Greasing the wheels to good jobs: a school-to-work agenda for government.
| Author | O'Connell, Jim |
| Position | ESSAY |
There has been a renaissance in the political importance of education in recent years, lifted from its previous backwater status. Tony Blair sailed to victory in 1997 on the back of the mantra of 'education, education, education' and a pledge card that included a reduction in class sizes. Under Michael Gove, education was a key focus of the Coalition's public services reform agenda--pushed forward with almost evangelical zeal. In this article, we argue that despite the major progress made between 1997 and 2010, and the partial continuation of this progress under the current government, there is a long way to go in pursuing educational reform to get the system where it needs to be if the next generation of young people are going to be set up for success in the increasingly competitive, globalised labour market they will enter.
Under the last Labour government, the political impetus behind reform necessarily focused on schools and boosting baseline standards. For the next government, alongside continuing the pace of progress on school standards, there are two areas that need sustained attention. The UK must build a high quality system of vocational and technical education that is a true alternative to academic study and the university pathway. A system where, as the Shadow HE minister recently stated 'you still need a degree to break into the middle class' (Byrne, 2014) is sub-optimal and socially egregious. Relatedly, policy-makers must also look at how we can smooth transitions from school to the next stage in life, whether that be into further education or into work.
These are both areas where too many young people are still being failed by the system. For one of the authors, in their work with young people the route to rewarding work for those not pursuing academic study is best described as 'a rollercoaster with gaps missing in the tracks'. In the third quarter of last year, over 15 per cent of 16-24 year olds were not in education, employment or training, the lowest number for seven years, but still unacceptably high.
Since the last election, Ed Miliband and successive Labour front-benchers have made good progress in highlighting the crisis of a generation underprepared for tomorrow's economy. In the pages that follow we make a number of constructive suggestions for the policy response required.
We suggest three areas for bold reform. First, the way Information, Advice, and Guidance (IAG) and employer engagement is delivered needs to be overhauled, with the creation of locally-led youth transition services. These services would bring together careers advice, work preparation training and education-employer opportunities such as work experience and work shadowing, better ensuring young people gain access to the opportunities that are vital to ensure they make an effective transition. Second, the role of teachers in stewarding young people needs to be recognised, strengthened and incentivised by ensuring every teacher develops the skills to support youth transition in their initial training, backed up by access to employer-led continuing professional development (CPD) throughout their careers. Finally, as a minimum, all citizens, regardless of their age, should have an entitlement to level 3 education or training (i.e. A-Level standard), to ensure they are qualified to the standard that will be needed to secure 'good work' and to support the UK's transition to a high-skilled economy.
The analysis in this article is based on a wide range of collective experience working in this area: teaching at the chalkface; working within a number of localities to develop bottom-up solutions; researching and writing about education reform for a variety of think tanks, businesses and other organisations, and speaking with scores of policy experts and other stakeholders.
These reforms will cost money, at a time when there is not much available.
However, we argue that these reforms provide good value, generating returns far greater than the cost to the Exchequer of their implementation. We also suggest a number of ways that they could be paid for through the re-prioritisation of current government spending.
Boosting employer engagement
The underlying reasons for the difficulties around school-to-work transitions are complex but a number of interconnected problems stand out for those wishing to take a non-academic route to employment.
First, there is insufficient employer engagement within the education system, and indeed insufficient employer investment in education and training. This in in turn leads to a shortfall in employer demand for trained and skilled workers and therefore an insufficient number of high quality opportunities to pursue work-based learning. In the absence of this, the quality of vocational education, especially that which is purely college-based, is extremely variable. Second, there is insufficient support to enable young people to navigate the various vocational options and make informed decisions. This lack of support has serious consequences, given the variability of quality already noted, and the variability in returns to vocational education.
This is an area of policy that cannot be fixed by government diktat--and any policy that attempts that will ultimately fail. Instead, we need to reach a new consensus about the role that government, employers and individuals should be expected to play in our education system. To a degree, this has already been recognised in Labour's approach. Miliband's announcement, based on IPPR's Condition of Britain report (Lawton et al., 2014), that, under a Labour Government, unemployed young people will be paid to undertake worthwhile training rather than receiving cash benefits constitutes a step in the right direction. It should be seen not as a punitive measure, but rather as an entitlement with an accompanying responsibility. The state has to ensure the individual has access to opportunities to get worthwhile training, and the individual has a responsibility to seek those out. This can be seen as a form of social contract between state and individual.
However, if Labour is to transform the British workforce it needs to go much further --also introducing a new social contract between employers and the state when it comes to engagement in education. The engagement and involvement of employers in an improved system of vocational education is a precondition for success. Indeed, many of the challenges faced in vocational education are not educational challenges at all, but rather consequences of how businesses operate and are structured. It is only through an evolution in business practice that change in this area...
To continue reading
Request your trialCOPYRIGHT GALE, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
