Universities and Science Minister David Willetts has announced the launch of five new Industrial Doctorate Centres to train ‘a new wave of engineers with the knowledge and skills needed to become future business leaders and create new innovation and economic growth for the UK’. According to the National Union of Students and the CBI, the UK’s leading business organisation, all universities should embed the teaching of employability skills into course structures.

While employability is being embraced in the least job-related courses, from philosophy to medieval history, many supposedly vocational courses do little for students’ employment prospects. Professor Alison Wolf notes in her recent review of vocational education that up to 400,000 students are on courses that will not get them a job. Professor Wolf criticises the range of ‘perverse incentives’ to get meaningless qualifications, and asks educators and policy makers to make sure every English child has at least a C in English and maths before doing anything else. The review also suggests we learn from other countries where skills are taught more effectively. But in a globalised economy, should we look to recruit the best-skilled from far afield, as well as improving education at home? The government’s proposal to introduce an annual cap on non-EU economic migration on top of its existing ‘points-based system’ is proving controversial. The CBI’s John Cridland argues that as the economy gears up for growth, ‘Companies must be able to access the best and brightest talent from around the world’. Do restrictions on foreign workers represent an implicit admission that skills education in the UK is inadequate, and a failure to deal with the problem in its own terms?

What kind of skills do we need to be teaching? Should the focus be on ‘hard’, practical skills or rather on entrepreneurship? Will humanities students with ‘employability skills’ ever be as attractive to employers as their engineering and science peers? Is the acquisition of skills really the point of education? Or might academically-educated critical thinkers with ‘irrelevant’ knowledge have more to offer business and the professions, including the ability to learn other skills on the job? Is it even the business of education policy to deal with skills shortages? Shouldn’t this be the business of business? Do we risk squeezing out the arts and basic science from education and too narrowly prescribing the future direction of UK plc?

Professor Wolf will give an introductory lecture with responses by the other speakers.