About us

Skillfast-UK is the Sector Skills Council for apparel, footwear and textiles. We are the voice of our sector’s employers on skills issues.

Our campaign stance is based on detailed research with more than 2,000 employers and a close ongoing dialogue with many of the sector’s major companies.

The sector, and how it compares to other areas of industry

The apparel, footwear and textiles sector comprises approximately 40,000 businesses. In the manufacturing component of the sector alone, there are more than twice as many businesses as can be found in the food industry.

Around 380,000 people work in the sector. In comparison, the pharmaceuticals and motor vehicles sectors each employ around a third of this total; aerospace around two fifths.

The clothing, footwear and textiles sector contributes £10 billion to the UK economy each year. The pharmaceutical sector contribution is around 60 per cent of this; the furniture sector just over a third.

The skills situation

At present, £80m of public money is spent every year on providing educational and training courses of notional relevance to our sector. Up to four fifths of this money goes into Higher Education – mainly to fund fashion design courses – with the bulk of the remainder going into designs and hobby courses delivered through Further Education colleges.

The issues

Why is so much money being spent on fashion design courses when graduate supply outstrips industry demand by around up to 600 per cent?
With well over £64m per year going into fashion education, why do our employers complain that graduates lack the essentials - CAD-CAM operation, pattern-cutting, sample-making, production knowledge and commercial awareness?
In England, in 2004/5, there were only 270 registrations in England for publicly-funded sector-specific qualifications. The clear message from employers is that they lack faith in qualifications. A key reason for this is that local colleges have neither the staff nor the equipment to be able to deliver qualifications. So why is Government continuing to route funding through colleges?

The answer

Our research has shown that employers will invest more in skills IF the training is right and IF it can be delivered in the workplace – not in a college classroom. If the Government really wants to see an uplift in skills and productivity, why is more not being done to support workplace learning?

What needs to happen

We want Government to divert some of the public funding that is currently spent on courses that employers DON’T want, into workplace learning that employers DO want. We’re not asking for more. We’re asking for the current investment to be spent where it will make most difference.
We want long-term systemic change for our employers on skills – not the succession of short-term locally-funded pilot schemes and projects that we’ve had to date. In this way we can break the “postcode” lottery which sees some employers receive publicly-funded support for skills development, whilst others receive nothing.
We see the Government’s Train to Gain programme as a step in the right direction, BUT:

Support can only be accessed to undertake qualifications. Since qualifications are not always valued by employers, we are forcing them to make a choice between what’s right for the budget and what’s right for business productivity. We would like to see the programme broadened to cover other types of training – if this is what will help business competitiveness.
Train to Gain can only be as strong as the training infrastructure. Our sector suffers from lack of quality training provision, so the effect of Train to Gain will be limited. We would like to see Train to Gain brokers working with Sector Skills Councils to broker collaborative employer solutions to the lack of infrastructure.

For documents outlining the key statistics on skills for the apparel, footwear and textiles sector, and information on how workplace learning works in practice, visit the publications area on this mini-site.