Skills and Education
To achieve the vision, the region needs to focus on five key objectives:
- Tackle the lack of basic skills and qualifications to improve employability and reduce worklessness.
- Meet the skills needs of sectors and growth opportunities - essential to support expansion.
- Invest in workforce development - the development of intermediate and higher level skills in the current workforce is a key driver of productivity and economic growth.
- Develop leadership, management and enterprise skills - crucial to company survival, innovation and productivity improvement.
- Develop the educational infrastructure and skills of the future workforce - ensuring young people are developing the skills they need for employment and progression to Higher Education.
Research Programme 2008/9
Workforce Development
Workforce development is critical to the productivity, innovation and profitability of a business and the regional economy overall. However, it must be recognised that workforce development is not exclusive to purely skill enhancements. It is widely recognised that good employment relation practices are essential to promoting fairness at work and that those organisations choosing to embrace good practice are much more likely to be successful organisations. A combination of employers enhancing skills development as well as offering good employment relations will play a significant role in improving the productivity of the business. The aim of this work is to provide a cost benefit analysis that will clearly measure the impact of any investment made in Workforce Development and providing good employment relations practices.
Aim: The economic value added to a business from an employer adopting strong employment practices whilst investing in workforce development.
The Economic Impact and Potential of Higher and Further Education Establishments in the Northwest
The role of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and Further Education establishments (FEs) in the economy at all levels is of great significance. A recent Universities UK report showed that the HE sector generated £45billion worth of output a figure that has risen £10 billion over the last ten years demonstrating that it is also a high growth sector. The sector directly employs 330,000 jobs, 33,000 in the Northwest and using conservative estimates students in the Northwest alone spend around £1.9billion in the region. These impressive figures only show half the story, there are many other ‘soft’ impacts such as business clustering around universities and the high level of skills provided by universities to employers which all further demonstrate the crucial importance of the HE sector to the Northwest economy and the wider UK economy.
This work will allow us to fully understand the role HEIs and FEs play in the Northwest economy. The economic impact of HEIs is considerable but we do not know the extent of the impact of Northwest HEIs to the region and what the further economic potential could be. We wish to build upon high calibre individual institution studies that exist in the US and UK to cover all 15 HEIs in the Northwest.
Aim: The role that Northwest HEIs and FEs play as employers including the indirect and induced economic impact of such employment. In terms of potential, we need to what more HEIs can do to work with the region in creating employment.
Universities Challenged: The Future of Higher Learning
This project has two objectives. First, to develop a sophisticated understanding of the impact of recent reforms to higher and further education. Second, to set out a challenging but credible future higher education policy agenda. By combining these, the project aims to make a significant intervention into political and popular debates about the way our society provides and funds, as well as views and values, higher education.
Aim: The project will assess the impact of recent policy changes and consider what our future vision and progressive ambitions for HE should be.
Research Programme 2007/8
Leadership & Management
This report presents the findings from SQW’s study into leadership and management skills in the North West, commissioned by the North West Development Agency (NWDA) in February 2007. The study had two principal objectives:
1) Developing a set of baseline indicators that provided meaningful data on current levels of leadership and management skills in the region, and could be updated in the future to track how these levels were changing.
2) Identifying a small number of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for use in monitoring progress against regional leadership and management objectives as detailed in the Regional Economic Strategy (RES) and North West Statement of Skills Priorities.
The research process involved consultations with regional and national partners, a literature review and audit of data sources, followed by analysis of data for the most robust indicators identified. The study then moved on to the identification of KPIs from the wider set of baseline indicators, undertaken in consultation with partners both within and outside the region.
Outputs:-
Executive Summary
Full Report
Northwest Skills & Productivity
It is commonly assumed that workforce skills are a primary determinant of economic performance at all levels of UK geography. At regional level, however, the evidence base is less robust than one might imagine. The Skills and Productivity research project is intended to extend the breadth of evidence by addressing a number of key issues in this arena. The evidence in this report is organised around five specific questions:
- Is it possible to isolate the contributions of sector, occupation, productivity and skills to North West economic performance?
- What quantitative evidence exists to directly link skills and productivity performance within firms and what are the potential implications of upgrading skills in the North West for productivity and economic performance?
- What quantitative evidence exists to indirectly link skills and productivity performance within firms and what are the potential implications of upgrading skills in the North West for productivity and economic performance?
- Will anticipated employment change within the region continue to require upgrading in skills?
- Are skills progression patterns adequate to (a) sustain future NW employer needs (b) achieve Leitch targets within the North West?
The final report was published in April 2008.