18
Examination of witnesses
Lesley Giles, Professor Steven Spier and Dr Lisa Morrison Coulthard.
Q61 The Chair: This is the Communications and Digital Select Committee. We are continuing our inquiry into the future of creative industries. For those of you in the room, we are currently transmitting live on the internet. A recording will also be taken; that, together with the written transcript, will be available on our website in due course.
I will give a very quick reminder as to where we are before I get to the witnesses and ask them to introduce themselves. In recent weeks, we have been examining the impact of technology, primarily, and the opportunities and threats that come from that. We are now moving on to skills, which is clearly one of the most, if not the most, important aspects that needs to be addressed if we are going to have a continuing successful and thriving creative economy.
We have two sessions today. The first I might describe as a panel of skills experts. We will be looking to understand and hear why we have a skills shortage, what that looks like in the creative sector and why these gaps matter. The second session will be with people whom I might describe as creative and industry representatives. We will pick up on that last theme as we go into that session. Could I ask all of you as witnesses to be as candid and specific as you can in your answers? We are looking to move beyond the generalities that we have heard so much about in the past as to the problems in this area, and want you to help us be more specific so that we can, I hope, drive some change. Can I ask you first to introduce yourselves?
Lesley Giles: I am a director at Work Advance, which is my own company and gives me the opportunity to continue what I have done through my whole career: research and policy analysis around skills and employment. I am also here because I am part of the research consortium for the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre, which I am sure you have already had contact with. It is a centre funded by the Government through the UKRI and BEIS from the industrial strategy challenge fund.
Professor Steven Spier: I am the vice-chancellor of Kingston University. We are a university with an extremely diverse student body, which we think makes for a great learning environment. We are mostly professional and technical. I have more than 100 professional, statutory and regulatory bodies helping me all the time. We focus on careers, particularly on the future world of work. Before that, I was the head of the Kingston School of Art, which is a world-leading art school. I have worked in higher education in various countries outside of the UK as well.
Dr Lisa Morrison Coulthard: I am a research director from the National Foundation for Educational Research. We are a leading independent education research charity. Through our independent research and insights, we aim to shine a light on pressing issues to help make improvements across the system for all children and young people.
The Chair: Thank you for your time and for being here.
Q62 Lord Hall of Birkenhead: My thanks to you for coming this afternoon. I do not need to tell any of you that the creative sector is an area of future growth, so it is imperative that we improve the skills of the workforce and those who could join the workforce as well. We have heard quite a lot of issues coming out about skills from some government data, which seems to suggest that we do not have the skills we need.
It is a fast-moving sector so, if you have the skills, how do you keep refreshing them to make sure you are keeping up with things? Do we have the skills in this country to scale up from micro-businesses to larger businesses? There is a lot of really interesting research we have been hearing about suggesting that the confluence of technology and creative skills is an area that we will really need to build on. I would like you all to start with one question: what skills do you think we are going to need in the creative industries in the next five to 10 years?
Lesley Giles: That is a really important question. There are lots of ways of answering that. I will try to be succinct. I will give my impressions on what some of the important skills priorities are, both specialist and generic, but it is important to caveat what I say by saying that the creative industry is not a homogenous thing. It is a very diverse set of sectors. Equally, there are all those things you said about innovation. They are all technologically biased. They all have very high skill demands. Three-quarters of the creative workforce have degrees or higher. Some 85% work in highly skilled roles.
There are those common threads but, when you get into the profiles of the workforce, you see that they are totally different things. The nature of the occupational profiles in the IT sector, which focus on advanced technical skills in programming and software development, will obviously be very different to those in the highly skilled performing arts workforce, which is focused on artists and so on. That is important to caveat.
You said that there is up-to-date data in some of these areas. Some of the research we are referencing that, importantly, draws on government data so that you can compare and contrast sectors in a consistent way is still being updated. In fact, Lisa is updating one key source that we had in the past around Working Futures. It is important to caveat that sort of thing. It really is time to update some of these key sources. I am not sure how long your inquiry is running for, but sources such as the employer skills survey will not be available until the spring.
They are going to give perceptions of shortages and gaps. It is important to take those into account, not least because, when we talk about the future, we have to acknowledge the external environment in the sense that it is very uncertain. We were at some point modelling megatrends, including some you have already mentioned such as technological advances. Now, we are increasingly getting these short-term shocks as well, such as Covid and the cost of living crisis, which are displacing those megatrends and setting them off in different directions—and they came on the back of the global crisis. All these things have important implications for how these different creative industries respond.
Having said that, I will give one or two perspectives on the future. We know that a lot of these developments tend to be incremental, rather than evolutionary. It does not mean to say that we cannot understand some of those skills priorities by looking at the evidence in the here and now and complementing that by triangulating it with some futures research. If we look at something like the shortages and gaps that we see, they are already indicating to us where the growth in demand is happening at such a rapid rate in different parts of the creative industries that supply cannot keep up with demand.
There are areas, for example in IT and the digital sector and in terms of design, film and TV—I know you are speaking to some of those subsectors this afternoon—and parts of the performing arts, where we already see some pressing skills shortages that are important to reference from a technical point of view. If we look at some of the occupations where there are shortages, again, it gives us a sense of what some of those skills demands are. It is in these technical areas around advanced technical, technological and digital skills, professional programming, software development and data scientists. It is also around design in all sorts of areas—including games and animation, areas affecting textiles and those sorts of areas—as well as around various types of artists. We can get a good indication of some of those growing demands in some of those technical areas.
I would also reference some of the things you have already alluded to that are quite important in terms of some of the future research. That is talking about an increasing fusion of technologies and digital capabilities merging with creative capabilities—the whole createch industry and createch set of skills. Those are really growing in number as digital applications enhance our ability to transform creative content and the way it is distributed, accessed and used by audiences through digital technology, streaming services and those kinds of things.
That is through those kinds of developments, meaning that certain skills that originally perhaps would have been more separate are fusing together. Beyond those kinds of technical requirements, there are changes in the economy as well, where the pervasive nature of some of these digital technologies is meaning that it is putting an onus on some of those general transferable skills, particularly those skills where people can complement working with machines, working with technology and making the most of technology. That is communication, analytical skills, problem-solving, critical skills and critical thinking. A strong component of that is creativity. That is probably quite a long answer but there are quite a lot of layers in that.
Lord Hall of Birkenhead: Thank you for that. It was very thorough. Dr Coulthard, do you want to add to that? Where do you see skills shortages being in the next five to 10 years?
Dr Lisa Morrison Coulthard: We know that the world of work is undergoing a series of profound transformations, driven by a series of megatrends such as Brexit and Covid-19, as well as technological advancements, demographic change—in particular a growing older population—and growing labour market inequalities, which were particularly exacerbated by Covid, as well as the greening agenda. The National Foundation for Educational Research has a five-year research programme, which Lesley alluded to, called the Skills Imperative 2035.
Within that research programme, we are providing a series of evidence-based insights into the nature and scale of the impact of those transformations. We then provide information to drive a long-term skills-based strategy so that we can think about the need for the children and young people coming through the education system and into the labour market, as well as upskilling, reskilling and transitional needs for the 80% of the workforce that will still be in work in 2035.
In terms of where we are with our research, we have completed a literature review, which highlights a number of the skills that Lesley has already mentioned. These are employment skills that complement the new technologies that are likely to be operating within the labour market. These include analytical and creative skills and particularly interpersonal skills, such as communication and collaboration, but also self-management skills, such as self-motivation, flexibility, adaptability and resilience, as well as emotional intelligence skills. It is that emotional intelligence that the robots certainly will not be able to give us, so those uniquely human skills will become increasingly important.
We have also done the second stage of our work, which was published very recently. It is a series of long-term labour market projections, utilising the methodology you may be familiar with through Working Futures but extending it from the usual period of three to five years to 15 years, so looking at 2020 to 2035. That demonstrates the fact that there will be a decline in some areas as a result of these megatrends, but the opportunities in terms of the number of new roles within the labour market looks to be about 2.6 million. Also, the number of replacement roles is just over 17 million. Despite the fact that there will be shifts, growth and decline within sectors across the labour market, there will still be a very dynamic and changing workplace within which we will need individuals with very specific and different skill sets.
Lord Hall of Birkenhead: Professor Spier, could I ask you exactly the same question? I also note that your university’s research programme into future skills says that creativity is one of the key skills that employers want. A comment from you on that would also be useful.
Professor Steven Spier: Those are the two future skills reports that we conducted with YouGov. We went out with YouGov to more than 2,000 businesses of all sizes and shapes and asked them, “What are the skills your workforce needs to meet the challenges of the future?” What came back gets around the short-term answer. When we speak to people at TikTok, they say, quite literally, that they do not know what problem they are going to be working on in the next four months. That is quite sobering when you talk about skills. You have to start to redefine what skills are a little bit.
What came back from the 2,000 businesses were things such as problem-solving, critical thinking and communication so that you could work together across subject areas, but also digital competency analysis, adaptability and resilience. If you start to think about skills in that way, you can get around the short-term problem what skills we need now. By the time we respond to that, those skills will have moved on to some other skills. We need to start to educate people to be able to reskill and upskill, almost continually. I hope I will have an opportunity to talk about the university later. Through the university, we are going to be doing that in the curriculum now; that is the response to the challenge.
Lord Hall of Birkenhead: There are specific technical skills that you need, but there are also broader ones, about how you run businesses and scale up skills, that it is necessary to teach.
Professor Steven Spier: Yes, that is right. There is the subject competence or technical competence, but also these other skills that surround it.
The Chair: It sounds like what you are really asking for is a whole new approach to the way we educate people, moving away from functions to problem-solving.
Professor Steven Spier: Yes—expanding the notion of skills and having education rise to that challenge.
Q63 Baroness Harding of Winscombe: You have covered quite a bit of what I was going to ask you, so I will try to narrow it down. I want to understand where you think the greatest skills shortages are going to be and where there might not be skills shortages. Picking up on your comment, Professor Spier, I am focusing in this case on the technical skills. Could we start there? What are the areas? A couple of you have referenced how important it is to be specific. The more specific you can be, the better, in terms of where you expect to see large technical skill gaps and where you think we might have technical skill surpluses.
Dr Lisa Morrison Coulthard: Partly, as I have already said, this is the stage of work that we are in at the moment. From our literature review, there is certain evidence in terms of growth and decline in certain sectors. We expect to see growth, from the published literature so far, in health, social and personal care roles, as well as education, professional services, creative digital and design, the green economy and so on—as you would expect, given the megatrends impacting on the transformation of the labour market.
We expect to see decline in admin and secretarial, manufacturing and production, agriculture, business admin and finance. Those are roles that tend to be at the lower skills end and that will be more easily replaced, for want of a better term, by artificial intelligence and technology. However, we expect technology also to impact at that higher skills end as well. That is what the work that we are doing at the moment will really drill down into, to identify exactly what skills will and will not be in demand in addition to these essential employment skills.
Baroness Harding of Winscombe: What about within the creative industries?
Dr Lisa Morrison Coulthard: Specifically within the creative industries, that will certainly be covered in the level of analysis we are doing at that stage in the work but we are not there yet.
Baroness Harding of Winscombe: Okay, so you do not feel comfortable giving us a view yet.
Dr Lisa Morrison Coulthard: It would pre-empt the outcome of the research; I would not want to do that.
Baroness Harding of Winscombe: Professor Spier, would you be willing to give us your view, in the scope of the creative industries? I should have been clearer up front.
Professor Steven Spier: The answer still comes out of these two future skills reports. Those included businesses of all sizes and shapes. One of them that is perhaps particularly pertinent to the creative industries would be digital competency. That comes through all the time. The issue there is that it cannot be understood as learning a piece of software because that field really moves very quickly. You need these other future skills to keep up with that. Being competent in all things digital would clearly be a huge issue for all industries and especially for creative industries, I would think.
Baroness Harding of Winscombe: Do you have any view on areas where we might have surplus skills? I am pushing to see whether there is any need for us to be retraining, or whether it is simply that there are not going to be enough people with the skills to drive the creative growth we would like to see.
Lesley Giles: From my perspective, in terms of the creative industries at the moment, the biggest issue is having a sufficient source of labour supply—particularly in the context of things such as Brexit, which have been constraining access to an international workforce. It would have had traditionally quite a high level of international workers. That is a challenge. With Covid, there has also been an increase in certain types of workers becoming economically inactive. Self-employed workers have not been able to sustain their businesses and have gone out and become economically inactive. Equally, there are older workers. There are greater sources in terms of the labour supply.
If you are talking about overqualification, museums, galleries and libraries as an area often have a higher proportion of people with higher degrees relative to the jobs they are doing because it will be quite a competitive area to get into, where there is more stability because of the public sector nature of a lot of that working. That makes it attractive in terms of securing stability in income and employment.
My take more broadly on some of the future developments in creative industries is that, as Lisa said, some of the current data of Working Futures is not yet available. The existing data has been updated by some sources in some parts of the time series. We use Working Futures as a baseline and look to some of the sources of information updated by Creative UK using Oxford Economics forecasting models. It looks like some of the big growth areas are going to be in IT and the digital sector, advertising, marketing and the screen industry in particular.
If you have those areas combining with some of the areas where you are already starting to see quite significant skills shortages, that starts to heighten the scale of demand and the need in terms of what the skills system needs to do, particularly when you consider what I said at the beginning: that nearly three-quarters of the workforce have a degree or higher degree, in terms of qualifications, and they are working in highly skilled jobs. So there is going to be a certain lead time of training before you ensure that somebody is work-ready.
Q64 Baroness Bull: You may have said as much as you want to say on this, Lesley. Thinking about skills shortages, particularly over the next five years, pre Brexit there was a lot of argument about the importance of European workers filling specialist skills on a freelance basis and how that suited the sector because you did not need an expert in X to be on your books the whole time—you just needed them for project Y, as it were. Is there any more that you want to say about the importance of immigration policy, whatever it may be, going forward and the reliance on freelancers in a global marketplace?
Lesley Giles: I do not think I have any further insight in terms of the international piece, beyond what I have said. The whole issue of freelance is quite different in the sense that there are certain challenges around the way in which creative industries operates and the structure of creative industries. That perhaps puts an overreliance on freelance working because of the diverse and episodic nature of project work, if you think of the production cycles in terms of film, TV, screen and so on, and working in the performing arts and the way productions are put on there. That presents particular challenges as well in terms of training freelance workers and who shares the responsibility for that kind of investment. That unlocks a whole host of other challenges in thinking about future supply and skills shortages.
Baroness Bull: Does it start to indicate other issues about who gets in? There is also then an issue of gender and the socioeconomic status in that market, too.
Lesley Giles: I was kind of alluding to some of that in what I was saying about the structure and modes of operation. There is a lot of informality and networking, in terms of recruiting and filling some of those vacancies when they come about. Even if they are vacancies, companies often do not actively go out to recruit and networks become quite important. Increasingly, the challenge is that, if production opportunities grow without a parallel growth in skills investments, you have a set number of production companies operating in an increasingly small pool of talent. That is the challenge.
Q65 Lord Young of Norwood Green: You mentioned the impact of Covid. I wondered if you had taken into account the most profound changes in the world of work. We have had working from home. We have had employers introducing a four-day week. We have had flexible working. The challenge that I hear from a number of employers is, in relation to people who have the skills, if you do not offer them a decent package and study retention, you are likely to lose some of your best people.
I have one further point. I was a bit puzzled when somebody—I might have got this wrong and misunderstood it—talked about jobs that were going in self-employment. One thing we saw during Covid was the enormous amount of jobs that were being created on social media, for example. If anything, I thought that there was an increase. People were forced to think about how they could create jobs during Covid, whether you like those kinds of jobs—influencers and all sorts of things—or not. I wonder whether you have taken those aspects into account.
Dr Lisa Morrison Coulthard: In terms of the impact of the pandemic and some of the really rapid transformations that happened within what was traditionally the workplace then, that was more focused on the immediate adoption of technology in order to support ways of working. In what we have done in relation to our research and the projections so far, we are very much looking at long-term trends rather than short-term impact. We have not gone into that kind of level of detail in relation to how that might impact on what the labour market looks like in 15 years.
Lord Young of Norwood Green: Do you not see that as a long-term trend as well? Do you seriously think we are not going to have working from home and all the other things?
Dr Lisa Morrison Coulthard: It is not that it is not part of the methodology of the modelling that is used for Working Futures but it is not part of the modelling that is done in order to produce the projections, if you see what I mean.
Q66 Baroness Featherstone: You laid out in the previous two questions some of the challenges and areas where there are going to be all sorts of issues going forward. We have also had quite a number of stakeholders arguing that recent government policy has indicated a deprioritisation of creative skills. You have not really talked much about the creative side. You have gone more into digital, technology and jobs. I wonder whether you could say something about that. Putting all that together, the real question is whether the Government’s education and business policy is fit for purpose. Will it deliver? Are there changes in the pipeline that will deliver that are not there to ensure that these skills needs are met? If that is not the case, what specifically must the Government do urgently as well as for the long term? There is going to be a hell of a gap if they do not get moving, at least in my view.
Dr Lisa Morrison Coulthard: In terms of our research and what we are doing, we are certainly concerned that there is not enough information to properly understand exactly what is going on, which is what we are aiming to produce. Also, there is quite a serious need for the Government to take control and co-ordinate a response that involves employers and educationalists as well as working across government departments.
Baroness Featherstone: That is not happening.
Dr Lisa Morrison Coulthard: It is not happening to the extent that it needs to. We certainly do not have a long-term skills strategy in a way that would enable us to deliver, and certainly not in the way that is happening if you look at what is going on in some of the devolved nations. Their thinking is much further ahead. Our main recommendation at the moment is that that needs to start to happen. There needs to be some kind of cross‑cutting body that would oversee the challenges that need to be addressed; make sure that the monitoring of the data that is available is done; make sure that we are ready to look at what is going on within education and how that supports skills development; and look at what is needed to support those who are already in the workplace but may well be at risk of falling out of work if they do not upskill, reskill and so on.
Baroness Featherstone: When you push this at the Government, what do they say to you?
Dr Lisa Morrison Coulthard: At the moment, they say, certainly in terms of conversations we have had, that it is much more in the context of the levelling-up agenda. There is a sense that, with local skills improvement plans, responsibility for looking at skills needs and employers’ needs within the local context is being devolved down in that way. That is definitely needed, but there still needs to be that overarching approach at a national level.
Professor Steven Spier: There are a couple of good initiatives. If the lifelong learning entitlement could be designed to facilitate this continuous reskilling, that would be a win. If we could fix the apprenticeship levy, that would be a win. The Creative Industries Council is a fantastic model that sits between DCMS and BEIS.
I will be quite blunt here: education and business policy are completely siloed. The Higher Education Minister needs a seat in BEIS. BEIS is where the discussions about the future world of work are happening. The Higher Education Minister does not have any part in those conversations. UK Research and Innovation distributes £1 billion a year to universities and to support innovation in business. The Higher Education Minister has no say in that distribution. Who is going to deliver the skills? The skills are going to be delivered by FE and HE but they are not at the table when these conversations are being had. You cannot have those two silos. They are pulling in different directions, or ignoring each other at best.
There is one other thing that I would suggest. The Office for Students also needs to understand the future world of work. It is using metrics for the quality of courses and graduate outputs that completely ignore entrepreneurism and start-ups, which you can only really hit through graduate employment schemes. That is a really old-fashioned idea of what work is going to be like. It is not the future of work. All those things impact on what the educational sphere will offer, because they are all judging how well we are doing. There needs to be quite a bit more of a think. The conversation about industry and business needs to be got much more into the higher education sphere.
Baroness Featherstone: That was very restrained.
Lesley Giles: In principle, the Government clearly have a lot of policy levers. They have published strategies such as the economic plan and their post-16 skills White Paper, which say all the right things. We need to support a system for lifelong learning and make sure that industry is at the heart of the system and that the system responds to industry.
Baroness Featherstone: They are saying all the right things.
Lesley Giles: Yes. One answer to your question is to reference—I am sure you have seen it—the National Audit Office report from July this year. That said that this needs to be set in the context of a cut in budgets from 2010 due to austerity by at least 40% on average. The indicators of success that the Government are tracking, in terms of individual participation or employer investment in training, are going in the wrong direction and going down. There have been huge falls over the last decade—something like a 50% fall in level 2 and below, and a 33% fall in level 3—in engagement.
Although we have an apprenticeship levy, which has tried to drive up employer investment and has actually changed behaviour, it has only really changed behaviour in the larger businesses that are paying it and want to get their money back. They have repurposed the provision to higher-level qualifications. A lot of those are around management and trying to get money back on management training, which is not ideally what the apprenticeship programme was about. That led the National Audit Office to say that it did not think that the conditions were in place for the Government to deliver a connected, employer-led skills system that was going to achieve those aspirations.
I could give you a whole set of statistics to show that that is a similar pattern for the creative industries. There are low levels of engagement in terms of individuals in training in the creative industries and among the lower levels of participation of employers investing in training. There is a need for reforms.
We have a good starting position in terms of having a skills vision and a skills strategy linked to an economic strategy, as Professor Spier has said. You need to think about dealing with megatrends, including these issues that we have been debating about technological advances. We need to make sure that our innovation system and research are getting under the skin of those kinds of developments. That is the beginning of unlocking long-term investment, not just by the Government but by individuals and businesses, to try to achieve this.
Our skills system needs to have a skills strategy and delivery plan that gives more autonomy to some of the institutions and skills providers within the system, so that they can link and engage with industry in a real way, modernise training and drive skills improvements in a way that is going to meet employers’ needs. We often find that funding goes down certain channels for schools, colleges and universities, through governance processes and KPIs, which works against real collaboration.
I support in particular the things that Lisa said about co-ordinating our system for labour market information. We used to do that under a body called the UK Commission for Employment and Skills. We used to have a network of sector skills councils that provided detailed sector assessments to align with those national assessments. That created a much more effective, future-focused and collective responsibility around what some of the skills priorities were that the skills system was trying to meet.
In the absence of those kinds of bodies, we have to wrestle with that employer investment question, and question whether we think employers are investing enough. We have a levy, but employers do not really have control over the levy and how that fund is spent. A lot of the levy is returned to the Treasury as unspent funding.
We also seriously need to embrace the place-based agenda, allow partnerships to build at the local level and devolve some funding so that local partners can customise some of their solutions to local needs. That is something that would really benefit the creative industries. The creative industries have a geographical footprint, and it varies. To some extent, that is enabled in the nations that have a different approach to England, but we also need to enable it at a local level.
Baroness Featherstone: There is a supplementary about what other countries are doing that we are not doing and should be doing. As a rider to that, what is going to make the critical difference in making the Government do what you are all telling them to? It is a really difficult thing. In a way, we know some of this stuff and tell the Government this stuff, and yet this huge opportunity seems to be drifting. This is my personal interpretation; I apologise.
Lesley Giles: It is really challenging. Reports such as that from the National Audit Office clearly send a strong, independent message to the Government saying that the system is very fragmented and disconnected, and that users of the system find it hard to navigate in terms of there not being clear pathways. The answer is known. Part of the challenge is funding, particularly in the current climate, which is why we have to start to enable this partnership piece and recognise the institutional infrastructure that still exists. What are some of those key mechanisms for engaging with industry and reaching industry? What are some of those mechanisms to engage with individuals? What are some of those mechanisms to engage with some of the skills providers and try to optimise the benefits for those different communities to work effectively together and strengthen communities of practice?
Baroness Featherstone: What are the top-line things other countries are doing that we might learn from?
Professor Steven Spier: Other countries are embedding what you might call creative education much lower down in the school system. If you look at the creative barrier behind Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea, these big industrial countries are trying to move from “made in China” to “designed in China”, so they are pushing creative education down into the primary and secondary school system. That comes back, Baroness Stowell, to your comment about wanting to redesign the education system. I am only a vice-chancellor. There are other countries that are putting these kinds of future skills and broader skills into the school system. Sometimes we seem to be going in the opposite direction. That would help.
In answer to your other question, it is very difficult, it seems, for a Government to join things up. I have not worked in government, so I do not really know what the answers are, but there are some things. The Creative Industries Council is a model that is worth looking at. There was also a time when the Minister for Higher Education sat in BEIS. So there are some simple structural things that could be done at least to make sure that there are different conversations happening than are happening right now. Sometimes you feel like the DfE is pulling against what DCMS or BEIS is trying to do. They are pulling in different directions. We certainly feel that as a university.
Dr Lisa Morrison Coulthard: I just mention two things. In terms of what other countries are doing, I agree with everything that Steven has said. Recent research from the OECD has shown that, for some of those countries, what is missing is what happens for older, adult learners. They are being missed out of the picture. Clearly, that is an issue that we have in this country, but it is obviously an issue elsewhere, so some learning from whatever country might have got that right would be useful.
On what government could do, the advent of the Unit for Future Skills presents a real opportunity in terms of making data more available so that more research can be done and the approach we have can be properly data driven as best it can be, in terms of short, medium and long-term needs. That needs resource. It is quite a small team. Also, it needs other departments to contribute and open up data availability, so that that kind of research can be done.
Q67 Lord Lipsey: There is all this concentration on schemes to provide people with skills on the education side and all that. All these seem excellent to me but they seem to be only half the problem. You have to consider how you encourage people to go into these—particularly people from working-class backgrounds, women and people from ethnic minorities. We have not heard anything about that. My impression is that some of these industries are the kind that are very hard to penetrate if you do not know people in the industry, rather than being an open, competitive market. I wonder, therefore, whether any of you would like to make a quick observation on that observation of mine.
Dr Lisa Morrison Coulthard: In terms of equality, diversity and inclusion data, again, that is something we will be looking at in more detail in the next stages of the research. From the projections we have done recently, we know that, of the 2.6 million new jobs that are anticipated to be in the labour market in 2035, the majority will be taken up by women. Also, quite a substantial portion of those will be part-time. We will have the answers to what is driving that, what skill sets that will relate to and so on and so forth in the next stage. That is an initial finding in terms of potentially where there is a growth in terms of female employment, but a decline in male employment, particularly in the more manual and lower‑skilled end of the market.
Lord Lipsey: What about ethnic minorities?
Dr Lisa Morrison Coulthard: We have not gone into that detail yet, but we will.
Lesley Giles: I would just reference that the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre has done a lot of work on diversity and inclusion across the creative industries, working with the Creative Industries Council and DCMS. There are reports to reference on that. There are a range of different industry bodies across the different subsectors of the creative industries that are already advancing a whole range of strategies with their communities to try to make their sector more inclusive.
Q68 Lord Griffiths of Burry Port: The ground is well trodden by the time it gets to this question. Education is where I am supposed to focus; a lot has been said about it. I hear what you say about driving down lower and lower in schools. I hear the mention of further education. I have experience of one-year Certificates of Higher Education. They are currently aimed, in the university I work with, at skills needed in social care and mental health, but I am sure that this could be diversified to the creative industries as well. I am thinking of all the talent that gets lost. These are people who have never had the chance to get into higher education but are very talented and work has developed their skills.
How do you get the education sector, with the commercial interest, to actually talk to each other without each leaving it to the Government or somebody else to make those marriages happen? With schools, there has to be the recognition that a certain line could yield very profitably, and vice versa. Granted everything that you have said about higher education, Professor Spier, is marvellous, but how do we get it down to the ordinary level with ordinary kids who are very talented and diverse?
Professor Steven Spier: There is a huge role for further education and higher education. Sometimes we are not clear enough. They are very different missions. If we are talking about skills, they are imparting a different kind of skill. There is a huge need for FE to deliver a lot of the immediate skills and for people to understand that. I was at a couple of conversations recently—panel discussions—about skills. There seems to be a huge problem in getting secondary school students to understand what opportunities are out there. How to fix that is beyond my ken but you are right that people do not know what the opportunities are, and that a lot of them are at FE level.
Lord Griffiths of Burry Port: Throughout my experience of education—I have been involved for decades in one way or another—further education is the Cinderella of our educational system. It has not been invested in. How can we expect outcomes from a sector that has not received the right kind of investment and orientation?
Professor Steven Spier: As someone in HE, I would agree with that. Unfortunately, the policy conversation sometimes becomes FE versus HE. That is why I was saying that they are very different things. If you look at the facilities, the staff and the curriculum, they are very different things. They are both really important. FE has not been treated very well recently. It would be very difficult to deliver the way that I am discussing future skills at FE but, in the industries we are talking about, there is tremendous need for a lot of the skills that FE is probably best placed to deliver.
Dr Lisa Morrison Coulthard: As with a lot of this work, this is a future part of our five-year research programme. We will be looking at how the essential employment skills develop during formal education as well as how they interplay with more cognitive skills. We will also try to understand the extent to which different qualifications and pathways through education lead to the generation of different skill sets, which speaks to what you were saying.
Also, we want to look at what happens in educational systems internationally, particularly where there are countries with a good proven record of producing young people entering the labour market with that broader range of skill sets. We want to look at what policy underpinned that so we can see whether, if it was implemented in this country, it would have a similar kind of positive outcome. There is a lot of work to be done there.
I agree with what has been said about further education. Just recently, three bodies within FE have come together to form a coalition on future skills. That is a really important development to try to stop having multiple individual conversations and have one collective conversation and speak with one voice on exactly what the key asks for the sector are. I very much hope that that continues and look forward to contributing to it, but that is certainly something we need to do within the sector.
Lesley Giles: In my view, it is a multilayered problem. In part, it is what I was saying earlier about the way in which different skills providers are funded and the key performance indicators and so on for schools, colleges and universities. That generally leads to the conclusion that they do not have a lot of space. They are often looking internally at those administrative systems and processing funding. They do not have a lot of time to engage with industries and their local communities. That is one problem.
Part of the problem is the nature of courses, the funding of courses and how those are reviewed. There was earlier reference to the fact that some of the analysis about what skills are in demand has deprioritised creative areas. It is often looked at over a very narrow range of economic indicators related to wages. If that is not reflected in some of those indicators, that has deprioritised some of those courses. That has affected what courses are available at level 2, level 3, the higher technical qualifications at levels 4 and level 5, and in higher education. That is something that would have to be counted, so that there are those options.
There are initiatives such as the Careers & Enterprise Company, which is working to try to strengthen some of those collaborations with schools through things like business adviser networks. There are some really interesting initiatives in the creative industries, such as the Discover Careers initiative, which was funded by DCMS. That could certainly then put many more creative industry advisers into that network, which would be really important, alongside the time when they are trying to improve the quality of careers innovations and information.
More generally, we should also look to some of those really good examples and hotspots of good practice where, despite all the challenges, industry is working with colleges, schools and universities. They exist. There are examples there. Linking it to this international dimension, in other countries, you see technical pathways and sector-facing, connected networks of providers and industry-facing courses that link together. That is the position we need to get to from having those really good hotspots. I would mention things like the NextGen Skills Academy, the film academy. TechSkills, within techUK, has its Tech Industry Gold work that it is doing, which provides training right across the career pathway from level 1 right up to higher education.
Lord Griffiths of Burry Port: We have heard about universities and places of education. There used to be courses that were led by industries and sectors, such as certificates and diplomas, in hospitals, factories and the rest of it. There, you had half the time learning the skills and half the time doing them. Everything is now degrees and graduates and we have lost a lot of that focused preparation for the workplace.
Q69 Lord Young of Norwood Green: I will address my question to Professor Spier. I want to disagree with the last point because we have vocational routes now into practically every area. That has been a profound change. Middle-class parents are now beginning to think, “Wait a minute, they can earn while they learn”. To me, that is important.
The other thing is that we still have the challenge of schools and colleges that want to fill their sixth forms and so want to drive everyone to university. Apart from that, there has been another interesting change, on which I would like your comment: UCAS now lists apprenticeships as well as degree courses. That is a step in the right direction.
Professor Steven Spier: Yes, that is a positive move. You could not find anyone who disagrees with the idea of degree apprenticeships, but providers and businesses find it very difficult to work in that space. There is such unanimity about that. If you got a few people round the table, you could fix it. It is a fantastic initiative that is extremely cumbersome for both sides, but I am sure that could be fixed.
Q70 Lord Foster of Bath: As one who played an incredibly small part in the creation of the Creative Industries Council, I was delighted, Professor Spier, that you praised it as a model to look forward to. I point out to you that, when you said that kids in schools do not know what is available, it is actually the Creative Industries Council that has come up with the Creative Careers programme, which is seeking to address that particular problem.
My question is a very simple one. You rightly talked, much earlier on, about the gap between the whole education and skills debate. You talked about the way that BEIS and DCMS get together through the Creative Industries Council but that HE and FE are not even in the room. Would it be a good idea to get DfE suddenly to become a member of the Creative Industries Council as a quick beginning of a fix?
Professor Steven Spier: In our future skills reports, we call for using the Creative Industries Council as a model to do something similar at the skills level, so it could be very crowded in that room for the CIC. You could, however, do something similar by getting BEIS and DfE together to look at skills.
Q71 The Lord Bishop of Worcester: This follows on from that. I am afraid that it is directed at you again, Professor Spier, because I am using something you said earlier: one thing that could be done is getting HE back with business, innovation and skills. I was one of those who rather rejoiced that there was a separation made, because I would like to think that education is about more than simply business, innovation and skills, but I can see the problem with silos. It is like the curriculum, is it not? It is all siloed in an artificial way. Would there then be a problem, I am musing, that the rest of education might be left out of the conversation? It needs to be much bigger, but where do you draw the line? It is really tricky.
Professor Steven Spier: Yes, that is really tricky. If you ask Lord Willetts, he says that the sector was rather keen to get out of BEIS. At the time, he said, “Be careful what you ask for”. The conversations are very different and the DfE’s focus is mostly on schools and the mechanisms about schools. You will end up with silos no matter how you do it, will you not?
A lot of what we are talking about today is around driving innovation in the economy, is it not? A lot of that is being done, at least in the beginning, by higher and further education, so it seems obvious to put those two things together. At my university, we are working really closely with industry. That report is the voice of industry and we are going to turn the whole university on its head to deliver that. There are universities—mine is not the only one, by any means—that are working closely with industry to try to deliver what it says it needs.
Q72 The Chair: Before I close, I want to ask a couple of things. Ms Giles, for clarification, you said earlier that three-quarters of graduates are in highly skilled jobs. Can I make sure that I understood the point you were making there? Are you saying that these are graduates who are in highly skilled jobs but are not qualified for the skilled jobs that they are in?
Lesley Giles: No. If you look at the creative industries as a community, there are two aspects to it. One is that, if you look at the highest qualifications that workers in the creative industries hold, nearly three-quarters of them hold at least a degree or higher. The industry average is 44%.
If you look at the jobs that people are in, we have a standard classification system that is differentiated by skills level. We look at associate-professional and above professionals, which are considered to be higher-skilled roles. Some 85% of creative workers work in those highly skilled roles, compared to 46% on average across the economy. If you include creative occupations working anywhere, so you include people who work outside of the creative industries, 95% work in those higher-skilled roles.
The Chair: Forgive my dimness, but I am not sure I am understanding the point you are trying to make.
Lesley Giles: It is a highly skilled workforce.
The Chair: The people who are going into it—
Lesley Giles: They need to be skilled.
The Chair: Do they need to be educated to degree level? Or is the problem that they do not have the specific skills required but they do not necessarily need to be graduates in order to be trained and skilled to do those highly skilled jobs?
Lesley Giles: No. That is probably a function of where we are in our education system, and the fact that we have moved to a mass higher education system and not diversified in terms of our qualifications. In the future, in the context of rebalancing and the fact that we are trying to create higher technical qualifications at levels 4 and 5—as well as degree apprenticeships, for example—the actual qualification and entry route that people might have in the future might change. At the moment, it is degree-dominated.
The Chair: Yes. I was interested by the point that Professor Spier made about FE and HE being very different things, yet one of the earlier comments that he made was that, graduate or no graduate, you are finding that people who are entering the workplace are insufficiently skilled in basic competencies to be good at a job, whatever that job may be.
Lesley Giles: Yes, that might still be the case. I am essentially reporting to you labour market information that actually shows you what qualifications people hold. You would go to separate sources to try to make an assessment about shortages, surpluses and things like that. You would have to triangulate the two. On that particular evidence, that is what it means.
The Chair: We have another panel coming in that is even more focused than you on the creative side, but it is important that we understand that the skills shortages in the creative sector are not necessarily about degree-educated skills shortages.
Lesley Giles: No, I would agree with that.
The Chair: That also expands the opportunity for people to move into the creative sector. Clearly, as that sector grows, we are going to need more people.
Lesley Giles: Yes. It was just an indicator of what the broad skills requirements are, relative to other parts of the economy, and therefore what the likely lead times to train people will be.
The Chair: I very much thank all three of you again for being here, answering our questions and giving us your time. We will draw a pause before we move on to our second panel.
