Driving local skills and employment leadership in Salford under devolution

How can leaders ensure that the economic regeneration of a city translates into ‘good growth’ for all residents?

We recently hosted a webinar to discuss this very topic, and examine the different approaches local authorities can take to improve employment and skills systems in a devolved policy landscape.

Mat Ainsworth, Director of Skills, Work & Inclusive Economy at Salford City Council, and James Farr, Director at Think, shared their thoughts on how a locally driven approach with strong, strategic leadership can turn aspirations into reality.

Setting the scene: Salford’s changing landscape

As someone born and raised in Salford, Mat has seen first-hand the transformation of the city over the past decade.

“The old tropes of LS Lowry-esque whippets, cloth caps and Dirty Old Town are a far cry from the reality of present day Salford. In the last five years alone, the city’s added 15,000 new jobs and built over 14,000 homes.”

Once associated with deprivation and industrial decline, Salford has become one of the fastest-growing cities in the north. However, physical regeneration alone does not guarantee inclusive growth. Despite the economic uplift, stark inequalities remain - particularly in educational outcomes and employment levels.

Mat explained that this disconnection between investment and community benefit was a central driver for the Council's decision to invest £1.5 million annually in its skills and work agenda, despite austerity constraints.

Against this backdrop of future-focused investment, Think was commissioned to help develop a refreshed, data-led, and partnership-driven skills and employment strategy.

Think’s approach: Evidence, engagement, and co-production

James Farr took attendees through Think’s methodology for the strategic refresh. This work was grounded in three pillars: data analysis, stakeholder engagement, and collaborative development of priorities produced with both Salford's Work and Skills Board and Salford City Council.

James stressed the importance of using insights from people with lived experience of the skills and employment challenges in Salford to set the direction of travel.

“You can write a method on a page, but actually the way you go about delivering it makes a big difference not only to the quality of the output, but also to how effective the implementation might be.”

Rather than a top-down consultancy model, Think immersed themselves in the local context - interviewing partners, residents, employers, and young people - to co-produce a shared vision for the future.

Key findings included Salford’s rapidly changing demographics and labour market. The city experienced a 15% population growth in the decade to 2021, and a dramatic rise in residents qualified to Level 4 and above.

Nevertheless, challenges remained: Salford ranked near the bottom nationally for Level 3 attainment by age 19, and a growing cohort of economically inactive residents, especially under-40s, presented long-term risks to productivity and inclusion.

James emphasised that the strategy needed to reflect this dual reality. Salford is a city of opportunity and transformation, but it’s still grappling with persistent inequality and systemic barriers to progression.

“This is a Salford thing: all our partners have their part to play”

The evidence gathered by Think helped to galvanise local partners around a compelling narrative: this wasn’t just a council plan, it was a city-wide mission.

A total of 17 priorities were established under four strategic objectives, ranging from inclusive pathways into technical roles, to collaborative employer engagement and better use of social value. Mat described how the process of implementation was almost as powerful as the final outcomes.

“Rather than taking an “everything, everywhere, all at once” approach, we’ve created a clear, phased and coherent delivery plan. The depth of engagement and the combination of hard data with qualitative insights has provided a real sense of ownership and credibility.”

Previous discussions often focused narrowly on the 2% of public investment in employment support, education and training that is directly controlled by the Council despite the fact that 98% of provision funded via other routes such as colleges, DWP, and national programmes. The new strategy deliberately shifted the focus toward influencing the wider system.

One notable success was the enhanced collaboration between Salford City College and the University of Salford. Historically disconnected (and, in fact, occasionally competitors) the two institutions are now co-designing progression routes in key sectors like construction and the built environment, driven by employer demand and future-facing development pipelines.

Mat described one practical outcome of this joined-up approach, particularly across the FE and HE landscape:

“A couple of years ago the college's key construction training centre was on one side of a main road in Salford. On the other side of it was the University of Salford's Energy House, which is a cutting edge, state-of-the-art built environment facility where home builders are testing modern methods of construction - and there'd never been any relationship between those two things!”

“Now, partly driven by this work, there's now a coherent single pathway between FE and HE employer engagement.”

Partnerships, devolution, and system leadership

A major theme throughout the webinar, and in questions submitted by attendees, was the importance of system leadership in a devolved environment.

Mat highlighted how Salford's proactive approach has built credibility with the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA), positioning the city as a testbed for new initiatives like the Economic Inactivity Trailblazer and WorkWell programmes.

“The Greater Manchester strategy provides a great opportunity to amplify what a local area might want so that the funding flows down - and the activity flows down.”

James echoed this, noting that councils may only control a fraction of the funding but through influence, brokerage, and alignment, they can shape outcomes at scale.

There's also a desire to shift from short-term, reactive funding to a more coherent, long-term system shaped locally and delivered collaboratively.

Final thoughts

Mat brough the session to a close with reflections on what made this work successful: taking the time to build shared ownership, investing in deep engagement, and creating an actionable delivery plan that gave partners a stake in the citywide roll-out.

Think’s work shone a spotlight on the widening inequalities that exist in the city, but it also provided a clear roadmap for improvement. As it continues to grow, Salford is committed to embedding social value into planning and procurement, improving employer engagement across the board, and expanding inclusive recruitment models.

Salford’s journey is both inspiring and instructive: it demonstrates the potential of local authorities to act as convenors, innovators, and champions for inclusive growth under devolution.