What is a National Skills Academy?

National Skills Academies are employer-led centres of excellence. They deliver the skills required by key sectors and sub-sectors of the economy, contributing to world-class competitiveness through world-class skills.

National Skills Academies are a core part of the Government’s plans for improving the skills available to employers and to creating opportunities for their employees. They come in different shapes and sizes, driven by employers’ needs.

All of the National Skills Academies in the network tackle different problems and have the freedom to evolve approaches that best fit their sector. But they all share a set of core values about what it means to be a National Skills Academy and what a National Skills Academy is setting out to achieve:

• Leadership: National Skills Academies enable employers to take the lead in driving change for their sector—to come together and develop the levers that will effect that change.
• Transformation: National Skills Academies offer compelling solutions to current and emerging skills challenges. They are about moving the skills system to a new place including, but not limited to, the achievement of specialist excellence—they should be about increasing the supply of skills to provide innovative solutions for business.
• Collaboration: National Skills Academies will only realise those solutions by networking with others, facilitating wider improvement as well as delivering it. They need to find ways to network with others who share their values and aspirations—from employers and training providers, to Sector Skills Councils and Regional Development Agencies.
• Openness: National Skills Academies are national ventures for the good of a sector or industry and need to live up to the obligations that entails—working to ensure all employers, in all parts of the country, can access the quality products and services they have to offer.
• Independence: National Skills Academies have freedom to innovate because they are independent; that independence is critical to their credibility as a centre of excellence for their sector. Once fully operational, they must be able to support themselves financially and be transparent in the way they develop and manage their work and account for public funds.