Agenda item

Michele Lawty-Jones, Skills Hub Director, presented the report (circulated) updating on the work of the Lancashire Skills Hub. She particularly highlighted the following:

·  An additional 24 new Enterprise Advisers had been recruited to the Careers Hub and the network of schools and colleges had grown from 131 to 154. A campaign to attract additional Enterprise Advisers was being run in tandem with the national Careers and Enterprise Company Rewrite the Story campaign

·  Technical education vision - the first stage bid for the Lancashire Institute of Technology was submitted to DfE by the lead institution Blackpool and the Fylde College, the college had been invited to a webinar to hear about the next stage

·  Teen Tech Festival Lancashire - it had been delivered virtually and 37 schools and 684 young people had joined the sessions so far

·  Digital Careers Videos - a series of short films of local business people talking about their careers in a range of digital roles had been produced

·  The application made to the European Social Fund (ESF) national reserve fund under investment priority 1.1, aimed at boosting labour market mobility, had been successful and a new call worth £4.750m opened for applications in February 2021. The deadline was 12 April.

·  The Skills Hub had worked in collaboration with the NHS, Lancashire Adult Learning, People Plus and referral organisations to support the recruitment of clerical and administration staff for the mass vaccination centres in January. 121 people had successfully been offered employment to date.

·  The Digital Freedom 50+ Lancashire project, administered by Selnet, had supplied 320 digital devices and connectivity to digitally excluded over 50s across Lancashire

·  A refreshed Apprenticeship Action Plan had been produced with the shared aim of enabling the Apprenticeship system to meet the needs of the Lancashire economy. A meeting was planned in March with key partners to agree the draft plan and collective actions.

·  The requirement to publish a Local Skills Report by the end of this financial year still remains. As there was significant crossover between the contents of the published Lancashire Skills and Employment Strategic Framework 2021 and the Local Skills Report, the Skills Hub and the Skills Advisory Panel team in DfE were discussing a pragmatic way forward to bring the two documents together into one.

·  The partner data pack was an online interactive data dashboard which builds on the provision of the LMI Toolkit. It will be updated six times a year and was circulated to around 150 stakeholders

·  The Skills for Work microsite was launched in July 2020 to enable Lancashire residents to access support if furloughed, facing redundancy, looking for work or 16-25. The website had so far received 14,600 views.

·  Over the last 12 months the number of Lancashire Skills Pledge members had grown from 26 to 75 businesses, despite little promotion due to the pandemic

·  This week was national careers week and 21 nominated careers champions from across the country would be showcased on social media by the Careers and Enterprise Company, including committee member Peter Caney, from BAE.  The committee passed on their thanks to Peter for spearheading BAE's role as a cornerstone employer for the Lancashire Careers Hub.

Committee Members were requested to help spread the word on the various schemes and projects. 

The committee agreed that the new structure for the update report was helpful.

Resolved: That the update be noted, and the new report structure be adopted