I was horrified to read that “ministers are looking at a number of measures to establish how businesses can take on more responsibility for skills training, including proposals to extend training levies and licence-to-practice schemes”. Hopefully, the various protests from the CBI and others will stop this in its tracks.
I started my career not long after the introduction of Industrial Training Boards by the Labour Government in the sixties. It was a costly bureaucratic nightmare. The current Government frequently talks of the need to reduce central control across many aspects of life, remove surplus red tape and get police away from form-filling and back on the streets. These suggestions go in the opposite direction – creating a series of industrial Ofsteds.
Back in the sixties and early seventies Industrial Training Boards were set up on an industry by industry basis. Even if the basic idea had been sound the difficulties of defining an industry (somehow local and national government were also seen as ‘industries’) led to much duplication and confusion. A sector-based approach is being considered again!
Most ITBs chose to adopt levy and grant systems. Each employer was liable to pay a levy which with luck, and a great deal of form-filling and creative writing, could be recovered if sufficient training of an approved nature was carried out and recorded. Naturally extensive teams of inspectors needed to be set up (plus, of course, head offices and management teams). The theory was that this would transfer money from those companies that did very little training to those, usually larger businesses, that did.
The only ITBs that really made a significant difference were concerned with those industries with lots of small businesses and transient workforces (Road Transport, Construction and Hotel and Catering). They took an approach of running their own practical training centres with lots of short courses on offer.
