Education: Contribution to Economic Growth

Baroness Morgan of Huyton Excerpts

Thursday 5th December 2013 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Morgan of Huyton]

To move that this House takes note of the contribution of high-quality education to economic growth.

[Baroness Morgan of Huyton (Lab)]

My Lords, I am pleased to have the opportunity to introduce this debate on the important contribution of high-quality education to the economy. I am grateful to noble Lords who are taking part today, and I am humbly aware of the breadth and depth of experience and knowledge around the Chamber. I am particularly pleased to see that two noble Lords are making their maiden speeches today. I draw attention to my entry in the Register of Lords’ Interests, including my role as chair of Ofsted.

It is a very pertinent week to be holding this debate. On Tuesday the OECD published its PISA league table of global education. The UK stayed pretty static in the rankings, stubbornly hovering in the lower section of the top half. The focus on education in a number of Asian economies is well documented. Rather less discussed is the remarkable improvement in standards in other countries, including Poland and Estonia.

We must do better; but we must also not be pessimistic. There are reasons to believe that our schools and colleges will continue to improve. Indeed, there are lessons to be learnt very close to home. We do not have to go to Helsinki or Shanghai to understand how children—especially disadvantaged children—can get a better education and a better start in life. However, it would be equally foolish to minimise the scale of the challenges we face. According to the OECD, a quarter of all adults in the UK between the ages of 25 and 64 have minimal levels of numeracy and literacy, compared to 14% in Sweden, 12% in Canada and 11% in the United States.

No country that wants a dynamic economy can afford to neglect the quality of its education, and no country that is serious about its education can afford to neglect the full range of its educational provision: from nursery through school to college, university and beyond. Weaknesses in one will affect the quality of the next, and the earlier they occur, the greater the negative impact and the harder they will be to rectify. The economic opportunities for the poorly educated are few, and getting scarcer.

Three things in particular hold this country back: the gap in attainment between well-off and poor children; the alarming regional variations in the quality of our schools, especially with regard to teaching and leadership; and the weakness and irrelevance of much vocational education.

Our educational problems start early in life and have a lot to do with the way we tackle—or, more precisely, fail to tackle—disadvantage. At the age of five, children from low-income backgrounds are already 19 months behind their better-off peers. By the age of six, low-ability children from well-off homes outperform brighter children from poor families. So it continues through primary and secondary school. Just over a third of pupils on free school meals get five good GCSEs—27% behind the rest of the population.

The problem is now particularly acute among poor white children. For example, Bangladeshi children on free school meals used to lag behind their peers; now 59% of them achieve five good GCSEs, the national average for all pupils, whether or not they are on free school meals. Barely 30% of white children from low-income families manage the same. This matters because a quarter of all children without five good GCSEs end up being NEET—not in education, employment or training—within two years. Those with no qualifications have a greater than 50% chance of becoming NEET. It affects the economic prospects of the whole country.

This “tail” of underachievement is longer and bigger in the UK than in many of our international competitors. Canada, for instance, which has comparable demographics and income inequality, has half the proportion of children in its “tail” that we do. If the Canadians can do more for their disadvantaged children, surely so can we.

London stands out, although other areas are improving as well. Bluntly put, 20 years ago London’s schooling system was a basket case. Inner London’s GCSE results were a third of the national average. Schools were chaotic, with poor behaviour and inadequate teaching. Now the results are above the national average, even though the city still has some of the worst deprivation in the country. London has well qualified and committed teachers and great head teachers. Among disadvantaged children, the bottom 1% in London now match the average score of their peers in the rest of the country at GCSE.

If London were analysed in the PISA rankings separately, as Shanghai is, it would undoubtedly be much higher up the table than the UK. What happened in London was a combination of political focus and professional determination. London Challenge backed those head teachers who focused on achievement regardless of background, who never accepted excuses and who never gave up. It did not support those willing to let things drift.

The London Challenge team also encouraged heads to share good practice and the intelligent use of data and, crucially, to challenge each other. It benefited from other far-sighted initiatives of the time, such as many of the first sponsored academies and the first cohorts of Teach First and Future Leaders. Through a combination of practical steps, persistence and strategic imagination, it succeeded—and when the challenge formally ended, the system continued to improve and work in the same new way.

Interestingly, Andreas Schleicher, director of the PISA programme, would highlight many of the features I have just described in London as the core features of successful countries in the PISA study. He speaks of the core elements: capacity at point of delivery, with great teachers and leaders; zero tolerance of failure; well targeted resources; a commitment to raising attainment; and confidence for all. He also highlights the importance of time devoted to learning. One extra hour of maths a week leads to three-quarters of a year’s extra progress at GCSE, and underlines that autonomy with accountability is a must—we cannot have one without the other.

If London succeeded against the odds, other regions can succeed, too. As things stand, the variability in performance of many schools outside London is frankly alarming. In the north-east, for instance, less than a third of teaching was judged good or better last year by Oftsed; in London, it was over three-quarters.

Last month I visited schools in Hull and Grimsby. I met great new heads turning around schools, but their biggest challenge was not the children, or indeed the teachers any more, but raising the aspirations of parents and the community, and convincing them that education matters. That is tough when the jobs that used to be there have gone and have not been replaced.

It would be a mistake, however, to think that only economically challenged areas have problems with their education. The south-east, for instance, had the highest attainment gap in the country between children receiving free school meals and children not receiving free school meals—33 percentage points. In 30 schools in West Berkshire, not one free school meal pupil managed to get five good GCSEs. Relatively affluent areas may be educating some of their children well, but they are not educating all their children well.

The quality of much of our vocational education, too, lags far behind that of many of our international competitors. We must develop the skills base we need for this century rather than the last. Some of the Government’s recent initiatives are welcome. The move to require youngsters to study maths and English to 18, if they fail at 16, recommended by the Wolf report, was overdue. The introduction of graded apprenticeships in partnership with top employers will bolster the credentials of a vital training option. The move to fund apprenticeships through employers rather than providers should end some of the perverse incentives in the current system.

I welcome, too, the increase in the number of apprenticeships announced by the Government last month, which builds on the work done in this field by the previous Government. However, we would be foolish and premature to indulge in too much mutual backslapping. Are we collectively bold enough and comprehensive enough in this area? We do not yet have a vocational system that rivals our international competitors. Vorsprung durch Technik is not a phrase that was minted in Thurrock, Woking or Hull. Until we have an English equivalent, perhaps we should put the champagne on ice.

Too many training courses and apprenticeships still fail to deliver employable skills, too many are of short duration and too many cater to adults over the age of 25 rather than youngsters. Many of these are still, in effect, on-the-job training programmes for existing employees rather than genuine apprenticeships.

Although the numbers have declined slightly over the past year, we still have more than 1 million NEETs in this country. Indeed, it is unnerving to note that the proportion of 16 to 18 year-olds who are NEET has been roughly static for almost 20 years—at around 9% to 10%. That figure is an appalling indictment of successive Governments, a dreadful waste of the country’s talent and a personal tragedy for millions of young people. I will put those bare statistics in some kind of human context. In a recent survey, 40% of NEETs said they did not feel part of society, 36% felt that they would never get a job; and 37% said they rarely went out of the house.

Reforms of vocational education have to address not only the nuts and bolts of the issue—what apprentices should learn, who should provide it and whether it is relevant to employers and the local economy—but must also have legitimacy with those they seek to help. Crucially, will they get youngsters out of the cycle of little hope of a job or even of a place in society?

I have another concern about vocational courses. Until we make vocational training an alternative, sought-after and prestigious route into higher education and employment, we will never succeed in rebalancing our economy or harnessing the full potential of the next generation. Our country must become as proud of its vocational education as the Swiss and the Germans are of theirs.

If we are to do that, we must grapple with an uncomfortable truth. Vocational training is too often seen as the consolation prize: the route we urge young people to take if they have failed to shine academically. That must change. Vocational and technical training and education must be judged on its own merits, and not dismissed like some ill favoured child, always doomed to disappoint.

Apprenticeships and vocational training will always suit some children of all abilities and backgrounds, because that is where their natural potential lies. Unfortunately, in this country that technical potential usually is identified only in children from low-income families. Remarkably, it seems to be entirely absent in the children of the middle and upper classes. Has it been bred out of them or are we refusing to see what our prejudices will not let us see—that some children learn best by learning practically?

I have to say that I think the situation has worsened since the turning of polytechnics into universities. Institutions offering high-quality technical and vocational courses are something of a gaping hole in our academic landscape. The challenge for our country is not only to equip those disadvantaged youngsters with the key skills they lack—and that employers want—but to break the automatic assumption that decrees that a vocational education is a second-rate education for the poor and disadvantaged. When we see Cabinet Ministers or even, dare I say, your Lordships, boasting that their son or daughter has bagged an engineering apprenticeship at BAE rather than a place at Balliol, perhaps we will know that we are making progress.

The lesson from Shanghai this week is this. That city region is engaged in a systematic, long-term project as a way to transform its economy. As Andreas Schleicher says, you can see, from the Minister down to the classroom teacher, that this is their future. They believe that education is the great equaliser. That is why they make it prestigious to teach in a tough school.

We know what it will take in all parts of our country to move the goalposts: investment in preschool, recruitment of good quality teachers, continuous development, excellent leadership, a focus on numeracy and literacy and skills for life—and, above all, a determination to develop the potential of all students, not just the high-performing ones. These things are doable. If the disparities in our education system can be addressed, the economic gains will be immense.

Nothing is ordained; all it takes is will and persistence. If they can do it, so can we.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Morgan of Huyton]

My Lords, I thank noble Lords for taking part in today’s debate, which has been engrossing. I especially thank the right reverend prelate the Bishop of St Albans and the noble Lord, Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury, for their excellent maiden speeches. I am sure that we all look forward to hearing more from them in the future.

I have been struck by the breadth of knowledge and expertise in this House but also by the real experience that so many Members of this House have. We do not do too much stone-throwing here; we seek consensus and ways to try to move educational standards forward in a way that will help economic growth.

Motion agreed.