Nearly 150 years after the Royal Commission on Technical Instruction warned of Britain’s lagging workforce, today’s skills crisis shows that history may be repeating itself.
Policy makers have long been concerned about workforce productivity. In the 1880s, the Royal Commission on Technical Instruction, chaired by industrialist Bernhard Samuelson, sounded an early alarm. Comparing Britain with rapidly industrialising rivals such as Germany and the United States, the commission warned that other nations were racing ahead by investing in broad-based technical and elementary education for their people.
Britain, by contrast, clung to an economic model that assumed cheap labour and global market power would be enough. There was no national plan to upgrade the skills of youngsters who’d left school at just 12 years old before the end of the First World War.
Even the once-prized craft apprenticeship model, passed down from medieval guilds, began to wither, as mass production and ‘Fordist’ factories demanded different kinds of specialisation and work organisation.
Elites, education and exclusion
The British state’s primary concern during early industrialisation was to keep factories and heavy manufacturing supplied with ‘labouring hands’, rather than to develop a highly trained workforce to match that of Bismarck’s Germany. Academic, military and professional routes were reserved mainly for those who could attend elite fee-paying schools and then progress to Oxford, Cambridge or the officer corps.
At the same time, most working-class children saw little beyond basic schooling before entering dead-end, low-skilled jobs. Women’s opportunities were even more constrained, limited chiefly to clerical, caring and domestic roles until total war forced open roles previously deemed ‘men’s work’.
Limited reforms, such as merit-based entry exams for the civil service, offered some social mobility but did not fundamentally alter a system built on rigid labour-market stratification and social class division. It would take the post-war expansion of Beveridge’s welfare state to begin to open up this archaic structure.
Working-class self-help and imperial complacency
Where serious efforts to improve skills did emerge, they often came from below. Workers and their early trade union communities built mechanics’ institutes, polytechnics, correspondence courses and organisations such as the Workers’ Educational Association to educate themselves and each other.
In many ways, this was the golden age of lifelong learning, in the sense that a particular pride in and encouragement of autodidactic learning were more evident than perhaps they are today.
Meanwhile, many in Britain’s ruling elite assumed that imperial dominance and strong export performance would last indefinitely. Critics like the acerbic scholar, Correlli Barnett, would later argue that this post-war complacency, combined with an ‘individualistic’ and ‘suicidal’ business and trade union culture, left the country ill-prepared for intensifying global competition.
As did a sense that technical and commercial education was only studied by those taking ‘vulgar subjects’ – the genesis of today’s lack of esteem for vocational qualification routes.
War, planning and a new settlement
Two world wars shattered the illusion that Britain could coast on past glories. The sheer scale of mobilisation, rationing and ‘manpower planning’ during the Second World War pushed the state into a much more interventionist role in managing the economy and labour.
The historian Paul Addison describes the period in policy-making terms as the era of ‘blueprints from above’.
After 1945, a new political consensus embraced the idea that government should actively shape education, employment and welfare as part of post-war reconstruction.
However, the secondary education system that emerged – the familiar tripartite structure of grammar, technical and secondary modern schools – was still baked in social stratification and ‘class snobbery’, while the promised technical colleges never fully materialised.
A golden age that didn’t last
From the mid 1950s onward, policy makers sought to address the skills gap more directly. A White Paper on technical education paved the way for new Colleges of Advanced Technology, a wave of further education colleges and, in 1964, employer-led Industrial Training Boards designed to coordinate training across sectors.
This was the apogee of collective or coordinated workforce investment in Britain, epitomised by Harold Wilson’s epoch-defining ‘white heat of technology’.
For a time, this produced what many commentators regard as a golden age of industrial training, marked by rising productivity and high male employment.
Yet by the early 1980s, most Industrial Training Boards had been abolished under a Conservative government committed to deregulation and a greater reliance on voluntary employer action, despite parliamentary warnings that dismantling the statutory system risked undermining training quality and coverage.
Neoliberal turn and the New Training Initiative
The economic crisis of the late 1970s and the collapse of post-war Keynesian policies opened the door to a very different approach.
Under Margaret Thatcher, monetarist policies and rapid industrial restructuring destroyed swathes of traditional employment and craft skills, particularly in manufacturing and heavy industry.
At the same time, the Manpower Services Commission – initially a corporatist body bringing together government, employers and unions – was repurposed to run more challenging ‘active labour market’ programmes.
The New Training Initiative of 1981 was a foundational moment. It promoted youth schemes and work-based training but increasingly framed unemployment and skills deficits as problems of individual attitudes or ‘work readiness’, rather than as the result of weak employer investment in skills or of labour market structures failing to keep pace with new technologies.
The economic geographer Martin Jones refers to the period as one of ‘trainingfare’, since local communities began to be hollowed out in what became the Schumpeterian welfare state.
Previously unpublished documents from the National Archives show that one of the key workforce policy aims of Thatcher’s government was to ensure wage restraint through the ‘moral conditioning’ of the unemployed. It was a variant of the neoliberal playbook pursued by President Reagan and later by President Clinton in the United States.
Further education, lifelong learning and austerity
Further education (FE) briefly enjoyed renewed attention in the early 2000s, as centre-left governments invested in college buildings, staff pay and the idea of lifelong learning. Participation rose, and the language of continuous upskilling became a regular feature of policy debate.
However, the post-2010 austerity drive under Conservative-led governments reversed much of this progress. Funding cuts left many FE colleges struggling; adult learning participation declined; and apprenticeship starts fell, particularly for younger and disadvantaged learners, even as new apprenticeship levies, occupational standards and systems were introduced.
The evidence points to what can be seen as a period of hyperactivism in skills policy tinkering. It’s a phenomenon, or a ‘mode of socio-political governance’, I outline in my book, as the advance of Bureaucratic Market Centralisation (BMC) in skills development.
Diverging nations, shared logic
Devolution since the late 1990s has allowed Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to experiment with somewhat different skills and apprenticeship policies.
Over time, this has produced noticeable variation in apprenticeship frameworks and institutional arrangements, raising questions about how a ‘common’ UK labour market functions in a post-Brexit context.
Yet beneath these differences, the core logic has stayed strikingly similar: Central government designs systems and incentives from the top down, while employers are expected mainly to step up voluntarily within a broadly neoliberal labour market regime.
The result has been persistent underinvestment in high-quality, productive training and an emphasis on low-level or compliance-focused provision.
Today’s verdict: Voluntarism has failed
Recent data show that employer investment in training has fallen sharply, and where training does occur, it is often short, mandatory or of limited value in boosting productivity.
Policy makers have repeatedly tried to fix this through new agencies, levies or partnership bodies, from the Manpower Services Commission to Training and Enterprise Councils, and more recently, dedicated skills quangos like Skills England.
Despite these efforts, Britain’s productivity continues to lag behind countries like France and Germany, and skills shortages remain a regular complaint from businesses.
Critics argue that four decades of ‘highly-marketised’ top-down skills policy – combined with tight public spending and a fragmented institutional landscape – have left communities with too little say and too few resources to build the capabilities their local economies need.
A familiar warning, renewed
In 2024, a new Labour government once again declared that the skills system was failing to meet the needs of workers and employers, echoing concerns first raised in the Victorian parliament almost 150 years earlier.
Ministers pointed to falling apprenticeship numbers, heavy reliance on migrant labour for skilled roles and a patchwork of qualifications that confused learners and businesses alike.
The creation of yet another national body, Skills England, and the abolition of previous institutions symbolise both the urgency of the problem and the difficulty of escaping a well-worn cycle of institutional churn and reform. After decades of economic stagnation and persistent skills gaps, the central question is no longer whether Britain has a skills problem, but whether the political and intellectual frameworks that have guided policy since the 1980s are capable of producing a different outcome this time.
If the underlying commitment to voluntarism, marketisation and institutional churn remains intact, the results are likely to look strikingly familiar.
Tom Bewick is Visiting Professor of Skills and Workforce Policy at the University of Staffordshire. He is a former policy adviser to UK ministers on post-compulsory education and training.
Skills Policy in Britain and the Future of Work by Tom Bewick is available for £32.99 on the Bristol University Press website here.
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