What Burnham gets right - and wrong - about education
Labour’s plans for schools risk lowering the aspirations of working-class kids
The government has announced a radical shake-up of education for teenagers. Successive Prime Ministers may have talked about the importance of valuing vocational qualifications, but such promises rang hollow when set alongside targets to get half of all school leavers into university. Now it seems that Andy Burnham is prepared to change the national curriculum so that schools can encourage children as young as 14 down a vocational path. Here’s my take on what he gets right and wrong in the ideas he sets out in The Times this week.
‘We still educate our kids like every place is the same.’
Indeed we do - this is the whole point of a national curriculum. But rather than being a problem, the idea that children from Berwick-Upon-Tweed to Penzance all have the same opportunity to study a play by Shakespeare, calculate the area of a circle, gain some sense of national history and understand the structure of atoms is something to celebrate. Holding all children to a common standard reduces regional inequalities and helps create a shared national culture.
‘We’ll identify the industries driving growth in local areas and make sure that local kids have a clear route into them.’
Tearing up the national curriculum in favour of multiple local offers risks turning the clock back on the progress that has been made in England’s schools over the past three decades. Education should be about the transmission of knowledge - the best that has been thought and said in the world - from one generation to the next. Not preparing local kids for local jobs. This is an impoverished and limiting view of the purpose of schools.
‘Education will prepare our young people for the future that is being built around them.’ ‘Technical education will be at the heart of our system, not bolted onto the sides.’
Worryingly, neither Andy Burnham nor Education Secretary Lucy Powell seem able to conceive of education as having a purpose other than enhancing a person’s future employment prospects. This philistine assumption denies the capacity for knowledge to improve people’s quality of life.
‘Local apprenticeships faded, technical education was pushed into the background and practical skills came to be seen as somehow second class.’
This is true. There has been a decline in good-quality technical education since polytechnics were re-branded as universities and businesses began looking to migrants or graduates, rather than apprentices, for skilled labour. But for teenagers, it is a mistake to see academic and vocational qualifications as being in conflict. A person’s capacity to master practical skills isn’t diminished if they also know how to speak a foreign language or have a love of poetry. Quite the opposite. From carpentry to catering, a knowledge of maths and science can enhance people’s technical ability.
‘We know that one of the key reasons we have a higher proportion of NEETS than other countries is our relatively low take-up of technical education, which has been shrinking over the past ten years.’
Perhaps. But this completely ignores fundamental shifts in Britain’s economy brought about by de-industrialisation and the collapse of manufacturing, and changes in the labour market driven by high levels of migration, increases in the national minimum wage, and increases in corporation tax and employees’ national insurance contributions. In short, no amount of technical education will increase the number of jobs available; it will just increase competition for the jobs that do exist.
‘For too long, we’ve built an education system around the idea that there’s only one route to success: university, a degree, a desk.’
It is certainly true that Tony Blair’s target of getting half of all school leavers into higher education has been hugely damaging. It has contributed towards lower standards in universities as young people without any real love of a subject or desire to undertake rigorous academic study have taken up places, turning universities into an extension of school. An increase in graduates has not created more graduate jobs; it has simply reduced the wage premium on a degree as graduates take jobs that, a generation ago, were deemed suitable for school leavers. The people who have suffered most from this credentialism are non-graduates who struggle to get on the career ladder.
‘From the age of 14, we will be giving kids a new option in school: keeping core maths, English and science, but combining them with a real, hands-on technical education. This will include work experience and creating connections with local employers.’
This sentiment was echoed by Powell, who said, ‘We must recognise that an over‑focus on academic outcomes has left too many young people behind.’ But no one has ever been held back in life because they have too much knowledge. Struggling through GCSEs might be tough for some pupils - but that’s far better than making ‘academic outcomes’ exclusive to a minority. And this is the danger - children find they are labelled as ‘academic’ or ‘vocational’, brain-workers or hand-workers, at the age of just 13. In the context of today’s society, this is incredibly young to be making such life-changing decisions.
Despite Burnham’s talk of parity of esteem between the two routes, the prospect of ‘work experience’ and ‘connections with local employers’ does not suggest high-level, technical skills. High-quality, rigorous, technical education is important. But 14-year-olds are not best placed to benefit from this, and school teachers are probably the people most unsuited to delivering it.
‘From today, Britain will value the hard hat every bit as much as the graduation cap.’
Great. But saying it does not make it true. Raising the status of ‘the hard hat’ does not require certificates, but meaningful, secure, well-paid jobs.
‘A country that supports success rather than pays for failure.’
A wonderful aspiration. But the prospect of Burnham getting his more radical back-benchers to agree to benefit cuts without a fight looks highly unlikely…
Thank you to my paid subscribers for making it possible for me to write this.
Excellent article Joanna. I had hoped this might be just one Burnham policy I could support. I hated Blair's 50% target, and now see it as part of influencing the minds of young people for his vision of the future. But I can see the dangers Burnham's approach too. The government view of education seems to so often be about politics rather than knowledge. To his credit, I have to say Michael Gove did seem to have some desire to improve actual learning.