Member

The countries that have the best systems in the world also have extremely stable legislative underpinnings for them. I give just two examples, one of which everybody in this Room is very familiar with, which is Germany, which has the BIBB—everybody calls it that, including the Germans—the Bundesinstitut für Berufsbildung. It was established in its current form in 1970 and has not been touched since, but the basic system was set up by Bismarck in the 19th century. If we look at what I think is the very best system in the world, which is Switzerland’s, we see that it had one key Act in the late 19th century. They have amended it a little bit since then, but really not very much. It behoves us to get Skills England right so that the general praise that the original proposal elicited from people turns out to be justified and not simply an expression of hope tempered by experience.