As skills shortages bite, flooring must rethink training, apprenticeships, and reform to attract new talent
AS the flooring sector ages and new blood is needed, contractors need to find new ways to encourage the young in. One option is the apprenticeship where individuals learn on the job while being paid, with firms being helped to provide apprenticeships.
However, officially provided training and apprenticeship programmes have been a little bit of a ‘mishmash’.
Labour, heading towards its second anniversary with an intention on shaking up the economy, created Skills England, a new body, last June (2025) to change this.
It gave Skills England a goal – ‘to transform opportunities and drive growth… to bring together key partners to meet the skills needs of the next decade across all regions’.
Change was needed
And it’s needed because, as the ICAEW wrote in October 2023, ‘the lack of a strong system for retraining and upskilling workers to operate effectively in the workplace and take advantage of changes in the economy and technology is one of the main contributors to the skills crisis.’
According to the Productivity Institute the idea for Skills England isn’t new; rather, it was first mooted back in Autumn 2022 when a David Blunkett and the Council of Skills Advisers report on skills in the UK was published.
As the institute commented, ‘Skills England [was to] bring together central and local government, businesses, training providers and unions to meet the skills needs of the next decade across all regions, providing strategic oversight of the post-16 skills system aligned to the government’s Industrial Strategy.’
The problem seems to be fragmentation in skills strategy caused by multiple organisations and regulators and various forms of funding and accountability.
Further Education News wrote on the subject, saying that there are ‘multiple overlapping funding streams, blurred responsibilities between national and local agencies, and frequent policy churn create uncertainty and discourage long-term investment. Learners, employers and providers alike struggle to navigate this complexity.’
The result was skills mismatches that manifested in much under-skilling along with overqualification for some and too many people in jobs that fail to make full use of their skills and experience.
For Skills England to work, it needs to be able to link skills training to industrial strategy, local priorities, and the work of the Migration Advisory Committee which determines the priority of workers given the right to work in the UK.
Function takeover
In practical terms, as a House of Commons Library report outlines, Skills England took over the functions of the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education (IfATE).
IfATE worked with employers to develop, approve and review occupational standards; create and maintain occupational routes into occupations; oversaw the technical qualification of a T Level; approve technical qualifications; and develop, review and approved apprenticeship standards.
Skills England will go further and look at where skills gaps exist. It will also oversee training via a new Growth and Skills Levy that will replace the Apprenticeship Levy from April 2026.
The new levy will ‘allow employers to access a wider range of training with their funding. Under the (old) apprenticeship levy, employers (were) only able to spend their apprenticeship levy funding on apprenticeship training and assessment costs. Skills England will determine which training will be eligible for the expanded levy.’
Will it work?
The Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) reckons ‘Skills England will be in a battle for relevance from day one.’
A report from that institute, published at the end of March 2025, commented ‘that this government agency is likely to face an uphill struggle as it seeks to become a credible and respected organisation both within and outside government.’
It worries that ‘Skills England’s new CEO role occupies too junior a position within the Civil Service to have sufficient visibility and impact elsewhere in government. That the Department for Education has repeatedly talked about Skills England as an internal agency that will merely ‘inform’ and ‘feed into’ ministerial decisions about funding and policy changes.’ In other words, it may not have sufficient gravitas.
HEPI also highlights a range of contradictions related to Skills England – its national goal is going to clash with the government’s devolution agenda; this will be amplified when training funding is distributed along lines that don’t tie in with local needs.
Flooring and training
Formal apprenticeships and structured training for those in floor laying are increasingly recognised as a route into the trade precisely because they are nationally recognised, government-funded to help employers and apprentices with on-the-job experience and classroom or centre-based training.
For the sector there are options.
Take FITA and the CFA. It offers purpose-built facilities and block learning sessions. Alternatively, BwfA runs wood-specific apprenticeship programmes with structured technical and assessment units. CITB has a programme too. There are also commercial training providers that offer NVQs, CSCS card training, and fully funded apprentice schemes. And there’s training from flooring manufacturers themselves.
It’s true that dedicated apprenticeship programmes from the likes of FITA/CFA and BwfA demonstrate a high level of structure and industry relevance precisely because apprentices spend time in the classroom and in practical training rather than in occasional on-the-job learning. It helps too that training is provided by industry professionals and manufacturers who teach current methods and best practices.
And industry recognition through the Contract Flooring Association Apprentice of the Year further entrenches learning.
Even so, there’s more the sector can do.
Achievement rates
Apprenticeship results speak for themselves; indeed, the pass rate is very variable for trainers in the sector.
Consider a course, floorlayer – textile and resilient (level 2). Government apprenticeship provider data for one UK training provider, FloorSkills, found 56.8% of apprentices successfully completed and passed end-point assessment in 2023–24 meaning 43.2% didn’t pass or left the course.
Below FloorSkills result was Construction and Plant Assessments which achieved a pass rate of just 51.4%.
However, topping the list was Fullagar Construction Skills Centre+ with a pass rate of 75% which in turn was followed by Derwentside College at 71.4%.
Looking at other sectors as a comparator, taking building services engineering installer (level 2), training rates vary from a low of 45.5% (EAS mechanical) up to 92.3% (Choice Training).
For groundworker (level 2), pass rates range from 87.5% (West Suffolk College) to 21.4% (Greenlight Training).
And for property maintenance operative (level 2), the rates vary from 100% (Inspire Education Group), to 50% (Ixion Holdings (Contracts)).
What does this imply? That while many do pass in flooring courses, just as many if not more pass in other trades. The converse is equally true when it comes to failures and those that don’t complete. In other words, there’s room for improvement.
Ultimately
At the end of the day, training must be designed around real industry requirements such as site skills, subfloor prep, customer care, tools, materials. However, many flooring firms still rely more on informal training than formal apprenticeships, so opportunities can be patchy and uneven, particularly outside urban centres; and it’s also not uncommon to find an apprentice without a job post-training.
The UK construction sector, including flooring, faces longer-term skills shortages. More needs to be done to publicise the availability of courses. Further, there’s need to find ways of keeping apprentices on courses and make achievements more consistent.
Adam Bernstein is an independent columnist