The 2021 Ornamental Horticulture Roundtable Group (OHRG) report Growing a Green Economy found that the ornamental horticulture and landscaping industry is worth £28.8bn to gross domestic product and supports 624,200 jobs, but could grow to £41.8bn by 2030 and support 763,400 jobs if given the right support. We asked leading cross-sector industry voices to identify the drivers of market growth for their sectors.
Staff retention, professional development and climate change are some of the drivers for English Heritage, the guardian of 14 nationally important garden sites, employing 80 gardens’ staff. Senior gardens advisor Christopher Weddell (main picture) says its large training programme supports all grades of staff and, with an average garden team of four or five, succession planning can be a challenge. “We don’t get many people moving between sites because sites are so far apart. We recognise that despite our training efforts, some people will move on to progress. However, people come back.”
English Heritage historic and botanic garden training manager Elinor Davies runs the charity’s 12-month Historic & Botanic Garden Training Programme (HBGTP), focusing on practical skills. The programme began in 2006 and has had more than 300 starts. Its new partnership with the National Gardens Scheme means a three-year commitment of £125,000 a year of support for seven trainees.
For the upcoming 2023–24 cohort, the HBGTP has 19 trainee placements — four English Heritage gardens hosting eight trainees, one National Trust garden hosting one trainee and 10 further gardens hosting trainees. They take on three projects per year, including a career project, keep a technical daily journal and sit weekly plant identification tests. There is a four-day trainee seminar in autumn with the Professional Gardeners’ Trust, followed in the summer by a three-day study tour. Each of the trainees has £500 available for professional development.
Davies says some applicants have struggled to get their first job, depending on where they are, but 12 months in a HBGTP garden can really help. English Heritage offers a bursary to participating gardens — approximately half the salary of the trainee — enough inventive to opt for a trainee over a gardener post. Davies manages recruitment and checks in with trainees to ensure the structure is in place for trainee and garden. She also runs an annual seminar for gardens, preparing them for taking on a trainee in September.
“If you get training right, you can transform people’s lives and horticulture,” says English Heritage gardens and landscape head John Watkins. “The quality of the experience rather than the quantity is what matters, especially the difference a supportive team can make to people. You can never put enough money or effort into a garden, but teamwork enables you to achieve great things. We are looking for people who’ll benefit the most — keen amateur horticulturists. We started the programme because there was a need to get new people into horticulture.”
Urban context
In the urban context, Groundwork leads on the Green Spaces Skills Hub for the Greater London Authority (GLA), part of the mayor’s Green Skills Academy, in partnership with Parks for London. The hub aims to bring together all the parties involved in the capital’s green space improvements with a particular focus on sharing the skills and knowledge needed to meet the landscape challenges of climate change adaptation and mitigation, while attracting and supporting new entrants into the workforce.
Groundwork strategic development manager Fiona Brenner says the hub is focusing on people as well as on training and curriculum gaps. “We’re getting employers to be specific about what they mean by gaps and looking into content and methods of accessing training, connecting employers and training providers.”
Parks for London development officer Ed Stannard adds: “One of the challenges will always be keeping the curriculum relevant. Climate mitigation, environmental awareness, SuDS [sustainable drainage systems] — the sector will need to respond faster than the training providers can.”
Green Space Skills Hub manager Charmaine Holland says she is trying to start conversations with employers, asking them what they can do to solve skills gaps in their own organisations — for example, helping staff get a driving licence. “If employers take up the baton and run with it, they’re more likely to succeed than making certain skills requirements mandatory for contractual arrangements,” she maintains. “If employers commit through their own free will, they’re more likely to have a successful update and a long-term legacy.”
Part of upskilling the workforce means tapping into part-time working, expanding and diversifying who is able to enter the sector. In the production sector, Tristram Plants director Martin Emmett, OHRG education and employment subcommittee chair, admits: “Our first choice is employees who can work as a team over a full working day. However, in the last few years, realising that there is a relatively untapped resource out there, we now offer more flexible part-time contracts than ever before. Teams and shifts are being developed to cater for people doing the school run.”
Charlotte Howard, convenor of the Women in Gardening Networking Group on Facebook, asks: “Are the industry/Government trying to attract young people when they should be trying to attract women in their thirties or women who are early retired?” One function of the group is experienced women gardeners offering mentoring support to women new to horticulture, often career-changers.
Stannard says: “We need significant improvement in employment facilities and making roles attractive. How are people being managed and how is their development being managed? Workforce shortages plus competitive tendering lead to environments where people aren’t encouraged to progress. Upskill managers to see the value in investing in staff. If the concern from some employers is ‘what happens if we upskill our staff and they all leave?’, answer ‘what happens if we don’t upskill our staff and they stay?’”
Good practice includes Hounslow securing £200,000 from the GLA to deliver 10-week skills boot camps for 18- to 25-year-olds not in education and economically inactive, who are guaranteed an interview for a grounds maintenance job. The hub is piloting a jobs board that brings all green space vacancies into one place (see www.greenspaceskillshub.london).
“What is significant is a lack of confidence in those delivering training advice on horticulture careers, especially to potential entrants who are economically inactive,” notes Stannard. “When shown a list of potential roles, they go for the digital, construction or hospitality industries. How can we raise the profile of horticulture careers to those on the urban climate front line, linking the big environmental challenges to connecting people with career opportunities that make a difference?”
Choices offered
Ros Burnley is a director at skills consultancy Adrow. “For the level 2 apprenticeship, there’s quite a lot of choice out there now,” she says. “Choices within the standard mean you can specialise in maintenance or landscaping, but you do everything.”
There is flexibility in terms of how providers deliver content. Some have the capacity to be more supportive, some are more light-touch. For instance, for the forthcoming level 5 horticulture apprenticeship, people will not have to take time off work.
Capel Manor College acting horticulture and garden design head Sophie Guinness held an employers’ forum in February as part of preparations for delivering the T Level in agriculture, land management and production in September 2024. She says: “Employers really don’t understand the different levels of qualifications, but they welcome the T Level, a qualification they can really understand, with a challenging aim, which is what they want.”
The 20 employers/educationalists attending Capel’s forum support the 315-hours-per-year work experience component of T Levels and the route they provide to study for a degree. The two-year T Levels will replace the technical qualifications at level 3. Guinness adds that Capel shows careers advisers the courses offered, “but the relationship between the schools’ agenda and further education is not an easy one because it is very much in the schools’ interest to keep their A Level students”.
Burnley adds: “I’d like to see work-based and classroom-based education remain integrated in the sector. There aren’t enough employers to only do work-based. I’m worried about how education reforms are going to affect further education colleges. T Levels are designed for 16-year-olds. We need something more for career changers who want something targeted.” Burnley also works with PlantNetwork members on what training they need.
Emmett asks: “If you’re a 16-year-old who earnestly wants to work in our industry, are you going to do a T Level or an apprenticeship where you can get a level 3 qualification while being paid? The dynamic of how apprenticeships and T Levels work alongside each other remains to be seen when you’ve got employers screaming out for candidates. Against this employment environment with a shortage of people, a lot of employers are going to make their apprenticeship offer as attractive as possible.”
RHS education head Suzanne Moss describes the rationale for the society’s new level 2 qualification. “The horticulture industry has moved on since our previous level 2 qualification was regarded as a staple, so we had to move on exponentially,” she explains.
“We wanted to make the level 2 more flexible and relevant to more sectors of the industry, and industry wanted it to be more understandable and simpler.” The new qualification does not have a modular scheme. All level 2 achievers will have the same core skills, standardising the outcome, and with more capacity for online assessment. The RHS has seen 33-50% more applications for the new qualification than it anticipated.
Moss says the RHS supports T Levels and the apprenticeships, though neither lend themselves to career-changers. Trying to get people to sites for the work experience component is not going to be easy and doing T Levels part-time is not necessarily practical. “To support the industry, RHS qualifications and those like them need to remain.”
She says the RHS has developed schools programmes in its gardens to make them clearer and more curriculum adjacent, with 47,000 pupils coming through each year. The National Education Nature Park with the Natural History Museum is new.
“Within the industry, we’ve always been very strong from an engagement point of view and from a professional learning point of view,” says Moss. “Where we’ve always struggled is the bit in the middle — career transitions. Our New Shoots scheme tries to address this gap through providing information and opportunities to move from one to another. We’re trying to bring more people into our gardens for shorter-term experiences — volunteering, T Level work experience, taster days — and we’ve put in a new team to resource this.”
Policy commitments
Emmett says the OHRG is focusing on seven areas where it is asking for policy commitments — seasonal workers, recruitment, apprenticeships, T Levels, professional skills development, careers promotion and school curriculum. As NFU horticulture and potatoes board chair, he says the big win for 2023 is 45,000 seasonal worker permits.
“It’s now more widely appreciated that there are more vacancies than people available,” notes Emmett. “A high proportion of those unemployed are over 50. We are an industry that is primarily based on physical work. Proportionally, younger people are a smaller component of the population as a whole. Ultimately, we need to look at more ways of automating our operations, which is easier to think about in a commercial production context than a landscape context.
“What do we do to recruit more young people? The success story is apprenticeships. The landscape sector has been particularly strong leading on this and apprentices are just coming into commercial production. We must have a good-quality programme and a good offer, which means competitive wages — i.e. National Living Wage rather than apprenticeship wages.”
Emmett says two themes that need to be highlighted are the green jobs agenda and the economic/employment impact of horticulture at a national level that a local focus might miss. “It’s really important that we as a sector and the majority of the employment in our sector are identified as ‘green’. Younger people want to be associated with green jobs.”
Andy Jasper - credit: © National Trust Images/Paul Harris
Positive development
National Trust gardens and parklands head Andy Jasper (above) and horticulture development specialist Emma McNamara say T Levels have been a positive development: “We have worked closely with the City & Guilds team to create the T Level curriculum and exams. These two-year technical A Levels include 45 days of work placements and the National Trust is looking forward to offering work placement opportunities at some of its gardens. Through programmes such as the T Levels, we can work with schools and colleges to ensure our skills needs are met from the outset.”
New strengths-based recruitment allows the trust to make decisions based on more relevant criteria, based on potential opposed to experience, and “will make us more relevant and inclusive as an employer, supporting our strategic objective to diversify our staff” as well as helping career-changers who may have transferable skills and experience working with volunteers and on events.
The trust offers level 2 and 3 apprenticeships and is looking at offering level 5. Apprentices can apply for grade 9 and 10 gardener roles once they complete their apprenticeship. The trust’s first horticulture scholarship, The Sissinghurst Scholarship, launched in 2022.
Market drivers for growth in horticulture careers are maintaining diversity in training and education options and improving access to these, as well as pursuing the possibility of rebranding horticulture as an “environmental services industry”.
