It has been a week since the Spring Budget, and now that the dust has settled and the numbers have been crunched, it feels like a good time to analyse the budget and think about what it means for our sector.
It will likely come as no news to you that there wasn’t much for skills in the Budget. In fact the Chancellor, presenting the Budget to the House of Commons, failed to mention skills once. At a time when we have 851,000 young people not in education, employment or training, sluggish economic growth and a chronic skills shortage, this feels like a rejection of the scale of the challenge we face.
The Office for Budget Responsibility's modest projection of a 0.8% growth this year could have been an opportunity to underline the importance of skills development as a cornerstone for sustainable economic growth. What we got instead was a holding pattern, with deep dark clouds on the horizon in the shape of potential funding cuts.
Ironically the Prime Minister said it best when in 2022 when he said education is the ‘best economic policy, the best social policy and the best moral policy’, so we are right to wonder why skills isn’t getting the focus it needs.
