In a previous article, I argued that the government’s plan for more vocational education at 14 was not a good one.
I’ve had a lot of positive responses to that article. In particular, a lot of people accepted my point that vocational education in this country often conflates two groups of students: the 10-15% of students with an interest and aptitude in technical education, and the 30-40% who struggle to get grade 4+ GCSEs in English and maths.
However, there was also one persistent question, along the following lines.
“OK, fair enough, I take your point about vocational at 14 not being a silver bullet for struggling students. BUT then what is the answer? We have such a problem with disengaged 14-16 year olds who have a terrible time of it in school. About 30-40% don’t get grade 4+ GCSE in English and maths – the so-called “forgotten third”. Also, we have so many NEETs who are clearly leaving school without the skills they need for the next step in life. What are we supposed to do about this problem? Are you seriously saying we should just carry on as we are?”
In this post I will attempt to answer that question, with the focus being on 11-16 school policy (not post-16 or university).
Before I do that, I will repeat and emphasise two points I made in my previous post.
First, the literacy and numeracy skills students acquire by doing GCSEs have greater vocational value than we realise. GCSEs often get described as being “academic”, but the irony is they often have greater labour market value than a lot of allegedly “vocational” 14-16 courses. This is true not just of GCSE English and maths, but also other GCSEs like science, history, geography, etc., partly because those GCSEs are also helping to develop literacy and numeracy.
Second, the reason that GCSEs, and the literacy and numeracy skills they represent, have such value in the labour market is because developed economies like the UK’s are built on top of literacy and numeracy. Lots of the unskilled labour has been automated away. There are lots of jobs which people lazily assume don’t require much literacy and numeracy, but which actually do – I gave the example of electrical installation in my previous post. And there are a lot of jobs which in previous eras did not require literacy or numeracy, but now do. A good example is firefighting: when Parliament burnt down in 1834, it’s likely that a lot of the men who turned out to battle the fire were innumerate. Today, the fire service has entrance exams requiring you to calculate how long a quantity of oxygen will last and understand the physiology of respiration. This is not an example of “the modern world gone mad”: there are obvious and sensible reasons why these questions are on the test.1
If you accept the above two points, you reach some conclusions which are quite unpleasant but which may still be true: that students without the enabling basic skills in literacy and numeracy are going to struggle in a modern economy (and arguably in life as well). There’s no real shortcut or “alternative pathway” that solves that problem. The so-called alternative pathways depend on foundational skills to a far greater extent than we often imagine.
The international PISA surveys measure these kinds of foundational skills, and they set their level 2 threshold as being the baseline proficiency level required for “students to participate fully and effectively in modern society.” In England about a fifth of 15-year-olds don’t meet that level. There are then probably another fifth whose basic skills would still benefit from some further improvement.
The solution is simple, but not easy
My solution to this problem is simple but not easy. Rather than focus on creating new alternative pathways, we should get really good at the existing pathway. We should set an ambitious target that within 15-20 years, 90–95% of all students should reach the standard that is currently reached by only about 60-65%. Yes, that will be hard, but given how important these skills are, it is worth making the effort.
We also have some growing evidence that it might be more achievable than we think: over the last decade or so, there is some evidence on other OECD surveys of low-attainers improving their skills. Over the same time, the top 1% or so of non-selective schools in England have achieved some remarkable GCSE results that are well above the national average. It is worth examining whether what they do is or is not replicable by more schools, and whether we can continue or even ramp up these trends. We definitely shouldn’t be adopting policies that reverse these trends!
In different societies and economies, the effort might not be worth it. In a world where every town has a couple of local factories that employ every 14-year-old who wants a job, then maybe the intense effort needed to get everyone up to the current grade 4 standard would not be worth it, and would not be welcomed by individuals or make sense economically.
Is this wishful thinking?
Obviously, there are people who will accuse me of wishful thinking. They will say – maybe not explicitly, because it is a bit impolite to say it explicitly – that essentially, there is quite a large group of students who are incapable of reaching a grade 4 standard. This attitude is quite widespread on both the left and the right, and it manifests itself differently. On the left, people will generally approach this in a more empathetic way, saying that it is unfair to force kids into the straitjacket of academic learning. On the right, people approach it in a bit more of a hard-edged way, saying it’s a waste of money to keep these kids in education. But the underlying analysis is similar: a significant minority of kids are never going to get grade 4+ GCSEs in English and maths, and so we need to find alternative options for them.
My pushback to people making this argument is: what are your alternative policy options? As I’ve detailed above and in my previous post, there aren’t that many! One solution that seems to be popping up at the moment is that we need a different kind of economy that will provide good local jobs for this cohort. I’ve had conversations with various people about this, and what I find quite striking is that there seems to be some intense nostalgia for a world where 14-year-olds with no qualifications could leave school and have their choice of a job at three local factories in their home town.
Now obviously, I can see how there were upsides to that world. There were downsides too. I am not sure if, given the choice, I would prefer to live in that world. But let’s just assume for now that we would like to bring that world back. Is it possible? It’s true that we could reindustrialise, and I am personally quite sympathetic to a policy of reindustrialisation which aims to create some sovereign capacity in areas like drone manufacturing. That might mean a lot more factories being established in the UK. But is it going to mean lots more factories recreating mass employment for low-attaining school-leavers? I doubt it. Modern factories are highly automated and require smaller and more skilled workforces than in the past. This is a variant of the “15% / 33%” problem I outlined in my previous piece: if you are reindustrialising for the primary purpose of building advanced sovereign capacity in critical industries, then your workforce strategy is going to focus on the 10-15% of students with interest and skills in the sector – not the 30-40% of students struggling with maths and English.
So if we go back to the wishful thinking charge, who is more guilty of wishful thinking? Me, for thinking that it is possible to spread the best practice of the top 1% of schools throughout the system? Or the people who think we can return to the political economy of the 1950s?2
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Jim Callaghan’s famous “Secret Garden” speech. One of the subtexts of his speech was that school standards have to rise in order to meet the changes in the modern economy. The speech is fifty years old! Callaghan realised in 1976 that the political economy of the 1950s was not coming back. I don’t think anything has happened since then to prove him wrong.
So how do we raise school standards?
As I say above, over the last couple of decades we have seen a handful of non-selective schools in England achieve remarkable GCSE results. These schools have 90% + of their students getting grade 4+ in English and maths, and often have very impressive results across the entire attainment distribution as well. The big debate now is whether the achievements of these high-attaining schools are replicable at scale, or if there are aspects of their success which are essentially not scalable.
This is a live and controversial debate, and one that deserves a separate post from me. But essentially, I am on Team Scalable. Enough schools are achieving remarkable results now that we should be making some more systematic studies into what they have in common, what is replicable, and what the best methods of scaling their success would be. I suspect a part of the puzzle will involve evidence-informed approaches to the curriculum and pedagogy. I am not pretending any of this will be easy – I am just saying that of all the available options, it might be the easiest.
You might disagree, and you might think there are other options I haven’t mentioned that offer greater benefits for lower costs. In which case – the comments are open and I would love to have the discussion!
As with so many things at the moment, AI is a bit of a joker in the pack, so here’s a speculative footnote about what AI might mean. The trend over the last 100 years or so has been for a lot of jobs to have increased cognitive demands and fewer physical demands. But there are some ways in which technology is now doing to cognitive labour what it did to physical labour in the past – eliminating the need for it. I’ve written before about how modern technology could be making us stupid by removing the need for us to think. So an important counter argument to my “literacy and numeracy are non-negotiable” point is that more and more jobs could end up having fewer requirements for literacy and numeracy. In the firefighter example, you can see a world in which oxygen tanks and hosepipes and other tools have a variety of AI sensors which automatically communicate and regulate their functions in a way that reduces the need for the human using them to interpret data. Another simplified example: maybe 250 years ago, a nurse could be innumerate and do a good job. Maybe 100 years ago, that would be a terrible idea: nurses were responsible for preparing medicines where a misunderstanding of place value would be literally fatal. Today, we have a lot of innovations like pre-made medicines and pre-filled injection pens that reduce the potential for disaster. It is possible that continued technological innovation and developments with AI increase these trends. Voice technology has improved dramatically over the past year or so, to the extent that you can see a lot of jobs will have reduced need for writing (although not, I suspect, reading, because whilst it is quicker to talk than to write, it is not quicker to listen than to read. Also, audio suffers from the transient information effect in a way that printed text doesn’t). I think a lot of this is happening already, and a lot of it could be quite positive for everyone. However, I’m still wary of saying that it is going to eliminate the need for humans to have literacy and numeracy skills. Even with more smart tools and sensors I think we are still going to want nurses to understand place value and firefighters to understand cubic metres. It is very hard to make predictions given the speed of technological change, but I do still feel fairly confident in saying that literacy and numeracy are going to remain important in the economy and in life, and my major reason for that is that technologies are path-dependent: new tools are not developed from scratch but are layered on top of existing systems. The alphabet and number system are two of our oldest technologies, and everything else – including the most cutting edge AI – is layered on top of them. So I just can’t imagine any realistic future world where literacy and numeracy are not going to have value. But maybe that is a failure of imagination on my part.
Again, AI is the joker in the pack, so here is another highly speculative footnote. You could argue that both sides of this debate are engaging in wishful thinking, and that the inexorable logic of advanced modern economies is that more and more people get left behind economically as machines take over the basic jobs and the jobs that are left require increasingly high level skills that an increasingly large chunk of people will struggle to acquire, however good our school system gets. If that is the case, then presumably the only solution is an increasingly redistributive welfare system that eventually, at some point, shades into a universal basic income. There are utopian and dystopian flavours of this prediction: the utopian flavour says we will all be liberated from the burdens of physical and cognitive labour and can spend our time fishing in the morning and doing literary criticism after dinner; the dystopian version that the mass of humanity will spend their time inhabiting lonely virtual realities while megalomaniac technological elites command drone armies that ravage the world. Whatever you think of any of these predictions, I still don’t think they constitute a good argument against trying, right now, to make our schools as good as possible at teaching a set of foundational GCSEs.
I understand the argument here but I think scaling up those most successful schools relies on recruiting and then most importantly, retaining the most committed teachers. The level of energy required is something else and staff will
need lots of training and support. We don’t do enough of that for teachers. That would need to change, I think to make those most successful school models scalable.