This chapter provides a critical discussion of the principal ways in which employers in England have engaged with further and higher education in recent years to improve workforce skills. There is a specific focus on recent apprenticeship reforms as illustrative of the strongest form of employer engagement, involving employers as co-producers alongside colleges and universities. The final section of the chapter examines the broader role of employers in engaging with apprenticeships as a means to improve workforce diversity, thereby contributing towards the government’s social mobility goals.

Employer roles in further and higher education in England

Employer engagement in England provides a critical case of how employers behave as stakeholders in a liberalized workforce development system. In other words, the English context illustrates what happens when next to no demands are made on employers to develop workforce skills, leaving them free to engage with education providers as they wish, while taking advantage of changing government incentives. By contrast, other advanced industrial democracies – and even the devolved administrations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – place clearer obligations on employers through more formalized institutional arrangements (see Bredgaard, Ingold and van Berkel, in this volume).

Further education (FE) in England encompasses the compulsory elements of education up until the age of 19 as well as post-compulsory education and training below the level of university degrees. Full-time FE provision is primarily provided by school sixth forms and sixth form colleges, which concentrate on university entrance qualifications, as well as FE colleges, which also provide the majority of part-time training for young people and adults. Alongside FE colleges are a growing number of private and non-profit training providers, commissioned by the state to provide both full-and part-time training courses. This institutional landscape – of FE colleges, alternative accredited training providers and, to a lesser extent, sixth form colleges and school sixth forms – is the primary site of workforce skills development in England. Employers play various roles, most notably in the provision of work experience placements and work-related experiences as part of training courses.