Education, Training, and the Labour Market in Britain

Abstract

Many of those leaving formal education in Britain now encounter a period of prolonged unemployment, alleviated by participation in a manpower programme, before securing a conventional job. This has led, both inside and outside the education system, to a questioning of the value of the existing educational process if such circumstances are likely to persist. Not only is the pressure to be cost effective now very strong, as education is expected to bear some share of the overall public expenditure cuts, but the system itself appears to be vulnerable to more fundamental examination. There are, however, several aspects of the present reaction in the United Kingdom which would assert themselves regardless of the economic climate. Of these, the first is that a period of considerable reform and expansion at several levels of the education system is bound, eventually, to provoke an appraisal of its performance. The second aspect is that the demographic trends imply falling numbers of pupils and students in the 15-19 year age group (the corresponding population cohort is expected to decline from 4.6 million in 1980 to about 3.4 million in 1996). This will occur to varying degrees in the different sectors but, presumably, the prospect is enough to warrant serious discussion of whether or not resources--or at least some growth in resources-should be sacrificed by education to the benefit of other public services, or as part of a general shift towards stimulating the private sector of the economy. Next, manpower policy, as developed by the Department of Employment and the Manpower Services Commission (MSC), has emerged as a force to be reckoned with, particularly in the area of post-compulsory education for the 16-19-year-olds. The precise form its evolution has taken has certainly been strongly influenced by the economic situation during the 1970s, but even in a better economic climate it is likely that manpower policy would have started to come of age. The treatment of young people under the Youth Opportunities Programme, for example, invites comparison with that pursued within the conventional full-time education system and raises major questions of policy about the content of education, the institutional framework within which it is offered, the method of financial support to those receiving it, the relevance of industrial experience to the educational process itself, and the most appropriate way of absorbing young people into the labour force. There are now concrete examples of alternative programmes which blur the divisions between education and training, student and employee, in a way which even further education had not managed to do. Fourthly, although manpower policy is overtly labour market orientated, both manpower and educational policies affect and are in turn affected by the labour market environment. This interaction between policy and environment in the long