R.A. Butler is often numbered among the finest Prime Ministers that this country never had. But the greatest omission from his distinguished political career is not, in fact, that he never rose to occupy 10 Downing Street. It is that none who did ever completed the work he began in the Education Act, 1944. The Butler Act legislated, ostensibly, for a set of technical schools that would provide an alternative route for children who were not academically inclined. Unfortunately, the promise of a serious technical education never materialized.
There was a time when the problem of Britain’s poor-quality technical education was masked. When a generation of men could follow their fathers into unskilled employment, their absence of qualifications hardly mattered. The changing structure of the British economy changed that. Suddenly, the failings of the education system began to turn up in the economy. Unskilled workcould be either mechanized or exported.
British public policy failed to rise to the challenge. The system of technical education was an alphabet soup of qualifications, most of which were not valued by employers. Students had to suffer the ignominy of stumbling on the academic track before being permitted to travel the technical path. Perhaps a solution is finally at hand. Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, received last week a report from Professor Alison Wolf on the curriculum that young people should follow between the ages of 14 and 19. It is full of good sense.
The most crucial of Professor Wolf’s recommendations is that all students must follow the core academic curriculum until 16. It is not doing the student any favour to allow them the easier options of vocational courses which have been too heavily weighted in the accounts in the school league tables. Students do not emerge with the so-called “transferable skills”. Between a quarter and a third of the 16 to 19 cohort emerge with nothing of any great value even though they can point to a string of paper qualifications.
Employers are not fooled. They know that, when half of all 15- and 16-year-olds are leaving school without a good GCSE in English and Mathematics, something seriously is awry. Professor Wolf estimates that there are as many as 350,000 students who are getting little or no benefit from the system as it stands. She recommends that pupils who do not succeed at English and Mathematics at GCSE should try again.
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Professor Wolf is also right to demand more involvement from business and realistic to say that such involvement will be less than enthusiastic unless the range of apprenticeships she envisages can be subsidised. The economy needs the skills that businesses can transmit but it is a risk for any single business to spend a lot of money on training as, in a flexible labour market, it fears rival firms will take the benefit. It is also welcome that there should be more traffic of teachers between schools and further education colleges. We have wasted the time and talent of a whole generation, as Professor Wolf says in The Times today, educating people for unemployment rather than employment. Hundreds of thousands of young people are doing vocational courses that lead neither to further study nor to related jobs.
Taken in conjunction with the new movement of University Technical Colleges established by Lord Baker of Dorking and the late Ron Dearing, the Wolf report offers the prospect of serious progress on an issue that is profoundly important for Britain’s economic health. Further Education rarely gets the attention it deserves. It is the squeezed middle of British education, struggling for attention in between schools, which excite the imagination of all parents, and universities, which command the attention of the most articulate. It is time we woke up to the importance of technical education and Professor Wolf has provided the template.