Opera Chief Says Skills System is Impenetrable

Tony Hall CBE, Chief Executive of the Royal Opera House, and chairman of Creative & Cultural Skills, today criticises the UK’s education and training system for its complexity and lack of real responsiveness to employers.

Speaking at a creative industries conference in Liverpool, part of the Capital of Culture celebrations, Tony Hall said:

We need to make it as easy as we can for employers large and small to raise the skills of their workforce. At present the way in which you take on an apprentice is far too hard and complex—there needs to be better incentives, in a more upfront fashion too.

The very language of skills can be impenetrable to many people. There are too many different agencies that an employer has to wind its way round. And although the idea of the network of sector skills councils was that the employers are in charge because they are in the best position to know what skills are needed, in practice that’s not the case.

To make progress involves a radical simplification of the skills landscape.  We need to empower sector skills councils with both the resources and the authority to get the job done. It shouldn’t take 2 years and over 15 agencies to have a say in the approval of an Apprenticeship. At present we don’t have a system that genuinely puts the learner and the employer at the centre.

Tony Hall's comments were made at the Supporting Creative Industries conference where over 200 representatives from further and higher education attended.