Accelerate EAST. Harnessing East Anglia s Skills and Talent for regional and national benefit

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1 Accelerate EAST Harnessing East Anglia s Skills and Talent for regional and national benefit

2 Our ambition is simple to make East Anglia the most innovative and successful region in the world. We already have world-leading clusters where innovation is driving explosive growth. Yet these sit side by side with areas of low social mobility and limited opportunity. Through a region-wide skills Pathway and Passport we will create a fairer society, build the highly skilled workforce needed for our businesses to flourish, and help drive economic growth across the country. Peterborough Cambridge Bury 2 LEPs 16 FE and Sixth Form Colleges 5 Universities 2.3 million people, 3.5% of the UK population

3 05 FE Colleges 1. Cambridge Regional College 2. City College Norwich 3. Easton and Otley College 4. Great Yarmouth College 5. Huntingdon Regional College 6. Lowestoft College 7. Peterborough Regional College 8. Suffolk New College 9. College of West Anglia 10. West Suffolk College 03 Norwich Sixth Form Colleges 1. East Norfolk Sixth Form College 2. Hills Road Sixth Form College 3. Long Road Sixth Form College 4. Lowestoft Sixth Form College 5. Paston Sixth Form College 6. Suffolk One Sixth Form College Universities 1. University Cambridge 2. Anglia Ruskin 3. University of Suffolk 4. Norwich University of the Arts 5. University of East Anglia Bury St Edmunds Ipswich

4 Our regional economy East Anglia comprises the three counties of Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Suffolk, and unitary Peterborough, a region which has a distinct national identity and a globally significant economic offer. The GVA of our regional economy was 66.3m in 2015, a figure that is forecast to grow by 22% over the next 10 years. Our key sectors include: Agri-food: 98,000 people are employed in our regional agri-food sector (including agri-tech), equating to a GVA of 4.3bn 1 Our ambition But our ambition goes beyond this. In these challenging times, it is more critical than ever to ensure that all parts of our economy are firing on all cylinders. Inspired by the Industrial Strategy, we want to make East Anglia the most innovative and successful region in the world. We will do this by harnessing the strengths of our high-tech clusters to stimulate and drive growth across all our sectors, creating a region-wide powerhouse, whilst at the same time ensuring that we are a region that really does work for everyone within it. To do this, we need to identify and remove constraints on growth on a whole-economy basis. Digital: the digital and creative clusters around Cambridge, Ipswich and Norwich employ 47,800 people, and have a GVA of 1,195M 2 Energy: our east coast is the centre of one of the world s most productive energy industries, employing 7,700 and generating a GVA per job of 129K 3 Life sciences and healthcare: within 20 miles of Cambridge alone, there are 430 companies in the sector, employing 13K people and with a turnover of 3.43bn 4 Our growth projections are not aspirational or unrealistic. They are rooted in the strength and depth of our regional economy, and delivering them needs no intervention from Government. We are already a world-leading region for high-tech innovation and growth, and a magnet for international talent and inward investment. We are ideally placed to spearhead the country s economic growth in the post-brexit world. 1 Agriculture in the UK 2015, statistics/agriculture-in-the-united-kingdom Tech Nation 2017,

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7 Skills: a real brake on our economic growth & prosperity Given our strong upward growth forecasts, and our desire to contribute more to the country a whole, we need to ensure that our innovation-based economy has the workforce to sustain it for the long term. However, the companies and sectors that drive our regional economy are operating in an already-tight labour market. At the same time, we have some of the most deprived wards in the country with respect to education and skills, and five of our local authority areas rank in the bottom 20 nationally in terms of social mobility. This represents a huge amount of talent that is currently going to waste, for people of all ages, right across our region. However, it also represents a real opportunity to improve social mobility at the same time as unlocking further economic growth. In order to support individuals to make the most of their potential, and our companies to benefit as a result, we must: Many initiatives and activities already operate in this space. However, the differing scale and scope of these, and the sheer number of individual providers, means the skills landscape is incredibly hard to navigate. This is as true for the rural teenager with no family history of FE or HE as it is for the 50-year-old employee in a low-skilled job. It is also a landscape in flux, with the introduction of the Apprenticeship Levy, plans for T-levels, the recent publication of the UK Digital Strategy, the East of England LGA Regional Strategy for Apprenticeships and the DWP Improving Lives: Helping Workless Families Green Paper, and the soon-to-be concluded post-16 Area Reviews and the Science and Innovation Audits. And herein lies our opportunity. raise aspiration and attainment at an individual level; support innovation in our businesses; and improve connectivity between people and opportunities, by removing both social and infrastructural barriers.

8 Our strategy We represent a partnership of the business community and further and higher education providers from across East Anglia. Inspired by the ambition of Industrial Strategy, we will work together through a single delivery platform, Accelerate EAST (East Anglia Skills and Talent), to deliver inclusive economic growth by re-shaping the complex and un-coordinated regional skills landscape. We will operate as a regional partnership jointly co-ordinated by our two LEPs, albeit with our own leadership and a small secretariat. This will enable us to capitalise on the LEPs existing skills initiatives, links with industry and schools, and governance structures, and avoids creating yet another layer in the regional skills landscape. We can focus on using our convening power, experience and commitment to support activities that will deliver tangible benefits, in an agile and responsive way. Our core remit will be to: The result will be a sense of personal ambition and engagement in regional prosperity and growth, giving everyone in our region the means and motivation to benefit from well-paid and rewarding job opportunities. At the same time, our economy will benefit from a regional workforce whose levels of skill and ambition match the requirements of our businesses. We are focused on those things that will support and strengthen our region in the long term. facilitate co-operation and co-ordination of existing training providers connect local employers with the most relevant training providers across our region identify best practice, whatever its current scale, and support its expansion co-ordinate our activities with organisations such as Jobcentre Plus, to ensure that skills and training provision integrates with support to raise people out of worklessness commission additional provision where we identify gaps or opportunities, and act as a single neutral point of contact for regional skills and education for businesses, schools, training providers and Government.

9 Delivering our strategy The central component in delivering our strategy will be the Accelerate EAST Pathway, a map of activities and opportunities within our region related to skills and employability, with clear and easy-to-navigate entry points and progression pathways. It will enable individuals to quickly and easily identify what is available, how to get there, and what the onward routes might be, and will be used to frame education and employment-related discussions with individuals, providers and businesses. Individual components on the Pathway will be badged with our logo, which will raise visibility and become a mark of quality for both individuals and employers. Discussions with providers and employers around how and where to include individual components will also enable us to integrate and consolidate what is on offer, and identify gaps in provision. In parallel, we will develop the Accelerate EAST Passport, an eligibility voucher for free or subsidised access to training opportunities on the Pathway. Employers will play an integral part in identifying which opportunities should be supported in this way, in order to meet their current and future skills requirements. The Passport will also provide subsidised transport to the relevant provider, ensuring that infrastructure is not a barrier to realising ambition. For younger children, we will develop a version of the Passport that provides stamps (virtual or otherwise) for activities such as museum and library visits, and attendance at science outreach events. This will cultivate ambitions around participation and attainment at the earliest stage. By providing clarity, ease-of-access, and regional cohesion, the Passport and Pathway will have a transformative effect on raising individual aspiration and attainment, and on connecting people with the opportunities available to them as a result. There will be strong industry involvement, both through our partnership, and in discussions around individual components of the Pathway and Passport, ensuring that our regional workforce meets the needs of our regional economy, now and in the future. And all of this can be delivered ourselves, by utilising existing resources in a more flexible and joined-up way. We have also identified a number of additional activities that we would like to implement through the Pathway and Passport, in order to significantly increase the scale and scope of our impact on individuals and the economy. We would welcome further discussion of these with the relevant Government departments. The apprenticeship levy: Having responsibility for un-utilised apprenticeship levy payments across our region would enable us to support a number of additional activities to ensure that all our businesses have the capacity to innovate, and that their workforces have the necessary skillsets to improve productivity and drive economic growth. For example: Skills Deals for SMEs: Building on a successful pilot undertaken by New Anglia LEP, we want to support groups of SMEs to jointly commission bespoke training from FE, HE and other providers to meet specific SME skills needs on a sectoral basis. As the Digital Skills Strategy recognises, at least 90% of jobs will require some level of digital proficiency within the next two decades, and many of these jobs will be filled by those already in the workforce. Our major IT companies and FE providers are well-placed to support regional businesses in commissioning appropriate digital Skills Deals. Similarly, our high-tech sectors will be supported to bring forward their own Skills Deals proposals, in line with SIA recommendations. By taking a sectorally agnostic approach, we can identify potential synergies and facilitate co-ordination across and between the sectors. Support for FE & HE students: We welcome recent Government initiatives to rationalise and strengthen technical training, and fully support proposals around T-levels and apprenticeships. But we also believe that funded mini-apprenticeships and internships could be highly effective in raising the employability skills and aspirations of our students, and have a transformative effect on our smallest companies.

10 HEFCE National Collaborative Outreach Programme (NCOP) and DfE Opportunity Area (OA) funding: Being able to consolidate regionally-allocated NCOP and OA funding streams would enable us to deliver more coherent and meaningful support to the young people with most potential to benefit, and to remove the cliff-edges and postcode lotteries inherent in the current modes of allocation. To the same end, we want to increase the timescale and geographic scope over which these funds can be spent; effectively changing mind-sets with respect to ambition and achievement is a long-term endeavour that needs to be supported over many years. More broadly, we want to provide over-arching support for careers guidance in our secondary schools, jointly delivered by our regional FE and HE providers as an extension of their existing outreach and participation activities. Drawing on the Accelerate EAST Pathway, this approach will do away with the existing silos in which post-16 options currently sit, and our partnership and our links to industry will ensure that this provision is directly informed by sectoral and LEP priorities. All of this will support all of our young people to make the most appropriate and informed choices, on the back of a realistic picture of the education and employment opportunities on offer to them across our region. The Passport will further ensure that none of these choices are unavailable due to infrastructural or financial barriers. The ability to use the Adult Education Budget in primary school settings: Parental engagement is known to be a key factor in the educational attainment of children and young people. Evidence from within our partnership suggests that low levels of parental literacy and numeracy can lead to disengagement with their child s education as early as primary school, and once this happens, it is very difficult to rectify. In order to ensure that the child-focused activities supported by OA funding have every chance of success, we want to give our FE colleges the ability to spend a proportion of their Adult Education Budget within primary schools, so they can pilot novel approaches to adult learner engagement and raising aspiration with these parents and their children, by supporting the whole family as a unit.

11 Our commitment Request from Government Our aims are necessarily ambitious. They are aimed at strengthening our region from the bottom up, delivering both economic growth and a fairer society, on a long term and sustainable basis. But we believe that by working in partnership, and using our own resources, they are both realistic and feasible. Over the next six months, we will: Develop a suitable governance model for Accelerate EAST Formulate a working group to progress the Accelerate EAST Pathway and Platform Initiate discussions with other relevant stakeholders, including schools and businesses Explore how we can best co-ordinate with public sector organisations whose remit covers worklessness, such as Jobcentre Plus and Public Health England Set ourselves ambitious and evidence-based targets around aspiration and attainment, business innovation and growth, and regional connectivity, and Identify regionally-held funding streams that can be harnessed to support us. We invite Government to endorse our pioneering and proactive approach to regional economic growth and social mobility. We also hope that we have made a compelling case for relevant Government departments to work with us to explore how our plans can generate even greater returns. Specifically, we would welcome discussions around our proposals to: retain apprenticeship levy surpluses in-region, and to re-invest these in broader business-focused skills provision consolidate NCOP and OA funding use the Adult Education Budget in primary school settings Ultimately, East Anglia represents a microcosm of the issues facing our national economy: a patchwork of internationally competitive and highly productive technology-based sectors sitting alongside areas of low skills, low wages and high levels of underperformance. Given our regional coherence, both geographically and now, organisationally, we are ideally placed to act as a pilot for testing new approaches to closing the skills gap, and delivering the ambitious and far-reaching changes required to improve living standards and economic growth.

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