The Fawkes Imperative

A conversation with Professor Ewart Keep on the state of the English education system.

Here on The Green Edge, we may be guilty of the occasional nostra culpa of referring to ‘The UK’ when we don’t actually mean the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (as it says on our passports), or even the geographic entity of Great Britain with its three separate countries of England, Scotland and Wales. In extremis, we may even commit the maxima culpa of bandying about that rather ugly two-letter abbreviation when actually we simply mean England. For that, you have our apologies, although in our defence we suspect we’re by no means the first, nor will we be the last, to be sloppy in that way. At least we’re not Dutch.

So, to be clear, this post is about England. To be more precise, it’s about the English education system which, with the devolved administrations managing their own education systems, for England is managed wholly and separately by the Department of Education (DfE) of 20 Great Smith St, London SW1P 3BT.

To be more precise still, this post is about how much the English education system, with its mashup of policies for early years, schools, higher and further education, apprenticeships and wider skills, is broken.

Why do we make such a stark and – if we had careers to look after and care about these days – potentially career-limiting assertion? Well, we tend to hear it a lot from a number of people we respect and, combined with our own observations and experiences, we believe it to be so. Why and in what ways is it broken? The arguments are legion: perhaps it’s the outdated curriculum that obsesses over qualifications depending on regurgitating facts rather than acquiring proper capabilities relevant to today’s world; maybe it’s a system that’s been tinkered with over decades of successive governments and subject to bunker mentality by non-elected officials at the above address in SW1; almost certainly it suffers from a chronic lack of funding. And, with our green hats on, something that frustrates us like Ocnus’ donkey is an English education system in which nobody – anywhere – in government actually owns skills as they relate to the content of work that is critical to the sustainability of the nation and its economy. We could go on¹.

Gosh, Green Edge, that’s a bit direct, isn’t it? Well, yes, but for readers who are inclined to listen further, they might like to dip into our special podcast episode with Professor Ewart Keep, who we talked to recently on the subject (along with a few other things). Professor Keep has long involvement in the education sector, through a distinguished university career as well as through a wide range of committee and advisory engagements. So, when Ewart agreed to talk to us we jumped at the opportunity to hear his views on some of the detail surrounding why the English education sector is floundering and what might be done (or at least be doable) about it.

We started by asking about how we might frame some of the main problems underlying the English system. In Ewart’s view, the first one – actually two – is that the system is market-driven and over-centralised. He explains: “England has a set of quasi-markets where money follows student choice, or you tender through a [centralised] government agency to get funding. There's no block grant and there's a very atomised model of a system in terms of who delivers what.

The problem with the markets is that we haven't got many intermediary bodies. Basically we’ve got DfE and then we've got market regulators, but there's very little in between. And that's one of the things that makes the English setup very different from most other developed countries. Most developed countries have lots of powerful intermediary bodies - funding councils, social partnership organisations with trade unions, local government, and employers sitting around the table with central government”.

So, no real link between supply and demand, and a market where students decide what they want to be taught. When did students ever know that, we ask?

The next problem, according to Ewart, is lack of skin in the game from employers and others. Ewart again: “We've got a very narrow bandwidth of thinking running skills policy in England. There's very little input from employers, research and academics, and there's almost no input from social partners because we destroyed the infrastructure that would allow that. And so, the vast bulk of what happens is civil servants, advisors and the odd think tank. And that's a very narrow pool of ideas from which to construct answers to what are some big fat, difficult problems”.

But what about the LSIPs, we ask? “They're still the same old model, where employers write a Christmas list saying dear Santa, I would like the following skills delivered to me free of charge by the taxpayer, please. And then the local FE College has to deliver it. That's not employer involvement, that's just shopping. You have to get employers to do more and you actually have to get them to pay for some of it. If the only person who's paying is me, the taxpayer, I don't see that as employer leadership, I’m afraid”.

Right, so students with their social media-tunnel view second-guessing what they need to be taught, DfE in their bunker and employers taking holidays on the South Coast. What else? Well, there’s the funding, of course. We’ve already mentioned the chronic lack of it, but is that improving under, say, skills devolution to the Combined Authorities (CAs)? Not really, says Ewart: “The CAs have been given a small slice of money to spend [on skills development], but a large part of that money is committed through national entitlements anyway, and they're stuck with those whether they like it or not. There's been no attempt to institutionalise devolution at national level, so there's no meeting where the CAs sit down with DfE to discuss priorities. It's just DfE grudgingly giving them some money and saying, OK, go away. And I think there’s a lack of capacity in terms of people who actually have the skills to manage this relatively small budget in very creative ways”.

So, add lack of creative use of funding for skills. And, while we’re talking about skills, here’s Ewart’s fifth big one, although there may be more: no one in government ‘owns’ work – and, by implication, ensures the workforce has the right skills for it. One more time from Ewart: “We've got huge problems with work organisation and job design and jobs that are so stressful that people cannot do them, particularly as they get older, they just burn out. But no one [in government] really owns the problem of work. DWP is a social security ministry. Once people are in work, it couldn't care less what they're doing. So, it's supposedly the Department for Business and Trade which has a tiny part in industrial relations and labour legislation. But there's no one who really owns the issues of the quality of work, what it does, how productive people are. And that's really unusual. Most developed countries have a Ministry of Labour or something the equivalent thereof. We don't. And my experience of Whitehall is that if no one owns the problem, the problem no longer exists”.

So, a bunch of big problems, certainly, and we could go on listing the negatives. But in a spirit of posivitism, let’s think about what might be features of a future English education system that’s buzzing and thrumming, turning out the type of bright, shiny, eminently capable people we’re going to need for a competitive, successful and sustainable English – nay, British – economy. Prof Keep is happy to provide us with clues:

First, it’s a system that ties education to productivity. Right now, while England has one of the highest proportions of people with tertiary education in the world (Scotland is even higher), that hasn’t shown up in productivity, which has pretty much flatlined since 2008. There are lots of arguments about why that's the case: low investment, poor work organisation and job design, and reduced economic performance of many individuals who have had to fund their own investment in skills.

% of 24-34 year-olds with tertiary education. For comparison, UK (57.7%) shown in red and Germany (37.3%) in blue. Image: OECD.

Second – and linked to the previous – we’re looking at a system which has strong intermediaries linking supply to demand. At the moment, all England has is DfE with the Education & Skills Funding Agency wrapped up in that, and then a set of regulators: Ofsted, Ofqual, Office for Students, IfATE. None of these are very powerful, so one of the difficulties for DfE is that it has very few organisations who can help it to mobilise employer activity or coordinate things. Many civil servants might say that the invisible hand of the market does that for them, but that’s a minority view. Looking across the developed world, most countries don't do it like that, a great example being Norway and its Skills Policy Council.

Next, it’s a system that (re-)instates collective infrastructures for skills development. This is about stakeholders – notably, employers – pitching in to collectivise and share training and other skills-building provisions: by place, occupations, sectors and so on. Over the years, what was the English sectoral infrastructure has all but disappeared, and the national infrastructure is now incredibly weak. Instead, we see endless twiddling around at local levels with no real coordination or progression – the LSIPs are the latest such iteration.

Beyond that, it’s a system that redefines the education ‘market’ as one which funnels money to where the work demand is, rather than where the student demand is. After all, as we said earlier, with no real employer demand signal and with universities and colleges responding to what students think they want to learn, isn’t that like the tail wagging the dog? As evidence, a glance at the most popular English apprenticeships shows that starts in Business, Administration and Law during 2023/24 outstripped Engineering and Manufacturing Technicians by approaching two to one. Have they not twigged that advancing AI will take all the best business admin and paralegal jobs in a few years’ time?

The corollary of this, of course, is that someone in government needs to be given the job of waking up in the morning worrying about what he or she is going to do about the quality and future of work in England – and, hopefully, told that they are going to remain in post until they actually get that whatever-it-is done.

The final thing – for this this post at least – that a reimagined English education system would do is to teach English people what they need to function in, and contribute to, today’s England. That’s obvious, isn’t it? But, as Ewart says, “In England we always start with qualification and then we might relabel the qualifications by grouping them into different little boxes. But, if we look at countries like Germany, they start with curriculum reform. What do people actually need to learn? And there's a problem about what we teach in the sense that it's less and less aligned with the likely needs of the economy and of general adult life.

“We've got a 1950’s style secondary school curriculum, with a dislike of practical and vocational subjects and a desire to academicise everything, saying you're either science or you’re arts. And I think that’s going to be a real problem which we’ve got to start to tackle, because we are going to need more people with technical skills and an understanding of numbers and data”.

Image: House of Spells

So, burn down the existing English education system so it can emerge from the ashes with what we’ve talked about above, and it’s job done, right? No, of course not, it’s much more complex than that, and as ever we can only scratch the surface with our opinions – although we are grateful to Professor Keep for his deep insight and entertaining presentation of views for this post.

To finish, though, with three short points from our conversation. First, it’s clear that the English education system as it stands right now needs a good systems-thinking going over. It’s highly fragmented, and while DfE is trying to shoehorn a one-size-fits-all model across its schools, colleges and universities, the reality is that there are huge variations in supply and demand, by location, sector and demographic. And that calls for some proper systems thinking. This shouldn’t be new to Whitehall – there’s even a web page for it.

Second, for English policymakers looking for examples of, say, how systems thinking can be applied across the education system, it may be tempting to look at what countries like Norway, Switzerland and German are doing, but you might look at the devolved administrations – particularly Scotland – first. After all, Norway et al are very different countries, while the four home nations have essentially the same labour market, the same employers, and lots of the same sorts of structures. The UK is a policy learning lab, we could learn so much in England if we forget for a while that we’re English.

And third, we finish this post with our sustainability hats back on our heads. For decades now, England – indeed, the whole of the UK – has told itself and its people that our rightful place in the world is to be a knowledge economy. After all, the Industrial Revolution started here, we have three of the world’s top ten universities, we have London (!), and much government policy is given over to fostering and supporting innovation and entrepreneurship. The net result is that, well, we’re just not that good with our hands anymore – indeed, the artisanal trades just don’t have the kudos that they used to. Kids want to do Business Studies instead.

But guess what? Much of our progress towards a sustainable world is going to depend on artisanal and technical skills. Fitting solar, commissioning alt-heat, maintaining offshore windfarms, repairing stuff. And this all represents so-called ‘decent’ work, which in a very short space of time may not be the case for lots of the more automatable ‘knowledge’ work.

A case of repurposing mindsets? The subject for another post, perhaps.

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Our thanks to Professor Ewart Keep for talking to The Green Edge for this post. Green Edge opinions given in this post do not necessarily coincide with those of Prof Keep.

1. In fact, in a later post, we shall.