SLP responds to the Mayor’s Draft Skills for Londoners Strategy Consultation
In its response, the South London Partnership (SLP) has emphasised the importance of sub-regions in creating a more responsive and effective technical and vocational skills system in London.
Working together in sub-regional groupings, London’s boroughs are uniquely positioned to be able to:
- provide local leadership
- draw together a richness of intelligence and local knowledge to identify issues and opportunities
- facilitate closer collaboration betweeen providers, employers and other partners, and
- drive integration with other services and communities.
Skills is one of key priority agendas for sub-regional collaboration across the South London Partnership – as identified in their Growth Proposition published in December 2016. The partnership has been working with employers and providers to start to build a more collaborative and effective skills system. As part of this, it will publish in the next few months a South London Skills Strategy, to identify the distinctive skills issues and opportunities across its areas and set priorities for action on which it will seek to work with a range of partners.
SLP broadly welcomed the draft London strategy. But, it did flag the need for the Mayor to ensure that its aspirations continue to grow and stretch in the face of the significant changes and challenges to the world of work, and the critical importance of skills to support our status as a World City and ensure our residents can fully benefit from the opportunities this brings.
Other key points made in the SLP response were:
- the need to develop some priority outcome measures;
- the need for a greater focus on how raising skills can contribute to improving productivity; and
- the need for more explicit and ongoing consideration of London’s skills system’s responsiveness to the impacts of major labour market changes – including automation, changing working patterns, etc.