Get involved in Local Skills Improvement

The sector’s employers must get involved in Local Skills Improvement Plans if they want to meet the local workforce needs, says Clare Dunn, CIMSPA’s head of local delivery.

Introduced by the Department of Education, LSIPs are designed to address the skills shortages faced by businesses across England. LSIPs work by aligning education and training with the needs of local employers, placing employers at the heart of education provision to support and create a flourishing local jobs market, helping local economies grow and thrive.

In 2021, CIMSPA was involved in one of the eight LSIP trailblazer pilots to test how employers, providers and local stakeholders could work together to develop LSIPs for their regions. Alongside this government-funded pilot, CIMSPA also ran an additional pilot in Nottinghamshire in partnership with Vision West Nottinghamshire College.

We co-ordinated and developed the creation of Local Skills Accountability Boards (LSABs) for the pilots in Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire. The LSABs are led by local employers and include education providers, local authorities, the local health authority (known as ICT and ICBs) and other key strategic stakeholders, who work together to identify the current objectives in their area, the future skills and occupations that will be needed to fulfil those objectives, and also how education providers can adapt their provision to close these skills gaps.

It’s been fascinating to be part of the Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire pilots, which have given employers the opportunity to demonstrate the importance of sport and physical activity to the local economy. Engaging with key stakeholders like the Chamber of Commerce for the first time, employers have been able to show just how much our sector can impact local priorities from improving health inequalities and physical health and mental wellbeing outcomes to reducing crime and anti-social behaviour to improving educational outcomes and more.

As a result, members of the Employer Representative Bodies and local Chambers of Commerce have a better understanding of how the sport and physical activity sector can impact local need and are incorporating the industry’s skills needs into their skills plans. And crucially, by recruiting a new workforce from the local area, one that is more representative of the demographic of that area, will also help improve inclusion and diversity in the workforce.

Nottinghamshire is already benefiting from the pilot. After establishing the skills needed by local sport and physical activity employers, we worked with West Nottinghamshire College to create the Level 2 CIMSPA Practitioner Professional Sport Fitness course. The bespoke course offers students an introduction to the different career pathways available within the sport and physical activity sector.

As part of the course, students completed work placements as lifeguards at Lammas Leisure Centre in Sutton-in-Ashfield and have since gone on to local employment with CIMSPA employer partners. See news story here.

There are around 600,000 people in the sport and physical activity sector and we lose around 20% of this workforce every year. LSIPs can help the sector’s chronic skills shortage. Our data from these pilots demonstrates a healthy but growing need for more health-related skills as the sector is recognised for its impact on public health and specifically in tackling health inequalities.

At the same time, the initiative will help get more people into work, by making it easier for local people to access the skills needed to secure jobs in industries with skills gaps.

We want more of the sector’s employers to engage with us so that we can identify their current and future recruitment and training needs, and create a portrait of the local landscape. It’s only when we are armed with this information that we can really create impact at a local level.

As LSIPs are being rolled out across every region in England, we want to ensure that the sport and physical activity sector is at the heart of local skills development. We have recruited a cohort of skills hub managers who will lead the rollout, and we can provide support and guidance to anyone looking for further information on this project.

For more information, please contact partners@cimspa.co.uk