Telford College’s principal and chief executive was among the employers and training providers from the Marches who joined colleagues from across the Midlands to celebrate the progress of a major skills development campaign.

Local Skills Improvement Plans (LSIPs) are part of the Government’s reform of technical skills provision, encouraging employers and training providers to collaborate, prioritise and tackle locally-identified skills needs.

Representatives from all eight LSIP teams in the Midlands came together at the MIRA Technology Institute in Nuneaton to reveal and discuss the work completed so far.

Flying the flag for the Marches region – Shropshire, Telford & Wrekin and Herefordshire – were the local LSIP project manager Rosie Beswick, and Ruth Ross, chief executive of Shropshire Chamber of Commerce which leads the LSIP project in the area.

They were joined by Telford College principal and chief executive Lawrence Wood, Julia Edmunds from Herefordshire, Ludlow and North Shropshire College, and Dr Parakram Pyakurel and Michael Smith from New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering in Hereford.

Delegates heard that the LSIP projects had reached ‘the end of the beginning’, with many skills-boosting projects beginning to emerge from ‘incubator’ stage on the back of consultation with thousands of businesses.

The Marches LSIP has highlighted manufacturing and engineering, plus construction ‘green’ skills, as priority areas.

Rosie said: “We’ve been able to deep dive into sectors and turn over stones in ways and volumes that have never been done before.

“For example, social care in our area is a bigger employer than the NHS. And if you are small and rural – as the majority of these are – they struggle to get access to support.

“The deep factual knowledge gained directly from employers is how we will get advancements and achievements – based on facts. It’s about only acting on the skills shortages when they are truly understood.”

Ruth Ross chaired a question-and-answer session with a panel of business and training providers to look at some of the practical ways that the findings of LSIP research are being implemented.

Across the Midlands the top five priority areas for skills development were listed as manufacturing and engineering, construction, health and social care, digital, and agri-tech industries. Hospitality, tourism, haulage and logistics also featured high on the list.

When it came to the most common complaints among employers, top of the list was lack of work-readiness among new recruits, followed by gaps in transferable skills, and deficiencies in areas such as digitisation, smart working, and knowledge of ‘green’ issues.

The importance of finding a language which could be equally understood and adopted by businesses, educators and learners was emphasised by several speakers.

Delegates heard that the vast majority of small and medium sized businesses were not engaging with post-16 education providers, even though many were highlighting the lack of ‘work readiness’ among new recruits.

Ruth Ross said: “The LSIPs are important, because they give employers an opportunity to explain the issues they face with skills, training, and recruitment, as well as helping to shape the future of training and their own staff pipelines.

“This is a slow-burn process – changes don’t happen overnight, and the results of much of the early research won’t be seen for some considerable time.

“But it was clear from this meeting that a great deal of valuable work is being done on the back of detailed, area-specific data which ensure that projects are aligned with local labour market needs.”

Speakers at the event included Dr Mel Collins from the Department for Education, who leads on both the LSIP and Local Skills Improvement Fund (LSIF) projects.

She described LSIPs as ‘a process more than a plan’ which were looking at skills needs in a different way to anything done before.

“The role is to create a clear framework to bring employers and training providers together to plan, to collectively deliver provision, and to identify local priorities,” she said.