John Humphrys asks: What can be done about the failure in education?
There has long been a consensus – indeed it seems like simple commonsense – that the key to improving people’s life chances and at the same time to make Britain a richer, better place, is to create a first-class education system. Governments of all parties have invested huge intellectual effort, not to mention billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money, to bring this about. Yet there has been no transformation. Far from it, if recent evidence on the subject is any guide. So what’s gone wrong? And what should we do about it?
It’s not hard to see why education should have played such a prominent role in the plans of those intent on building a better society. From an individual’s point of view, a good education has seemed the best way to get on, as well as providing the basis of a richer, more fulfilling life. In the baby boom generation that grew up after the Second World War, education was the means through which a huge, professional middle class was created and greater social mobility achieved. Children of modest background could climb the social ladder because they had the brains and the education to propel them up it.
From society’s point of view that was a good thing too and it is the need now for an even more educated workforce that has been the incentive for governments to continue to want to raise educational standards. Britain can no longer compete in low-wage economic activities because poorer developing countries can always undercut us. So we need a highly-educated, highly-skilled, higher-paid workforce to do the jobs in which we can be internationally successful.
Yet things have not worked out as planned. Earlier this month the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) published a report which shocked many people. It compared the literacy and numeracy standards of young people, between the ages of 16 and 24, in twenty four developed or developing countries. Britain came 22nd on literacy and 21st in numeracy. Perhaps even more alarming was that Britain was the only country among the twenty four in which the literacy and numeracy standards of people approaching retirement was higher than that of the younger group. The obvious conclusion is that the education system, far from raising standards, has seen them decline.
Another measure was almost equally depressing. The latest report from the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, a body set up by the coalition government and chaired by the former Labour cabinet minister, Alan Milburn, concludes that social mobility is ‘flatlining’. Education is no longer providing the means for children from poorer backgrounds to get further up the social ladder (though the report also cited many other factors responsible for the halt in social mobility).
But perhaps most striking of all are the conclusions of one of the government’s own advisers about the state of our education system. Dominic Cummings, the outgoing special adviser to the education secretary, Michael Gove, has written a 250-page report under the innocuous title, ‘Some thoughts on educational policy and priorities’. Its content is anything but innocuous.
Mr Cummings writes that ‘at best standards have stagnated over the last thirty years’. He remarks that ‘in England few are well trained in the basics of extended writing or mathematical and scientific modelling and problem-solving’. Perhaps most gloomily he argues that the solution cannot lie in simply letting teachers do their own thing, in the hope that their inspirational teaching will raise standards overall. He writes: ‘While some children will always be blessed by a brilliant teacher, by definition that is not a scaleable solution to our problems: real talent is rare and mediocrity is ubiquitous.’ He even floats the idea that in order to overcome what he sees as this widespread mediocrity in teaching, teachers should given less freedom to teach as they wish and instead be required to teach from prepared scripts provided (presumably) by government-funded educational experts.
Many people, and not just teachers, will regard both his diagnosis of the problem and such possible solutions as outrageous. To many, the problems in education over the last thirty years or so have been created not by teachers but by politicians, notwithstanding the billions that have been spent. Ever since the Labour prime minister, James Callaghan, made a landmark speech back in 1976, saying that standards in schools were so alarming that politicians had no option but to try and do something about them, politicians have been doing just that. It is their interference, on this account, that has caused the trouble.
In particular, it was the creation of the national curriculum by the Tory education secretary, Kenneth Baker, in 1985 and the introduction of school league tables – policies continued by all governments since – that cause the trouble, they say. It led to an over-emphasis on testing children and on educating them simply to do well in the tests and these developments, it’s argued, have had a deadening effect on teaching. Brilliant inspirational teaching is rare, it’s argued, not because there are too few brilliant teachers, but because they aren’t allowed to teach inspirationally. If only government would get off the backs of teachers, things would improve, they say.
Strangely, governments have in part understood this. Or at least governments of both main parties have felt the need to liberate schools from political interference. That has taken the form, though, of creating systems of schools that are no longer under the control of local authorities. Labour’s academies (a system extended by the coalition government) were set up with this purpose and Michael Gove’s pet project, the establishment of free schools set up by anyone who can make a good case, does the same. Yet critics of these policies argue that far from reducing political control, they simply transfer that control into the hands of the secretary of state. Furthermore, there has been no reduction in the direct interference by government in what actually goes on in schools. Mr Cummings’ notion that mediocre teachers should be required to teach from prepared scripts suggests that interference may well continue.
Perhaps the most controversial of his arguments and the one likely to be interpreted as a counsel of despair is that the educational establishment has wilfully ignored evidence that suggests that genetic make-up can account for as much as 70% of educational accomplishment. With this in mind he suggests that money spent on schemes such as Sure Start, to raise standards among children from less privileged backgrounds by intervening early, before they even get to school, may well be wasted. Some will interpret him as saying that nothing can be done.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the political spectrum, some educationalists argue that poverty and inequality are the main causes of educational failure, claiming that it is no coincidence that the countries that come bottom of the OECD tables on standards of literacy and numeracy, are Britain and the United States, the two countries that, among the twenty four, have the highest levels of inequality.
What is clear is that current standards of educational achievement in Britain satisfy no one. But what to do about it remains deeply controversial.
