In 2013, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) launched a new adult skills survey of people aged 16 to 65 across 24 countries.
Young people in the UK aged 16 to 24 perform less well in literacy and numeracy compared to adults aged 55 to 65. Skills levels in the UK are disproportionately influenced by social inequality compared to other countries, with individuals from poor families much less likely to progress up the skills ladder.
The issue here is not just absolute levels of poverty but also inequality. In the UK’s deeply divided and unequal society, poverty and inequality interact to compound disadvantage and to place artificial limits on the educational achievements of poor children and young people.
Politicians used the OECD’s results to lambast the education system, but politicians are a huge part of the problem, and not the solution to the skills crisis.
In England, politicians have imposed upon schools a narrow, subject-based national curriculum, assessed by timed linear exams, neither of which meets the skill-set needed for productive working lives in the 21st century.
It is not just education experts who hold this view. Confederation of British Industry director-general, John Cridland, made a strong statement when he said: “Across the UK, we have too many ‘impoverished schools’ by which I mean schools which focus only on academic rigour.”
He said we need a broader definition of a school’s success which is “rigorous, rounded and grounded”. And on exams, Mr Cridland argued: “In the UK we have no debate at all about the 14 to 18 curriculum – only a debate about exams. We need curriculum reform, not just exam reform. We should stop using exams as a tool to influence education rather than accredit it. The government must make a start on a full review of 14 to 18 education.”
Of course there are schools that refuse to conform to the government’s narrow and limited national curriculum offer. The Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) has an interactive website, A Curriculum That Counts, with case studies from six schools that have forged innovative and imaginative approaches to the curriculum, and pages of resources to support different curriculum approaches, such as an aims-based curriculum or the RSA Opening Minds curriculum (visit http://acurriculumthatcounts.org.uk/).
Further education is essential for UK skills. It gives second chances to young people and adult learners, and it provides the training and skills development employers need. But further education is in crisis. If schools have had policy turbulence, further education has had policy tsunami.
Professor Alison Wolf produced a major report recently (for King’s College London and backed by the Gatsby Foundation) that demonstrates beyond any doubt that further education is under-funded. She wrote of an “unstable, inefficient, untenable and unjust” funding system that is destroying education provision for school-leavers who don’t want to go to university.
Prof Wolf analysed the total spending on the adult skills budget, which has been declining as a proportion of total spending on education, and is now, in absolute terms, less than what is spent on either pre-primary education or on taxpayer contributions to university teaching costs.
The government’s 24 per cent cut in adult education funding can only make matters worse. In 2012, further education got about £2,150 for a full-time college student whereas higher education got £8,400 for a full-time student.
She argues, and the figures are incontrovertible, that “the result is a system which is not producing highly qualified technicians at a time when there is a strong labour market demand for them and when many of those currently in work are nearing retirement. Apprenticeship numbers are overwhelmingly in areas which are cheap to deliver. Among Apprenticeships which lead to a higher level craft or technician level award, less than five per cent are in engineering, manufacturing technologies or science, and only about one per cent in ICT.”
We need joined-up thinking, adequate funding and coordinated educational provision across schools and further education to tackle the skills deficit in the UK. We are not seeing evidence of that thinking yet.
- Dr Mary Bousted is general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL).