David Willetts

Speaking at the Conservative Party’s Skills Summit today, Shadow Innovation, Universities and Skills Secretary, David Willetts, will unveil a five-point plan for skills in the recession. David Willetts will say:

“The Government must offer new hope to people who are losing their jobs. The deep recession makes it even more important that we offer new skills and training to people being made redundant. That is why we are proposing our five-point plan.”

ENDS

Notes to Editors

The Conservative Party has unveiled a five-point plan to help people update their skills and retrain during the recession:

1. Suspend the LSC changes

In our Green Paper on skills, we showed how the Learning and Skills Council is failing to deliver, and outlined our plans for radical reform of further education funding. But the timing is crucial. The Government’s reorganisation of the LSC is not only the wrong plan, it comes at the wrong time. To make training recession-ready, we must postpone this re-organisation until we’re in the recovery and make sure we get money to FE Colleges right away.

2. Liberalisation of JSA rules

We are calling on the Government to relax the rules on allowing unemployed people to take up training opportunities whilst claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance to allow the newly unemployed to reskill and find new work as soon as possible. Under the current rules Jobseekers have to wait up to 18 months before they are able to take a full time training course whilst claiming benefits. At a time when certain occupations are being particularly hit by the economic downturn Conservatives want to allow people the opportunity to retrain and reskill immediately, so they can return to work as soon as possible.

3. Apprenticeship clearing house

Our plans for an apprenticeship clearing house will help every apprentice who is laid off as a result of the recession know what options are available to them to continue their training. We propose to create a national database of alternative posts for apprentices who have lost their jobs in the recession.

4. Fair deal for mature learners

Adult learning has suffered a massive blow in recent years. There has been a loss of 1.4 million adult learner places funded by the Learning and Skills Council-funded since 2004/05 (NIACE evidence to the IUSS Committee, Re-skilling for recovery, 2009). We are committed to creating a £100m Community Learning Fund to reverse the decline in adult learning. And because we believe a variety of training options should be available to people of all ages, we will remove the age cap on apprenticeship funding and fully fund the 77,000 adult apprenticeships that are currently partly-funded.

5. Better support for young people

Under a Conservative government, there will be a £100 million NEETs fund - targeting special help at the many young people who leave school only to find themselves not in any kind of education, training or employment. We desperately need ways of helping this group into positive work-oriented learning opportunities. And because all young people need and deserve support, we will create a new, integrated careers service which will include a professional, specialist careers adviser in every school and college.