The UK government is once again on the back foot. The latest crisis in confidence comes from reports last week about deteriorating social mobility and the extended middle class domination of the professions. This is not only contrary to stated government policy, but has happened despite all efforts to reverse the trend. So what has gone wrong?
Government concerns that jobs in the professions are increasingly held by the offspring of the more affluent simply because they are mainly the product of independent schools says it all. State schools are simply not teaching to a sufficiently high standard and as a result even those going on to university from there are either not interested in a professional career or not well-rounded enough to meet the requirements of employers. Failure to face up to this is to continue to look at the symptoms and not the causes of the problem, while attacking the independent schools for the problem would be politics of envy rather than aspiration and defeat the purpose entirely by eroding the quality of the professions.
Professionals, by very virtue of that designation, recognise the value of education and so make the commitment and sacrifices, and provide the support, to ensure that their children get the best education they possibly can. By contrast, those who don’t or who cannot, contribute to a trend of downward mobility that increasingly handicaps not only their own offspring but the wider economy.
Successive governments have contributed to this dichotomy by aiding and abetting lower standards. They have failed to understand that closing any gap between ‘the masses’ and ‘the elite’ is an extremely expensive business and requires a considerable investment. This is an investment that they have not really been willing or able to meet. Instead they have proclaimed the need to be economically competitive, and championed policies of increased graduate numbers, achieved by debasing standards to enable more people to go to university, and co-opting the universities into the scheme by creating more of them, who, in order to survive and compete, offer a broader and broader range of so-called degrees.
Now we have the evidence ,and can see the emperor in his true clothes and what a hollow sham it has all been. Awarding higher grade results and more degrees is the educational equivalent of printing money – it has not created more well-educated people but is rather an educational inflation that simply devalued what one already had. All that has been done is to create a type of educational ‘credit crunch’ that has inevitably resulted in an overall lowering of standards, which has had a recessionary effect in the job market and exacerbated the so-called ‘war for talent’.
There is, and always will be, a need for different talents and an education system should recognise and support this. In historical language, this entails distinguishing between ‘academic’ and ‘vocational’ abilities, and meeting the needs of both sectors. Any society looking to flourish in our increasingly competitive and inter-connected “global village” (and can any afford not to?) thus needs to:
- Recognise the shifting skills requirements demanded by the workplace and provide an educational system – with the requisite balance – to meet that demand.
- Invest in the educational platform to ensure that whatever route a student takes, he or she is properly equipped to meet the workplace demands, to the standard that the competitive market needs rather than to some arbitrary standard determined by the government and/or the educational institution.
Who is bold enough to recognise this and act accordingly? The problem is not unique to the UK.