For many of the main challenges of the 21^st century, learning and skills will be crucial. They are an engine of growth and driver of social justice. It is therefore important to understand where the UK is headed and how this compares to other countries.

Our Ambition Skills programme, supported by City and Guilds and NOCN, aims to address this. The programme is exploring:

• the economic and social case for the UK to have a higher skills ambition
• what this would look like
• the key policy and investment changes needed to achieve it

Ambition Skills will build a shared vision bringing together stakeholders across the learning and skills sectors, including business and industry views, and inform and support work of the Future Skills Coalition and other partners.

The programme includes four strands of work:

1. Assessing the current situation. We will set out the current economic and policy challenges and their relationship to learning and skills. We will also project the skills bases of the UK at a national and regional level to 2035, in comparison with international comparators.
2. Understanding demand for and need for skills. We will consider the likely employer and economy demand for skills by level, type, occupation and sector, to address key policy challenges including delivering net zero, AI/automation and health and social care.
3. Setting a higher ambition. We will set a series of benchmarks for a higher ambition for skills and a cost benefit analysis to estimate the potential economic and fiscal benefits of attaining this against the investment required.
4. A plan for change. We will set out the key planks of policy needed to deliver the higher ambition. This will include  apprenticeships and the apprenticeship levy, entitlements to learning and how to build a lifelong learning culture, the potential for learning accounts and other support, the role of devolution, and sector specific issues such as green skills.