The Leitch Review will report its conclusions and recommendations to the Government in 2006.

A brief overview of Skills in the UK: The long-term challenge:

• The UK has a strong economy and world-leading employment levels, but its productivity trails many key comparator nations; poor skills are a key contributor to this problem as well as having wider impacts on social welfare.
• Over the last decade, the skills profile of the working age population in the UK has improved.  For example, the proportion of adults with a degree has increased from a fifth to over a quarter of the population.
• Despite these improvements, the UK still does not have a world-class skills base:

  • over a third of adults in the UK do not have a basic school-leaving qualification – double the proportion of Canada and Germany;
  • five million people have no qualifications at all;
  • one in six adults do not have the literacy skills expected of an 11 year old and half do not have these levels of functional numeracy.
• Looking ahead to 2020, global, demographic and technological change will place an even greater premium on the UK’s skills profile.
• New analysis conducted by the Review shows that, if the Government meets its current ambitious targets for improving the UK’s skills, by 2020:

  • the proportion of working age people without any qualifications will fall to 4 per cent; and the proportion of adults holding a degree will increase from 27 per cent to 38 per cent; and
  • this will have significant benefits for the economy – increasing annual productivity growth by 0.2 per cent with a net benefit to the economy of £3 billion a year, equivalent to 0.3 per cent of GDP.
• However, even if the UK can meet the current challenging targets, the nation’s human capital will still fail to be world-class. Considerable problems will remain; at least 4 million adults will still not have the literacy skills expected of an 11 year old and 12 million would not have numeracy skills at this level.
• The Review has analysed more ambitious scenarios for 2020:

  • tackling the stock of low skilled adults without qualifications, basic literacy and numeracy;
  • investing more in intermediate skills; and
  • further increasing the proportion of adults holding a degree.
• In all of the scenarios, the analysis shows the significant economic and social benefits that would result from higher productivity and employment gained through improving skills.  The Leitch Review believes that the UK must urgently raise its game and set itself a greater ambition to have a world-class skills base by 2020.