Tag Archives: apprenticeships

New SkillsPlanner Intelligence Briefing

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SERIO 3rd briefing

Keeping SkillsPlanner stakeholders updated on key developments, Plymouth University’s SERIO applied research unit is producing a series of intelligence briefings covering construction skills in industry and government. SERIO’s third briefing (PDF – will open in new tab) is now available in our media section, along with the first (published in February 2016 – post) and second (July 2016 – post).

Written in clear, non-academic English, these briefings are intended to inform and engage our audiences with our ongoing R&D project. The latest looks at four topics:

Apprenticeship Levy: In August 2016 the government released further details concerning the specifics of the Apprenticeship Levy. This includes a 90% apprenticeship training co-investment from government for non-levy paying businesses; and the introduction of 15 funding bands that will cap the maximum price government will co-invest towards the cost of each apprenticeship.

Further Education Provision: The findings from a panel chaired by Lord Sainsbury into the ‘over-complex’ technical and professional qualification environment have been released, alongside a series of recommendations which have been accepted by the government. The Post-16 skills plan sets out a streamlined technical education system where students will be able to choose from up to 15 distinct technical education routes, with the first routes being made available from 2019. In addition, the QAA have announced that they are developing a new characteristics statement for Degree Apprenticeships. Currently there are 13 Degree Apprenticeships on offer and this move will ensure that they are formally recognised within the higher education system.

Farmer Review: This month, a report on the state of the skills crisis within the construction sector has been published, detailing 10 critical areas where the construction industry is showing signs of failure. The review notes how an ageing workforce and surging costs driven by a shortage of skilled workers have stalled investment. Among the recommendations set out in the report, several refer to the need for skills and training to better reflect the needs of a future modernised industry, including the use of OpenData to address the construction skills gap, specifically mentioning SkillsPlanner (read our blog post).

Neighbourhood Planning Bill: A series of new amendments have been made to the Neighbourhood Planning Bill which are now due to be considered by a Public Bill Committee. The Bill seeks to simplify how plans can be revised as local circumstances change and measures will support more housebuilding and provide more local say over developments.

Parliament faces construction skills gap

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Westminster

The Houses of Parliament in London are falling down and in need of what will be a multi-billion restoration project. As a result, Members of Parliament, peers and civil servants are facing a skills gap literally on their crumbling doorstep.

Construction News reported last week (Specialist skills shortage poses ‘risk’ to £4bn Parliament restoration [£]) that Parliament’s Joint Committee on the Palace of Westminster had warned that a lack of specialist skills across the sector could hamper the parliamentary restoration programme. In a report (Restoration and Renewal of the Palace of Westminster – available here), the committee devoted a section (“Managing the supply chain“) of Chapter 6 to detailed discussion of the need for specialist construction skills.

The committee received evidence from construction industry organisations including the RIBA, RICS and CIBSE, all of whom pointed out the need to start investing at the earliest possible opportunity in the skills that will be needed to deliver the Westminster restoration and renewal (R&R) programme. It also highlighted that most of these skills tend to be found the heritage and conservation sectors, where the vast majority of firms are small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

  • The RIBA told the committee a “great skills shortage issue resulting from declining investment into the conservation sector and a large pipeline of works in the UK that would divert resources from the R&R Programme.” But even without this pipeline of expected works, there might still be insufficient skills available in the market to tackle the scale of the challenge entailed in the R&R Programme – even though it’s expected to start no sooner than 2023.
  • RICS suggested the R&R programme might become an “exemplar project” demonstrating how training and the sustainability of skills could be built into large programmes.
  • CIBSE also suggested that, rather than viewing the supply and capacity as a challenge, the R&R programme provided a unique opportunity to develop a new generation of skilled heritage workers, through apprenticeships and other career development activity, and also to bring a significant number of young women into the sector (diversity being an ongoing issue – post).

The committee was clearly under no illusion of the need to start engaging with supply chains, and also recognised that the project provided opportunities not only to engage with SMEs, but to spread the work well beyond London and the south-east of England (in much the same way that Crossrail has involved companies the length and breadth of the UK), and to develop a strategy for training and creating apprenticeships that would leave a legacy of skills and experience.

In short, the Westminster project, is, to use the RIBA’s words, “an ideal opportunity for educating and training the next generation in the skills needed to maintain, repair and enhance the historic buildings and to be an ongoing exemplar project for those skills and craftsmanship.” With SkillsPlanner’s focus on skills in London and the southeast, we will be watching for any mobilisation with respect to this project with interest.

Time to apply some military and manufacturing know-how?

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Module Building in factory environment

The UK construction skills crisis continues to delay projects, drive up costs and reduce quality. As we have discussed several times on the SkillsPlanner blog, the government and industry have produced various reports and instituted various campaigns, but the skills gap challenge is deep-rooted.

With the Global Financial Crisis wreaking havoc in 2007-2009 and plunging national construction industries around the world into recession, the UK shed hundreds of thousands of workers, many of whom never returned to the industry. As the UK emerged, somewhat shakily, from recession, replacing these workers has not been helped by the industry’s poor reputation – itself a symptom of deep systemic problems (To change the image, first change construction), including a lack of diversity, an ageing workforce, and decades of under-investment in research and development so that construction is rock-bottom of the digitalisation league, notwithstanding the efforts to promote technologies such as BIM (Tackling skills gaps – can we learn from BIM?).

We have welcomed government plans to reform post-16 education (post) and we are looking closely at recently announced changes to the UK apprenticeship levy scheme (summarised by TES here; the CITB suggests the changes could cut apprenticeship funding by a third). But we still think construction needs to adopt a long-term view of its skills and employment needs, and to be thinking about digital skills and the fourth industrial revolution.

Military-style skills provision?

We are not alone in this view. Gary Sullivan, CEO of construction logistics and security business Wilson James has urged much the same kind of new thinking. In a hard-hitting open letter to the recently reshuffled skills minister Robert Halfon MP published in Construction Manager magazine, Sullivan writes:

Gary Sullivan“… we need more than builders. We need to manufacture off site, we need people with good hand-to-eye co-ordination, we need people who can use state-of-the-art tools who can produce quality at speed again and again. The precious few young people who want to join the industry are being given the wrong skills and it is taking too long to train them in the wrong skills.”

He continues:

“We need to train differently, get people in at ground level and get them working. We could look at how the military train young people. In less than 18 weeks they produce the highest skill levels with technical expertise and a great work ethic. We have to invest in off-site manufacturing and in parallel train the workforce to fit, erect and plug in the state-of-the-art products created in factories in our Northern Powerhouse. Our ambition should be more F1 than 1961.”

It is no surprise that Sullivan mentions the military. Before founding Wilson James 25 years ago, Sullivan spent seven years in the paratroopers, and then worked for the UN where he learned about logistics. Upon return to civilian life, he worked initially as a logistics and security manager for Bovis Lend Lease on projects in the City of London, noting how much construction could benefit from improved logistics. Today, Wilson James employs over 3000 people, has an annual turnover in excess of £100m, and has recruited extensively from armed forces leavers.

BuildForce square 720pxBuilding a strong transition pathway from the armed forces into construction is actively supported by SkillsPlanner project leaders at Ethos (many present at the Westminster launch of BuildForce at the Houses of Parliament on 29 June). As Sullivan suggests, military personnel can quickly gain technical skills and have a strong work ethic, while many in senior ranks have both professional and managerial skills and attitudes that equip them well for work not just in construction as we currently know it, but in what construction might become over the next decade or two.

Modern methods of construction

Such thinking is already being applied in other countries which face similar challenges to the UK. For example, according to a 2015 Ford Foundation report, more than 2.3 million advanced manufacturing jobs in the United States are unfilled and over the next decade an estimated 2.7 million baby boomers will retire from this sector. In California, Workshops for Warriors is training veterans in advanced manufacturing – “Today we train veterans to make products, but tomorrow we will train them to train robots to make products,” says founder Hernàn Luis y Prado. Workshops for Warriors is also partnering with online learning provider SolidProfessor to provide additional skills in engineering software use, including several Autodesk applications familiar in construction.

Manufacturing is hugely important in construction. Common stereotypes of construction tend to focus on design offices or site-based activities, overlooking the key inputs of manufacturers and suppliers. In the UK, according to the Construction Products Association, the sector directly provides jobs for 313,000 people across 21,000 companies and has an annual turnover of more than £50 billion. And this importance is set to grow as the industry expands its adoption of Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DfMA) approaches in the coming years.

Sullivan rightly highlights the importance of off-site manufacture, and challenges the industry to become more like Formula 1 precision engineering. There are encouraging signs, even within one of the most conservative of UK construction sectors: housebuilding:

  • Earlier this year, Legal and General announced plans to “do for housing what Henry Ford did for the modern automotive industry” by manufacturing modular homes
  • Property Week recently reported the UK government and the mayor of London are drawing up plans to use modular construction to tackle the housing crisis
  • And when a skills crisis and a housing crisis coincide, you also need to review house-building skills (post).

Similar DfMA/off-site thinking is being applied to infrastructure projects and in relation to public and commercial buildings. Therefore, as Sullivan says, “We need to train differently“. We should be equipping people with 21st century technology skills, and breaking out of our traditional construction silos to learn from what the military, logistics and manufacturing can show us.

Skills shortages hitting workmanship

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Scape report clip

Skills shortages are wrecking the quality of workmanship on construction projects, says a supply chain survey undertaken by Scape Group (see also report by Construction Enquirer).

Earlier this summer, Scape surveyed over 150 senior managers at public sector organisations across local and central government, along with a range of suppliers and subcontractors delivering built environment services. These included contractors who provide construction and civil engineering services, consultancies who support the public sector and facilities management providers. This survey sought the opinion of tiers 1, 2 and 3 of the public sector supply chain. Scape asked questions about the tendering process and bid opportunities, the stability of the supply chain, supply chain management, the skills shortage and an investigation into the sector’s reliance on public projects.

The resulting Sustainability in the Supply Chain report (available here) found 58% of contractors and suppliers cited shortages as negatively impacting the quality of their workmanship. The problem is worse in the public sector with 85% of managers seeing the quality of their built environment projects negatively affected by skills shortages.

Lack of labour is also busting budgets with 80% of public sector respondents and just under 40% of contractors and consultants blaming skills shortages for cost rises.

Mark Robinson, Scape Group Chief Executive, said:

“Our research has shown that the skills shortage is at breaking point, not only severely impacting the quality of what we are building but also our ability to build it on budget. While there is a mountain to climb to overcome this challenge, basic recommendations can be put in place to ease the burden, for example, 19% of contractors and subcontractors still do not have an apprenticeship scheme.”

New: SkillsPlanner Intelligence Briefing 2

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To help keep SkillsPlanner stakeholders updated on key developments relating to construction skills in both industry and government, Plymouth University’s SERIO applied research unit is producing a series of intelligence briefings. The first was published in February (post); the second (PDF) has just been finalised and is now available in our media section.

Written in clear, non-academic English, these briefings are and intended to inform and engage our audiences with the ongoing R&D project. The latest looks at four main topics (some also discussed on the SkillsPlanner blog):

  • Apprenticeship Levy: In April 2016 the government released some additional detail concerning the specifics of the Apprenticeship Levy. This includes a deadline for spending funds raised through the levy (18 months) and the ability of ‘connected companies’ to pool their funds. However a number of details are yet to be released including: precise rules around how and with whom employers can pool funds; and how non-levy paying businesses, which make up the vast majority of construction employers will be funded to deliver Apprenticeships. Based on these emerging details, it is thought that the Apprenticeship fund could be a catalyst for increased levels of collaboration and partnership working between connected companies.
  • Post-16 Skills PlanFurther Education Provision: The London (Central) Area Based Review commenced in January 2016. The Review will examine the Further Education (FE) sector in the area and consider options for rationalising the curriculum and developing greater specialisation, as well as the prospects for any mergers, closures or collaboration. Similarly to the Apprenticeship Levy, the Review could encourage further partnership working and interact with other developments (such as the Sainsbury Review – post) to help simplify the technical and professional training market.
  • Transport Infrastructure Skills Strategy: The new Transport Infrastructure Skills Strategy (published January 2016) sets an ambition for at least 20% of new entrants to engineering and technical apprenticeships in the transport sector to be women by 2020. More widely, a new Strategic Transport Apprenticeship Taskforce will be set up to address skills challenges within the sector.
  • Government Construction Strategy: The Government Construction Strategy 2016-20 (see also this post) sets out how the government plans to develop its capability as an ‘exemplary’ construction client. One of the Strategy’s key aims is to develop collaborative procurement techniques to build skills capacity, including the delivery of 20,000 apprenticeships by 2020.

The reshuffle dust settles …

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GCS 2016-20

As the UK political establishment settles down after the EU Referendum (post) and the resulting spate of resignations and changes of office, the UK construction sector is now beginning to identify the new figures who will be leading key initiatives on areas such as housebuilding and planning, construction strategy, and skills.

Prime Minister Theresa May’s Cabinet reshuffle saw a plethora of new appointments, and as the various Cabinet ministers have begun to settle into their portfolios and some tasks have been moved between ministries, various junior minister posts have also been finalised.

Succeeding Nick Boles, Harlow MP Robert Halfon is the new apprentices and skills minister, appointed by education secretary Justine Greening – the skills brief having been moved from the former Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS, now the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, BEIS). Halfon appears well-suited to his new brief. He employed the first parliamentary apprentice, and says he has “led from the front in championing apprenticeships.” We assume he will be taking responsibility for pushing forward the Government’s Post-16 Skills Plan, its response to the Sainsbury Review, published last week (post).

From our point of view on the SkillsPlanner project, another key appointment has been Croydon MP Gavin Barwell, appointed the new housing and planning minister in the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG). Barwell is also minister for London; our two-year SkillsPlanner project is strongly focused on London and the southeast, and we expect Barwell will be working closely with London Mayor Sadiq Khan (post).

And, Cabinet Office minister Ben Gummer, MP for Ipswich, will oversee the government’s own construction strategy (post) and programme, lead on its procurement policy, and also look at digital transformation of government. The latter particularly interests SkillsPlanner; data, much of it provided by government or government-funded organisations and projects, is at the core of our open linked data platform, and the wider construction industry is also engaged in a deeper digital shift outlined in the February 2015 Digital Built Britain strategy (post).

Update (1 August 2016) – At BEIS, Jesse Norman MP, minister for industry and energy, will be responsible for industrial policy covering infrastructure and construction.