Scottish Government

life through learning; learning through life:
The Facts and Figures

"Just how distinctive is the Scottish education and training system, and how well does it work for the individual and for employers?" This question has been posed and answered in a variety of ways both prior to and since devolution. What this section aims to do is to set out what the evidence actually tells us; to show how we are doing compared to other UK nations and the rest of the world; to highlight what difference our policies are making to the people of Scotland and, based on current trends, to project forward and look at what the future might hold.

Scotland in context

In a UK context we are more than holding our own when it comes to delivering a skilled and qualified workforce. The Interim Report of the Leitch Review of Skills shows that relative to the rest of the UK we have a well qualified working age population - second only to London (and then by just 1%) in terms of the numbers of the working age population qualified to level 4 ( SCQF level 8) ¹ and above.

Scotland is the only nation or country in the UK where the proportion of people holding a qualification at level 4 or above is greater than those qualified below level 2 ( SCQF level 5) ². We also have the lowest proportion of people qualified below level 2. Put simply, with the exception of London at level 4 or above, Scotland has fewer lower skilled people and more highly skilled people than anywhere else in the UK.

In addition, Scotland's qualification profile is improving at a faster rate than for the UK as a whole: between 1997 and 2004 the proportion of the working age population in Scotland with at least a level 4 qualification increased from 22% to 29%, relative to an increase across the UK as a whole from 21% to 26%.

This strong position is borne out in an international context when Scotland's qualifications profile is compared with other key OECD nations. Looking at the qualifications of the 25 to 64 age group, work done by the Scottish Executive to build on the evidence provided by the interim report of the Leitch Review, shows that in an international context Scotland is starting from a better position than the UK as a whole, with more highly qualified individuals and less people with low qualifications.

Staying with the international dimension, Futureskills Scotland recently benchmarked the quality of Scotland's workforce alongside that of our OECD counterparts. What this work shows is that on most indicators of labour quality, Scotland sits within the first or second OECD quartiles.

Labour Quality Quartile

Scotland's labour quality should not be a surprise. Since the 1970s, Scottish annual public spending per learner on education has been at least 18% higher than in England. ³

So, in terms of right now, we have a good story to tell, but what about the future? The Scottish Executive has recently completed modelling work to give us an idea of what Scotland's qualifications profile may look like in 2020 and, although such projections must always be treated with caution, the results are interesting. This work suggests that Scotland will perform better than the UK in terms of tertiary education with around 50% of our workforce qualified to that level. This is comparable with the USA. It also places us ahead of Australia, Finland, Ireland and New Zealand.

Scotland's Employers

Our employers are also telling us that the skills and learning system we have in place is broadly delivering what they need. Since its launch in 2001, Futureskills Scotland has published 3 employer skills surveys that gather in the views of a wide range of Scottish employers from small family run firms to large public sector employers. This work forms the most comprehensive and authoritative source of information available to policymakers, sampling on average over 6,500 Scottish employers each time it is conducted.

What this evidence tells us is that for the majority of employers, Scotland's education and training system is delivering what they need most of the time.

Skills shortages, where an employer cannot fill a vacancy because applicants lack the required skills, qualifications or experience for the job, affect less than 1 in 20 workplaces and are equivalent to around 1% of jobs⁴. Skills gaps, which occur when someone who is in a job is judged by his or her employer to be not fully proficient, are more commonly reported but generally arise because employees have recently started a job or have not yet completed their training. More a natural result of recruitment then and an issue which Scottish employers are serious about addressing. Interestingly, half of employers with skills gaps report that they arise because of innovation or other, growth-enhancing activity in the organisation.
Deep-rooted, longer-term skill gaps are uncommon.

The results for the 2004 Scottish Employers Skills Survey show that some 87% of establishments address skills gaps by providing further training for staff, whilst 53% expand their trainee programmes.

Perhaps the most encouraging evidence is that 63% of Scottish employers invest in training for their staff.

The Scottish Employers Skill Survey also has some very positive messages regarding our training and education system. A large percentage of employers report that they are very satisfied with how prepared for work our FE and HE graduates are (81% and 82% respectively), whilst levels of satisfaction with courses and training provided by private providers and our colleges is also very high at 88% and 82% respectively.

Scotland's Learners

Participation rates in learning in Scotland have historically been at good levels. Maria Slowey, in work commissioned for the Scottish Executive, The Elusive Nature of the Learning Society⁵ found that 65% of respondents had undertaken some kind of learning since leaving full-time education. This fits with work done for the Labour Force Survey which shows that the proportion of people aged 16 to 69 who are no longer in continuous full-time education but participated in some type of adult learning (taught or non-taught) was estimated to be 68.6 per cent between March 2004 and February 2005, an increase of 2.4 percentage points on 2003 ⁶.

Attainment amongst school children is also rising. The percentage of pupils gaining 5 or more Standard Grades at credit level (or equivalent) by the end of S6 increased from 38% in 1998/99 to 48% in 2005/06 ⁷.

And routes from school into further and higher education and work are being used and developed by our young people from all social backgrounds. In 2004/05 half of school leavers went on to study at one of Scotland's colleges or universities. There was a 2 percentage point rise in the proportion of leavers going into higher education in 2004/05, whilst the proportion going into further education remained stable. The proportion of leavers entering employment also increased by 2 percentage points to
27%, while the proportion who are unemployed and seeking employment or training has fallen from 13% to 10%. ⁸

Participation in higher education in Scotland remains high - it has been running at or around 50% since 1999.

There have been some concerns expressed that this will result in an over supply of people with higher level skills in the market place, thereby devaluing the traditional wage premium that graduates have enjoyed. Research has shown that this is not the case - indeed employment rates for those with degrees have risen slightly from 88% in 1993-1995 to 89% in 2001-2003. The increase in graduate numbers over this period appears to have been "fully absorbed by a corresponding increase in demand. There are not too many graduates and no evidence of too many of the wrong type." ⁹ Graduates continue to enjoy an average wage premium of some 50% over those in the workforce who do not have a degree level qualification.

On the vocational side, the Modern Apprenticeship programme which has been running since the late 1990s has performed very well and, as the graph below shows, has helped thousands of young people and adults to build rewarding careers and gain valuable qualifications. A recent evaluation of the programme has shown that:

• 70% of businesses employing MAs saw improvements in their productivity which they could attribute directly to the training provided under the MA programme;
• 90% of MAs and Skillseekers felt that they had made the right choice of training;
• 75% were satisfied with their training calling it "good" or "very good";
• more than 80% of apprentices said that their ability to do their job had improved as a result of the MA programme and 70% said they would be more likely to undertake future training;
• At 60%, completion rates for the MA programme in Scotland are the highest of any UK nation. The most common reasons why apprentices do not complete their training are positive ones - they move on to a higher paid job, change employer or move into further and higher education.

So what does this tell us?

The evidence summarised above tells us that:

• the skills of Scotland's people is one of our key economic strengths;
• in general, our working age population is motivated, technically competent and willing to learn and develop new skills;
• on the whole we have an education and training system which is producing the right people at the right time for the right jobs;
• our policy environment is working for Scotland - putting in place programmes and initiatives that every day are making a difference to Scotland's society and economy; and
• as demand for more highly skilled individuals increases, on current projections, we appear to be on track to meet those needs.

But we also know that we have a lot of challenges facing us.

Participation in learning needs to be deeper and wider - at the moment, the more qualifications you have the more likely you are to be receiving training or participating in learning more generally. This needs to change and we are taking steps to make sure that those who have low levels of qualifications can and do take up further learning opportunities.

The Individual Learning Account ( ILA) programme is making important in roads to this issue already - almost 44,000 learning accounts have been opened with around 50% of account holders either having booked or having undertaken learning. Most importantly, 63% of learners who have few or no qualifications tell us that they would have been unlikely to have undertaken their course had it not been for ILA funding. And Workforce Plus, our employability strategy launched this year, is putting in place stronger partnerships between key stakeholders to make sure that all of Scotland's population can take advantage of the opportunities available to them both for their own benefit and for the benefit of Scotland as a whole.

Equally we have a responsibility to our young people to make sure that none of them are left behind. More Choices, More Chances, our NEET strategy launched alongside Workforce Plus, has been put in place to help us to do this. Evidence shows that the best way to prevent young people from becoming NEET is to intervene when they are young. That is why we have a curriculum spanning ages 3-18 - we want to ensure that children and young people can acquire the full range of skills and abilities relevant to growing, living and working in the contemporary world. That is also why we have Determined to Succeed, a programme which seeks to ensure that all children of school age develop positive attitudes towards work and learning, which has been very successful.

We also need to be alive to the skills and learning needs of adults in the workforce, especially those who have poor literacy and numeracy and/or few qualifications. It is these people who are most at risk of missing out on the benefits that learning can bring and who risk becoming trapped in a cycle of low skills and low pay. Workforce Plus outlines the scale of this issue and sets out practical steps that we should take to help solve it.

And as our demography changes, through the ageing of the population or the influx of migrant workers, we need to ensure that Scotland's education and training system is flexible enough to respond to the opportunities and challenges that these changes will bring.

The next section outlines in greater detail the main policies and strategies that we have been pursuing over the last few years that have helped us to reach our current position.