Researching skills in rural and town communities

Last year, I was awarded a Churchill Fellow travel to isolated places in Sweden and New Zealand to learn how we can ensure rural and town communities have access to retraining.

I believed we had learnt the true cost of state abandonment or managed decline of communities — that when jobs go, communities often stay but increasingly lose the ability to ‘keep up’ and the gap in economic and social outcomes relentlessly widens — but we hadn’t learnt how to prevent it.

I wanted to see places which had built the capacity of communities from the ground up rather than tried to fit the same retraining and employment support from the top down. I was interested in how these services can be designed with the needs of rural and town communities at their heart.

I felt this urgently mattered as the labour market changed as a result of technology and the shift to carbon neutral jobs. I didn’t realise a more seismic shift was imminent with COVID-19.

The impacts of COVID-19 on the labour market led to an increase in demand from individuals for training and service delivery to become remote overnight.

It was an opportunity to research I was not able to pursue at the time due to poor health but led me to adapt my research.

I’ll charter my Fellowship on this blog as I reflect on the impacts of COVID-19 on rural communities and the opportunities and threats ahead, learning from innovation in Sweden, New Zealand, Estonia and the UK through travel where possible and over Skype where not.