Responding to the Skills for Jobs White Paper for England, published today, Dr Neil Bentley-Gockmann OBE, Chief Executive, WorldSkills UK said:
“We welcome the focus on driving up the quality of teaching and training to better prepare young people to meet employer and economic development needs. This is vital as we look towards a skills-led recovery.
“But as the Education Secretary acknowledges, other major competitor global economies are ahead of us in valuing high quality skills to help drive their competitiveness and productivity.
“Our work on international skills benchmarking shows that the UK has been falling behind, so we have to up our game to help businesses better compete and support global trade ambitions.
“Driving forward the development of high quality skills to support key sectors will not only help attract more economic inward investment in potential growth areas of the economy, like green tech, digital and advanced manufacturing, but also help create high quality jobs for the next generation.
“Young people and their parents must have faith that the system will prepare them for rewarding, sustainable careers. Teaching standards are at the heart of this and it is good to see the Government recognise our new WorldSkills UK Centre of Excellence, which we launched in partnership with NCFE, as a pathfinder using world-class training methods for tens of thousands of students as part of the drive to improve quality.
“Our skills and insight makes us uniquely placed to make a significant contribution and we will continue to work with our UK and international partners to mainstream excellence in skills and help deliver this ambitious package of reforms to help more young people and the economy succeed.”
