Devolution is a critical and fast-moving area of policy crucial to the future delivery of further education and skills. However, while important steps have been made in the past decades towards greater localism, it is evident that there is much work still to be done to ensure effective and inclusive strategic planning of education and training at local level. Part of the problem, I would suggest, is that England, the focus of this study, has never wholeheartedly bought into the devolution agenda.
The way in which our institutions are run and funded, the traditional snobbishness about the local, and the tendency to put our faith in Westminster politicians with privileged backgrounds and little experience of grassroots politics, have all tended against it.
Our approach to the planning of skills and education remains, like so many other things in our national life, heavily centralised, with too little scope for local adaptation. However, the regional inequalities exposed and accentuated by the COVID pandemic, and the tensions it has created between local and national government, have made the question of how to facilitate place-based strategic planning and collaboration even more urgent.
The pandemic has laid bare the limitations of the localism agenda of recent years; its fragmented, often half-hearted, nature, and the uneven, and frankly unhelpful, distribution of power at different levels of government. The consequence of this, for further education and training, is a system that is top-heavy, often unwieldy, and not sufficiently flexible to respond to changing local circumstances and challenges at community level. I agree with the author that this need and this matters since national government has never really bought into the principle of devolution, seeing it instead as useful, but in specific, limited ways.
The case for community-led devolution, as a general principle for reform, is very strong and persuasive. This is not to say, of course, that the agenda is without challenges. As anyone who has tried to work strategically at a local level will tell you, the devil is often in the tangled detail of implementation.
