Post-16 Skills White Paper slammed by lifelong learning institution

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The 122-year-old Workers’ Educational Association strongly criticised the lack of content on adult education in the recently-published further education and skills policy document

“What is a White Paper again?”

For those of you not familiar with the essentials of policy-making in the UK, a White Paper is a formal statement of government policy in a specific policy area. It has to be presented to Parliament as a formal statement of government policy, and MPs have the right to ask questions in a set piece sitting in the Commons on the presentation of that policy paper. The House of Commons departmental select committee that oversees and scrutinises the presenting department will then hold detailed scrutiny sessions where ministers and senior civil servants are then cross-examined on the policy detail. Often this is after other interested parties (from businesses, to academia, to charities and campaign groups) have had the chance to give their views to MPs on the select committee.

Post-16 education and skills white paper

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If you have any views on the above, feel free to let your MP or local councillors know via https://www.writetothem.com/

Because if you don’t tell them, they won’t know what you think!

*It’s time to protect lifelong learning – WEA*

I blogged about the concerns the WEA had back in March 2025 here. They called for the Government to:

  • “Reverse the short-sighted cuts to the national and devolved Adult Skills Funds 
  • Restore the adult education budget overall to 2010 levels by the end of Parliament  
  • Rebalance the responsibility for community adult education across multiple Government departments to reflect its contribution to health and community building
  • Ringfence an uplift for the post-19 workforce who are yet to see the same funding uplifts as teachers and college lecturers“

Above – WEA Press Release March 2025

To which I agree. With the delivery of adult skills having been devolved to the Combined Authority in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, there’s little flexibility for the latter other than to deliver what ministers have instructed them to deliver. All too often that means the CPCA undertaking public procurement exercises for third party institutions to deliver the contract. Thus it means there’s no real ‘political debate’ involved. That has already been decided in Whitehall.

We’ll find out what the Skills White Paper means for Cambridgeshire & Peterborough on 10 November 2025 when the Skills Committee meets. But in the grand scheme of things I fear there won’t be that much meaningful or substantive ‘debate’ needed because of the tight framework created by central government.

Ensuring the multiple policy statements co-ordinate on the ground and result in something that is greater than the sum of their parts

Note there are several other significant documents that the CPCA has to produce itself, and/or deliver upon following publication by central government.

Because none of these involve the use of substantial independent revenue raising powers, the CPCA is dependent on government grants. Which makes it more of a delivery organisation rather than a meaningful ‘local policy maker’. This is a tension that is being explored in the context of the Government’s 1.5million homes target that was unpicked on BBC Panorama recently – you can watch it again here. It is within that context that the return of the OxCamArc via the Investment Prospectus should be looked at. And finally don’t forget the emerging local development plan for Cambridge and South Cambridgeshire, alongside the ongoing work of the Cambridge Growth Company.

Also, don’t forget:

“We see the grand ambition of the Cambridge Growth Company as delusional”

Above – Prof Tony Booth to the C2C Public Inquiry, 21 Oct 2025

One of the things I mentioned in previous blogposts – and one that needs close scrutiny by people more competent than me, is whether the resources and policies being committed to the skills agenda in and around Cambridge is enough to underpin the actions needed to deliver on the Government’s huge growth ambitions.

I do not believe that they are enough.

As I have stated repeatedly, ministers need to come up with a comprehensive set of policies (and provide the funding alongside it) to enable adults to retrain into the areas that have chronic skills shortages – those areas critical to the success or otherwise of the Government’s ambitions. At the moment I’ve not seen anything substantial that covers things like cost-of-living maintenance grants. And that’s before we consider the announced rises in tuition fees in the face of the implosion of higher education in England. You only need to look at the regular announcements of job cuts. And it’s not just the UK that’s in trouble. In ‘The Other Cambridge’ the funding for PhD researchers has been slashed.

Ministers and politicians generally risk forgetting the human elements behind the numbers

One huge risk is that ministers provide the funding for subject/vocation-specific facilities, but not for the wider general and leisure/community-based facilities that support the students and make the place of learning pleasant enough to turn up to in the first place. The concept of designing an ideal adult education college from 1968 – ironically by the WEA in Derby, becomes important again.

In the press release from the WEA there are a number of things that stand out:

“The White Paper is cross-departmental but it falls short of what is needed to get the nation learning, which is a full national Lifelong Learning Strategy led from the centre but with a clear role for Strategic Authorities to deliver regional and local needs.”

Employment is central to the Government’s growth mission, but can’t be achieved without a comprehensive approach that considers health and strong communities, and the underpinning role of adult learning.  

We will champion learning which supports progression into work as well as learning which is crucial to health and wellbeing (including for those thousands of people who are not in the workforce). We want to see a funding system which takes a flexible view of learning not a narrowly utilitarian one. 

WEA (21 Oct 2025)

Learning from the Total Place concept

This was something the former Communities Secretary Prof John Denham tried to get going at the end of Gordon Brown’s Government – and is trying to bring back. I wrote about Total Place 2.0 here. In the context of lifelong learning – and within it adult skills and vocational education, my general view is to build, provide and maintain a place where your target audience would choose to be – and would look forward to going to having woken up.

When was the last time you woke up and got out of bed ***really excited*** about something you were going to do that had a semi-contractual element to it? Eg employment – thinking of the majority of the population who most likely would choose to be somewhere else/doing something else if they didn’t have to be working where they are/in the current conditions they are in today.

My concern about the various training facilities popping up in various places is that they risk being standalone institutions rather than integrated and embedded into wider communities. The stereotypical edge-of-town campus is a classic case in point – such as Cambridge Regional College. Or Long Road Sixth Form College for that matter. These are places where many students have to travel significant distances to get to their places of learning. It wouldn’t be so much of a problem if the public transport services and active travel routes were safe, intuitive and efficient. For example at least the guided busway provides for some reliability for those that live close to a busway stop west of Cambridge. It’s point-to-point. But that’s not the case for the majority.

“Cambridgeshire’s further education colleges spend £1.8m on providing transport & bus services that should be provided for by local government”

Above – from October 2021

Which reflects how broken our municipal government systems are. Shouldn’t that money be coming from transport budgets? But then such is the fragmented nature of our local public services that as things stand, Total Place 2.0 does not stand a chance.

One of the reasons why so many people give up on mainstream politics is…

The problems they identify day-to-day that seem so easily solvable seem to require a disproportionate amount of time and effort to get them dealt with. And some never seem to go away.

“Such as?”

The chronic shortage of maths and physics teachers. Here’s the legendary long-form interviewer and former Labour MP Brian Walden in 1986 cross-examining the then Education Secretary Sir Keith Joseph MP.

That was nearly 40 years ago. We still have shortages of specialist teachers in those key subjects. Yet for as long as I care to remember, ministers of all parties have gone on about the importance of science and the concern about the shortage of inspiring science and maths teachers, yet the problem remains.

Which perhaps explains the growing popularity of both TeamNigel and The Greens who are coming at the political, economic, and public administrative system of the past 40 years with rhetoric on how it’s not working and that they intend to do something about it. (One theory behind the Brexit vote is that mainstream politics had spent the previous six years overseeing the decline of the public realm and of public services that voting to leave the EU was the only tool they had to deliver a major shock to the system.)

Whether TeamNigel and/or The Greens are able to overcome the challenges of running their own majority councils in the existing system remains to be seen. TeamNigel in Kent is having big problems as they found out the fantasy savings their senior political figures said were there turned out not to be there. We’ll get a sense of how successful The Greens have been in their only majority council in history in Mid Suffolk at the Suffolk County Council elections in six months time. (District level councils have much, much smaller budgets and far fewer powers too).

The local elections in England are in just over six months time. You can see the by-elections coming up at https://whocanivotefor.co.uk/ <<– Click & scroll down.

If you are interested in the longer term future of Cambridge, and on what happens at the local democracy meetings where decisions are made, feel free to: