Going into a new school term, which coincides with our annual party conference season, the air is charged with optimism. For schools and teachers, things feel different. In the new government’s first 100 days, efforts to reset the relationship with the education sector are on turbocharge. Perhaps fuelled by this optimism, or perhaps by curiosity, thousands of people logged into the new Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson’s very first Q&A in the role.
In opposition, Phillipson surprised some with her choice of role model. She had said she intended to be “as reforming an Education Secretary as Michael Gove”. Now in government, Phillipson must make her own legacy, and it needs to be skills: technical, basic and essential.
Smart, heavy-hitting appointments like Kevan Collins and Becky Francis, both experienced experts in the field, indicate a seriousness to understand what is happening in schools, with a deep knowledge of evidence-led solutions needed to tackle the major problems in the sector. Careful language, like “evolution not revolution”, has been deployed to temper disquiet about any upheaval under the Curriculum and Assessment Review currently underway.
Such a smooth, comfortable start (at least, at the time of writing) can only mean one thing: something’s brewing.
Three years after the 2008 crash, Gove used the Edge Foundation – our independent charity promoting balanced education that prepares young people for life and work – as a platform to position technical and vocational education at the heart of the government’s growth agenda. “The need to drive private sector growth is urgent and overwhelming,” he said. “And that depends on a reform of our education system which addresses our long-term weakness in practical learning.”
As we all know, however, what took precedence in the decade that followed were the ideological debates around knowledge versus skills. Gove himself said: “It’s not either/or but both/and”.
We paid the price, quite literally, when our labour market was starved of the talent pipeline it needed to adapt in the face of multiple shocks, not least the pandemic, lockdowns, and the impact of Brexit. And so, nearly 15 years on, the new government inherits a not-so-dissimilar situation to the one Gove did.
The UK’s further education providers are expected to pick up the pieces of failing GCSE resits policy, failing functional skills qualifications and low basic skills among adults. And yet they have been starved of funding and face the most acute workforce challenges across the whole education system.
Young people are hearing more about apprenticeships (and the fact that they often thrive once they secure one), but the opportunities are just not there to meet demand. Rather than comprehensive availability, we have a postcode, and too often a class lottery.
T Levels – intended to enhance the status of technical qualifications and help meet our skills deficits – are plagued with difficulties, with poor retention rates, students reporting delays in securing industry placements, and limited opportunities for practical work. Employer investment in training has declined extensively, with the litany of policy interventions designed to address this ending up actually making the skills system harder for employers to engage with. As ever, small and medium-sized enterprises, without the resources, personnel and connections as the corporate sector, find it the most difficult to engage and take advantage of the skills and training systems that are in place.
Parents, employers, young people and teachers tell us the system isn’t working. Our survey of 2,000 adults in England, carried out at the start of the year, finds less than a quarter (24 per cent) of adults in England think the current education system prepares young people well for the workplace. Some 37 per cent of adults think a person leaving education today is actually worse prepared than someone leaving 20 years ago. And the Essential Skills Tracker 2024, supported by Edge, tells us that less than a quarter of teaching professionals agree that essential skills are currently being taught sufficiently in the education sector.
What is new, however, is the appetite for change. The public want to see more emphasis on skills for life (90 per cent), work (88 per cent) and the encouragement of vocational and technical qualifications (82 per cent) on a genuinely level playing field, with opportunities to mix and match academic and vocational subjects (74 per cent).
Some 90 per cent of teaching professionals support building essential skills in education – be that through the national curriculum, threading essential skills throughout subjects, or by putting an emphasis on special projects. This means a greater emphasis on skills like creativity, which will set young people up for success in life as well as work.
Of all the changes we could make in education, potentially the most impactful – the key to unlocking opportunity, aspiration, and economic growth – lies in developing the talent we need for our labour market, now and in the future.
The new government has an opportunity to craft a legacy on education and skills that will transform opportunities for generations to come. That doesn’t mean more of the same. So, whilst we absolutely need to be sensitive to the pressures schools and colleges face, we need to seize this opportunity to make education relevant.
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