Although the 3SC area has high rates of employment and a highly skilled workforce, disparities do exist across the area. These disparities will become severe over the next five years unless the supply of appropriately skilled labour increases.
Ensuring our residents have the right skills for the jobs available is fundamental to ongoing economic growth, as it allows businesses to establish themselves and thrive in the area.
How would devolution help?
We want to place skills provision at the heart of the 3SC economy, so that it delivers what businesses need to help them flourish. Our proposals would enable us to build on existing relationships to better understand the skills needs in the area and to improve and develop pathways to higher level skills, higher education and employment.
The 3SC is asking for:
- greater influence over national skills and employment programmes through a devolved and integrated pot of funding
- devolution of the adult skills budget and co-commissioning with DWP of employment support programmes
- local co-ordination of the full range of programmes to provide careers information, advice and guidance to young people in schools and academies
- recognition of work readiness and vocational pathways within school and academy inspection and funding arrangements
- the ability to provide a range of vocational and professional pathways to meet the needs of employers
- commissioning of apprenticeship provision in the 3SC area, particularly aggregating SME needs, by retaining and pooling apprenticeship levy funds paid by 3SC employers and devolution of a portion of the funds retained by Government.
Skills workstream:
The Skills workstream is made up of officers from across the partner authorities and is led by:
CEO Sponsor: Becky Shaw, East Sussex County Council
Workstream lead: James Harris, East Sussex County Council
3SC 