Second Start, Not Second Class: A Skills Wallet for the Workers Written Off Too Soon

Walk into any further education college in our towns on a Tuesday evening and you will see the problem in miniature. The daytime corridors are busy enough. After six o'clock they thin out, and the reason is rarely a lack of appetite. It is the school run, the second job, the shift pattern that changes at a fortnight's notice, and the simple arithmetic of losing a day's pay to sit in a classroom.

We have spent years telling people that learning is a lifelong pursuit. The truth is that the system was built for an eighteen-year-old with no mortgage and no caring responsibilities. For everyone else, it is a series of locked doors with a leaflet taped to each one.

The gap between the slogan and the timetable

Successive governments have been fond of the phrase "lifelong learning". Few have been willing to fund the boring infrastructure that makes it real: evening provision, weekend provision, childcare that runs alongside the class, and a funding pot that follows the individual rather than the institution.

Meanwhile, whole categories of experienced workers are quietly written off. The forklift driver whose warehouse automates. The administrator whose department is restructured for the third time. The parent who stepped back from a career to care for a relative and now finds that the door has closed behind her. These are not people lacking ambition. They are people lacking a route.

The Adult Skills Fund and Skills Bootcamps have their place, but they remain too often shaped around what providers find convenient to teach rather than what a working adult can fit around a life. If Labour's promise of a genuine skills revolution means anything, it should be tested against a very specific question: can a forty-five-year-old with a job and a family actually use it?

A wallet, not a waiting list

The answer we would put forward is a personal skills wallet. In plain terms, an individual training account, held in the learner's name, that can be drawn down over a working lifetime.

It would work like this. Every adult would hold an entitlement, topped up at intervals and weighted towards those without a Level 3 qualification. Funds would be redeemable at accredited providers, including local colleges, adult education services and approved training organisations. Crucially, the money would follow the learner, so that a college cannot simply offer the course it prefers when the worker needs something else.

A second element matters just as much: protection for the time. A skills wallet is useless if drawing it down means forfeiting a week's wages. We would want to see a training allowance for lower-income learners, and a right to reasonable time off for training that is agreed with the employer and enforced, not merely encouraged.

Childcare is not a side issue

Here is the part that is usually left out of policy papers. For a returning parent, the barrier is rarely the course fee. It is the hour at either end.

Ask any mother who has tried to complete a level 3 qualification with a seven-year-old in tow. The class may be free. The wrap-around care is not. By the time the bus fare, the after-school club and the missed shift are added together, the arithmetic turns against her.

So a credible offer must include childcare support attached to the training entitlement itself, not as a discretionary extra that colleges ration when their budget allows. Evening and weekend delivery should be a condition of public funding for courses aimed at adults already in work, not an optional nicety. And local colleges should be funded to keep buildings open beyond the school day, which means paying staff properly for unsocial hours rather than expecting goodwill.

Delivered through institutions people already trust

None of this requires a new quango. It requires a deal with the institutions that already sit at the centre of our towns: the college, the adult education service, the union learning representative, the library, the local Jobcentre that still has staff who know their patch.

We would also argue for a personal adviser function, modestly funded, so that a worker can walk into a college and be told honestly what the wallet will buy, what it will not, and what the realistic route looks like. The worst outcome would be an entitlement nobody understands.

Employers have a part to play too. The Growth and Skills Levy should reward firms that invest in existing staff, not simply those that recruit apprentices at the lowest possible cost. A company that retrains its own workforce deserves recognition; a company that churns through staff and leaves the state to pick up the bill should not be subsidised for doing so.

What we would ask

Our asks are straightforward and, we believe, affordable if the will exists:

• A personal skills wallet in the learner's name, with a top-up for adults without a Level 3 qualification.
• A training allowance for lower-paid learners so that retraining does not mean a pay cut.
• Childcare support attached to the entitlement, not bolted on afterwards.
• Evening and weekend provision built into funding conditions for in-work adult courses.
• A statutory right to reasonable time off for training, properly enforced.

The test of seriousness

It is easy to write a strategy document about lifelong learning. It is harder to design one that survives contact with a night shift, a school gate and a household budget.

We should be judged on the person who is hardest to reach, not the one easiest to enrol. If a forklift driver in his forties, or a mother returning to work after years of caring, can open a skills wallet, book a course that fits around her week, and know that the childcare is covered, then the promise has been kept. If not, we will have produced another leaflet — and our towns have more than enough of those.

Labour's founding purpose was to make education available to everyone, not merely to those whose circumstances happened to fit. A skills wallet is a small, practical instrument. But it is also a statement of principle: nobody in our towns should be written off at forty-five.