Quoting the wizard Gandalf in his resignation letter – adding that he would also be standing down as an MP at this year’s coming election – Halfon said: “My time is over: it is no longer my task to set things to rights.” Which prompts the question: how much did he get right?

Halfon’s time in office has drawn many positive appraisals. David Hughes, CEO of the Association of Colleges, said: “His drive to promote inclusion and to back further education will be missed. He has been a passionate champion for further education, skills and apprenticeships throughout his tenure as chair of the education select committee and as minister, bringing to the roles a commitment to colleges and to understanding as much as he can about what works for students and apprentices.”

Neil Carberry, CEO at the Recruitment & Employment Confederation (REC), also extols his drive and understanding. “I think Halfon’s commitment to further education and skills is really deep-seated,” he said. “He brought a level of specialism built up over the years that was helpful in terms of discussing complex issues. I think we will miss that ability with him to get to the point quickly and get a clear ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer as well.”

It’s a point echoed by Tania Bowers, global public policy director at the Association of Professional Staffing Companies (APSCo). “It’s disappointing when any minister that’s become so well acquainted with their brief resigns and there’s a period of time before his successor settles in,” she said.

However, what Bowers and Carberry also agree on is that Halfon is leaving behind an apprenticeship system that still needs work to serve the skills sector properly. “Unfortunately, the department for education has been very resistant to changing its overall policy on the Apprenticeship Levy spend,” said Bowers. “Admittedly, they have recently increased the amount of levy that contributors can transfer to other smaller businesses to up to 50% of their funds, but we want the levy to be used in a far broader manner for short-term modular training.”

In terms of the impact on her sector directly, it’s about the larger members having huge levy pots they are not able to spend, Bowers told Recruiter. “Unless they can spend them or transfer them to other people in their supply chain, the money simply goes back to the Treasury,” she said. “So there’s huge frustration in our sector about being able to use it to upskill our own staff, as well as the agency workforce.

“They can only use this money to set up apprenticeship schemes. And although there are apprenticeship standards for recruitment consultants – and we have been working on updating these on a trailblazer scheme – the reality is that our members prefer to do their own training outside of the constraints of the apprenticeship scheme,” she added. “There’s this large population of workers that really don’t have any meaningful access to upskilling. Obviously being able to use the Apprenticeship Levy funds to upskill agency workers would be of great benefit to the UK.”

Reform of the Apprenticeship Levy is also something that the REC has campaigned for heavily over the years. “It’s not that we and everybody else don’t love apprenticeships,” said Carberry. “They’re great for training, but they can’t be the only form of training. And the levy encourages everything to be an apprenticeship. So, we’ve ended up in a world where we’ve got the likes of postgraduate-level management apprenticeships eating up the levy funds rather than apprenticeships for people on the ground.

“In our sector, we place a million temporary workers on site every day; those are workers who don’t have access to the training funds that the levy delivers because an apprenticeship has to be 12 months,” Carberry added. “There’s a real need for accessible funding for more flexible and modular training because that’s the route to making sure that the temps whose wages are being levied are also the beneficiaries of that tax. It’s a bit odd to have an Apprenticeship Levy where senior accountants, for example, are doing higher-skill management apprenticeships funded by a levy on the wages of temporary warehouse workers.”

That said, Bowers is heartened by the introduction of programmes like Skills Bootcamp and T levels, “but again, they are just not particularly widely known yet”, she added. “I’m sure the picture is getting better, but there’s not an overarching national strategy. And it’s unlikely that Halfon’s replacement, Luke Hall, will introduce this because it’s not government policy.”

Carberry believes the UK has a “deep and resilient skills sector” but agrees that it’s been lacking the clear guidance of an industrial strategy. “Sadly, it’s been sorely underfunded because of this. Yes, there were some good signs in the budget – the AI skills pilot for professional services, for example, is of particular interest to recruiters, and the REC has already been heavily involved in the development of this, but there’s a lot of work to do to if we’re going to meet the skills challenges in the next decade.”

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