year, was reformed into 148 local partnership teams with the addition of 25 sector skills councils.

Mr Brown ordered a review of skills in 2004, headed by Sandy Leitch, the former chief executive of Zurich Financial Services, which in its interim report last year predicted that opportunities for unskilled workers would shrivel from 3.4 mil-lion today to. 600,000 by 2020, bringing an urgent need to raise the level of skills.

The CBI is also calling for a new professional careers advisory service and a reduction in the bewildering number of skills bodies.

We don't want another shuffling of the deck chairs within a dysfunctional system, said Richard Lambert, the CBI's director-general.Instead a closer relationship between business and training could really help us face globalisation with confidence.

Dr John Brennan, the chief executive of the Association of Colleges,' disputed the CBI report, saying that Ofsted had judged 99 per cent of college provision to be satisfactory or better for 2005/06. Colleges already compete in an open market very successfully as more than 2000,000 [sic] (200,000?) employers across the country can testify.