The National Skills Academy for Materials, Production and Supply (NSA) has now officially been launched, and by Proskills chief executive Terry Watts’ own admission, the hard work is only just beginning.

Proskills (AKA print’s Sector Skills Council) has had its work cut out getting the NSA approved by the government’s Learning and Skills Council and has in the process come up with a number of iterations of a fairly hefty business plan for the academy. However, so nascent and nebulous is the NSA that even this ‘approved’ blueprint does not necessarily represent the finished product.

Stand and deliver
The document is a starting point that enabled Proskills to win the remit to enter phase two – the delivery phase – which is where the real work actually begins.

Nevertheless, while it may not be possible now to exactly predict what the NSA will become by the time it becomes a commercially viable business in February 2012, we can say what it is now and how it hopes to deliver its core aim to orchestrate the development and delivery of a sustainable, employer-driven education, training and skills programme.

The NSA is based on a ‘hub and spoke’ model, with the ‘hub’ in a physical sense being the head office located at Proskills’ headquarters in Abingdon, but also taking the form of the website that Watts hopes will be the gateway to all things skills-related. The ‘spokes’ will include regional managers, who will be the NSA’s ‘feet on the streets’ promoting products and services and lobbying with and on behalf of printers.

Other ‘spokes’ include Employer Learning Centres, Employer Training Clusters and the network of training providers that will be accredited and licenced by the NSA.

So far, so unclear. If we look at some of the ‘spokes’ more specifically we discover that the Employer Learning Centres will be on-site training facilities at the likes of (so far) Polestar, Heidelberg, Statex Colour Print and Newsprinters. These will be opened up (in most cases) for other companies to use.

Watts says: The problem is that there aren’t enough training providers around for the printing industry and one of the reasons there aren’t – in the public sector certainly – is because the cost of the capital equipment is beyond their budgets.

The essence of the idea is that companies, such as Newsprinters, which has its own training facility already, will not be using such facilities full-time and are therefore volunteering to open these up to other employers and training providers.

Employer Training Clusters are essentially groups of SMEs banding together to enable access to training that might not otherwise be available. For instance, although a training provider might not be willing to trek out to Shrewsbury once a week to work with one apprentice, if there are a group of companies with a number of apprentices with the same training requirements in the area, then those apprentices could form a training group that would be more viable for the training provider.

In a similar vein, Regional Skills Advisory Groups will involve groups of employers uniting to lobby regional government for changes to skills policy in that area.

Online access
The website (www.mps-academy.co.uk) that will form the core of the NSA offering will, in effect, be an entry point to accredited industry-specific skills training comprising a mix of free and gated onlinecontent, as well as products and services either available direct from the NSA or from a third party.

The financial model that is intended to support the NSA once its LSC funding ceases in 2012 includes membership fees, licence fees from training providers wishing to become accredited and sales of products and services.

Final decisions have yet to be made on what the cost of membership will be and whether there will be tiered membership for employers and/or training providers.

The first product that will be commercially available from the NSA will be ProFile, an online skills assessment tool that is currently being trialled in several companies across the UK.

Watts’ vision for the academy is that it should become almost like a department store for skills for the industry where employers know they can find anything they want, the training providers know there’s more chance of finding new customers there and the NSA just provides the platform for them to meet. The NSA also aims to accredit in-house training so that it can count towards NVQs and will help printers to access government funding, where available, to help support their training goals.

The NSA is still maleable and employers are being involved in both its development and governance (there will be a print representative on the NSA’s board). It is, as Watts would say, your academy and the more involvement from printers, the better the academy will function and the higher skills levels will become.

However, the inverse is also true, as Unite assistant general secretary Tony Burke warned at the academy’s launch when he said: The NSA can provide a new mechanism to deliver the skills all of the sectors need for the future – but only if our industries are prepared to use it.