E-skills welcomes increase in influence

E-skills UK, the business-led sector skills council responsible for tackling the UK's IT skills shortages, has welcomed the Leitch Review's recommendations that business should play a greater role in the UK skills agenda, claiming such reforms would prove beneficial for IT professionals.

Margaret Sambell, head of strategy at E-skills UK, said the review was " really good news", claiming that its calls for improvements in adult education and high level skills would prove particularly useful to the IT sector, where the pace of technological change means adult training is essential.

The report's recommendation that sector skills councils be given the power to approve various courses from both higher education establishments and businesses will also help make IT courses more attractive to professionals, according to Sambell.

"It means we would be able to grant national accreditation to employers' training programmes," she explained. "It would make them more attractive to staff if they knew internal courses were recognised nationally."

The report also recommends that sector skills councils play a greater role in determining the content of university courses – a move that Sambell argued would help make "the education system more responsive to employer demand". She added that increasing e-skills' power would also allow it to simplify the confusing IT accreditation system, under which there are currently over 600 different courses.

However, Paul Mackney, joint general secretary of the University and College Union, said in a statement that giving businesses the power to determine course content could backfire as they will be tempted to focus on short term needs while ignoring underlying educational principles. "Further education is better equipped to judge both immediate and long term skills needs, taking account of regional and national factors," he added.

Separately, Sambell argued that the Leitch Review's recommendations that firms commit to training staff or face government legislation forcing them to do so should hold few fears for the IT sector, which has a history of investing heavily in training compared to other areas of the economy.

Critics, however, have repeatedly argued that business investment in IT training remains inadequate, with the TUC recently claiming that one in three employers still fail to offer any real training.

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said that the Leitch Review meant "the clock is ticking" for those businesses that fail to train, adding that they " are now on notice to clean up their act by 2010, or the new individual right to workplace training will be implemented".