Round and Round the Houses: the Leitch Review of Skills

The Leitch Review, headed by businessman Lord Leitch, and staffed by government, was set up in 2004 to consider Britain's long-term skill needs. As such, it is the latest in an enormously long list of reports, commissions and reviews which, since the 1860s, have occupied themselves with the supposed failings of the country's vocational and technical training systems, and the extent to which the country's economic growth is being held back by skill shortages. In the last few decades, the pace of both reporting and policy-making in this area has accelerated. Indeed the Leitch Review was set up just four years after the final report and recommendations of a very large-scale 'Skills Taskforce' created by the incoming Labour government in 1997, and its inquiries actually overlapped with the launch of the government's Skills Strategy White Paper. (DfES 2005)