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Education and Home Affairs Scrutiny Panel Post-16 Education Review
Written Submission – Jersey Business – 25 September 2018
Further to your letter dates 12th September I'm pleased to provide the response from Jersey Business (JBL).
We fully support Scrutiny in reviewing post 16 Education given how critical this is to both the economic and social future of the island of Jersey and its residents.
In simple terms our future long term economic success will be reliant on the quality of the skills we build and develop to support the new and existing Jersey businesses that allows them to continue to compete in a global market which has much greater mobility (staff, infrastructure, technology etc.) Jersey should rightly aim to be seen as a jurisdiction of choice for innovative low footprint businesses and our pool of skilled resource will be one of the key factors.
This will help manage the challenges any small geographic jurisdiction has re balancing population growth and the demographic challenges we face with an ageing population. In doing this we will help drive productivity in our economy, maintain effective full employment and ensure our growth is sustainable.
Whilst Jersey continues to do well in terms of traditional academic results this does need to be balanced with greater focus on creative' and technology' related skills that consider how business needs are likely to change.
Part of this needs to be programmes that recognise lifelong' learning and the need for the workforce to consistently re-skill' so that developments such as AI in say financial Services create a potential opportunity for diversification/ new business creation rather than a risk in terms of existing jobs. This can be done in partnership with the public and private sector through a joined up workplace plan' which has shared short/ medium and long term strategic goals.
As such we very much support the suggestion of looking beyond the UK in terms of best practice' but we should not be afraid of breaking new ground ourselves. One of the key strengths of Jersey should be our ability to bring together great ideas and then make investment decisions quicker than our competitor jurisdictions.
We should also look seriously at what areas of skills Jersey could be a natural world leader in, for example a subset of financial services. This may be through a link with a top global University not only benefiting local students but also bringing international students to Jersey who then either i) stay to contribute to our economy or ii) become global advocates of Jersey business opportunities.