Education: a shiny new policy
RICHARD NORTH
Of the many policies that were initiated by Blair during his tenure of prime minister, it is hard to single out the worst elements. But a strong candidate for the most damaging policy of all has to be his plan, announced at the 1999 Labour Pary Conference, that 50 percent of all young adults should be going into higher education by the 21st Century.
To fund the rapid expansion of student numbers without overburdening taxpayers, his government abolished the old system of free university education and student maintenance grants. It introduced an up-front fee of £1,000 per year in September 1998.
This fee cap was later tripled to £3,000 under the Higher Education Act 2004, setting the precedent for subsequent funding frameworks. For a standard full-time undergraduate home student in England, it is now £9,790 per year, set to rise to £10,050 for the 2027/28 academic year.
Although the term higher education in the UK includes any qualification at Level 4 and above (such as foundation degrees and other higher vocational qualifications below degree level), which can be studied at higher education or further education institutions, it has come to mean the full-time university undergraduate degree, which is effectively synonymous with higher education.
Blair’s ambition was achieved by 2019, by which time around half of young adults were participating in higher education, but the overwhelming majority study for undergraduate degrees. Many are of dubious quality and have little relevance to the employment market, while loans for tuition fees and living costs can exceed £50,000, leaving graduates saddled with debt.
Today, however, that looks as if all this might be set to change. Under the heading “Burnham brings an end to Blair’s university vision”, the Telegraph is reporting that today, prime minister Burn’em is to make a major policy announcement on education, declaring that “hard hats as important as graduate caps”.
Burn’em, we are told, will argue that Blair’s drive to get half of school leavers to attend university has “let down” a generation of young people. Already, he has stated that, “For too long in this country, students have been told that you must take the academic path to do well and to be respected”.
He goes on to say that: “The whole school system has been built around it and that has let down young people seeking technical qualifications” but then says: “I want an education system based on parity between academic and technical which gives all young people a clear path in life”.
The Guardian offers more detail, telling us that Burn’em’s plan is intended to begin operating from September 2028, when mayors and other local leaders are expected to work with schools, colleges and employers to devise technical training built around local jobs.
In combination, there will be prioritised funding for such technical and vocational qualifications, plus guidance to Ofsted to recognise the value of these as well as more traditional qualifications.
In giving local areas more control over education for the 14-16 age group, the intention is also to help address the worsening problem of young people not in education, employment or training (Neet)..
This refers back to a report published in May by Alan Milburn, the former Labour cabinet minister, where the number of “Neet” young people could hit 1.25 million by early 2030..
Although the report cited a number of causal factors, including a changing job market, inequality and health problems, it also blamed a lack of focus on employability skills and non-academic qualifications. Those latter factors are the subject of today’s policy announcement.
According to the BBC, pupils will be able to study subjects like manufacturing and AI alongside core academic learning from age 14. The government says that the courses available from Year 10 would be linked to local jobs and industries.
We are informed that these plans for technical education reform will build on local initiatives like the MBacc, or Greater Manchester Baccalaureate, which was announced in 2023 by Burn’em when he was the city’s mayor.
Launched there in September 2024, this has provided a framework for pupils to pick GCSE subjects in both academic and technical subjects which align with growing local industries, like green energy or digital.
Education secretary Lucy Powell says the announcement will “mark the start of a real shared effort with employers, businesses, mayors and councils to design an education system that connects young people to jobs and careers in their local area”.
She adds: “The technological revolution we are living through should mean young people become the fresh lifeblood our economy needs to adapt and grow”.
However, a note of reservation comes from Paul Whiteman, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT). He says school leaders “support the principle of giving technical and vocational education the same status and recognition as more traditional academic routes”.
But, he says, “this announcement sets out a direction of travel rather than detailed proposals, and schools will need much greater clarity about what it means in practice and over funding”.
Funding, of course, is the key issue as there is nothing particularly new about Burn’em’s ideas, even if it does represent a break from Blair’s policy. In fact, it harps back to the Education Act 1944 (also known as the Butler Act) which established a state-funded “tripartite system”, splitting secondary education into grammar schools, technical schools, and secondary modern schools.
Allocation to these schools was determined by a student’s performance on the 11-plus examination at the end of primary education, with secondary modern schools expected to take the majority of pupils (roughly 70–75 percent) who did not pass or take the 11-plus exam. Unlike the highly academic grammar schools, secondary moderns focused on a more practical, vocational, and skills-based curriculum.
But a core part of the system was supposed to be the technical school sector, with schools equipped with heavy mechanics, engineering tools, and science laboratories, to give pupils a thorough grounding in technical subjects.
What killed this idea, though, was the cost. Because money was tight, many pre-existing junior technical or central schools were simply rebranded and absorbed into the secondary modern system rather than being upgraded. Compared with the 1.5 million in secondary moderns and 683,000 in grammar schools, in 1957, only 95,000 students attended secondary technical schools.
By 1960, the system had collapsed, to function almost entirely as a bilateral system, until it was eventually absorbed into the non-selective comprehensive school system, whence technical schools disappeared altogether.
What Burn’em is planning – whether he knows it or not – is a partial resuscitation of the Butler “technical school” idea but, as was found at the time, dedicated technical teaching is more expensive than academic or rote teaching.
Without the funding and support structure – such as the training and employment of dedicated technical teachers, and the provision of the necessary equipment and materials – Burn’em’s plan is going to be so much hot air.
Even then, funding isn’t everything. The idea was tried again in 2010, in the form of University Technical Colleges, with the aim of employers and universities working together to provide technical education.
After the expenditure of £792 million, the Guardian in 2019 was downbeat, while two years earlier, Gove was already admitting failure (paywall), complaining that “dividing our children at 14 has not worked”.
“There comes a point when the evidence has accumulated and the verdict is clear and even the most optimistic of us has to acknowledge that Godot won’t arrive, the base metal won’t turn into gold and the emperor really is in the altogether”, Gove wrote.
For the moment, though, Burn’em’s rehash looks good – one of the bright, apparently new policy initiatives pouring out of No. 10 North, the underlying drive undoubtedly contributing to the new poll finding which has Labour up four points to 28 percent while Reform falls to 24 percent, putting Labour in the lead for the first time in 15 months.
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Burnham prefers pious aspiration to serious reform
ANDREW GIMSON
Day by day Andy Burnham’s small-c conservatism grows more conspicuous. In his piece for yesterday’s Times, headlined “We’ll value the hard hat as much as the graduation cap”, he began with the remarkable observation that one place is not the same as another:
“Travel a few miles anywhere in Britain, and things begin to change. The accents, the food, the footy kits that kids wear — and the history we’re proud of too. Every place has its own story. It’s one of the things I love about this country. But for all that diversity, we still educate our kids like every place is the same.”
Each school, he went on to say, should prepare its pupils for work in the most promising industries in its own locality, by offering from the age of 14 the technical education which is needed there.
What a glimpse of the obvious, some will retort. We have been worrying for well over a hundred years that our technical education is not up to the standard of our competitors.
By setting a target at the Labour Party Conference in September 1999 of “50 per cent of young adults going into higher education in the next century”, Tony Blair unfortunately spurred a headlong expansion of the university sector, where the number of undergraduate degrees awarded rose from 265,000 in 1999-2000 to 414,000 in 2016-2017.
It is today far more straightforward, when one is preparing to leave school, to apply through the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service to go to university, than to find a local apprenticeship.
Filling in one UCAS form enables a school leaver to apply to five universities, whereas finding an apprenticeship might easily demand 25 or 30 separate applications.
Meanwhile small firms are deterred from seeking out apprentices by the time needed to find suitable candidates.
UCAS, by status a charity, works well: it even has a help line on which one can speak to a human being who will help one to sort out any problems.
One hesitates to interfere with an organisation which actually works, but it would surely be reasonable to add a section on the form which a school leaver can fill in if happy to be contacted by apprenticeship providers.
Those providers will, as Burnham recognises, be different in each locality. He relates in his Times piece that in Manchester, many young people were unaware that thousands of jobs were being created in the digital economy, and even if they knew about these jobs they had no idea how to set about getting them, so the Manchester Baccalaureate was created to bridge the gap between schools and employers.
Burnham’s announcement has been interpreted as a rejection of Blair’s approach, which it is.
But far more importantly, it is a rejection of the approach taken by the 1945-51 Labour Government, which nationalised the commanding heights of the British economy on the arrogant assumption that “the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves” (Douglas Jay, The Socialist Case, 1937).
As David Skelton pointed out some years ago in Little Platoons, the gentleman in Whitehall, more particularly the gentleman in the Treasury, was unable to provide the investment needed to keep the great steel works at Consett, in County Durham, at the cutting edge of technology, as it had been for much of the past century, providing skilled employment and apprenticeships to engineers, metallurgists, chemists and craftsmen.
The works closed in 1980, with dreadful consequences for Consett, but the seeds of its downfall had been sown many years before, when control was centralised in Whitehall, almost 300 miles away.
Will Burnham really bring back local control? He well knows how to articulate small-c conservative aspirations, but one may doubt whether he will have the slightest ability to give effect to those aspirations.
A big state, paid for by taxing business to the hilt and borrowing at ruinous rates of interest, is an article of faith for the great mass of his backbenchers. They will resist any meaningful spending cuts and any serious welfare reform.
Burnham declares that he wants to bring down the number of NEETs, young people Not in Education, Employment or Training. So does any sensible person.
But does the fledgling Prime Minister have the guts to take on his own party? Will he do more than tinker round the edges of the problem, while uttering pious aspirations in a matey tone of voice?
Does he accept that to find apprenticeships and jobs for young people, the country must have a robust, confident, expanding economy, not businesses mulcted of every last penny, with entrepreneurs and investors taxed into flight?
The Conservatives will have the chance at the next general election, whenever it is held, to request a mandate for the serious reform the country requires.
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(UKR)