When the great Tory Lord Chancellor F. E. Smith gave his rectorial address at Glasgow University in 1923 he promised the undergraduates there assembled that the world offered ‘glittering prizes to those who have stout hearts and sharp swords.’
A century on and our new government takes a rather different view. Instead of glittering prizes, it wants the young to know their place, limit their horizons and settle for less. In its first few days in power the Burnham administration has shown itself resolutely anti-intellectual, hostile to ambition and backward-looking.
The new Education Secretary Lucy Powell has promised us that she will end the ‘over-focus on academic outcomes’ in our schools. In other words – bring back stupid. Powell argues that ‘over-focus’ has ‘left too many young people behind.’ The truth is precisely the opposite. Too many schools have still not focused enough on getting every child to succeed academically. A failure to teach properly has left them without the knowledge, skills and qualifications which give them the ability to become authors of their own life story. The children who are left behind are those entirely capable of getting the good GCSEs which open up future glittering prizes but who do not secure those passes because their schools are insufficiently focused on academic excellence.
In its first few days in power the Burnham administration has shown itself resolutely anti-intellectual, hostile to ambition and backward-looking
The best schools in the country, such as Michaela in Wembley or the Mercia School in Sheffield, or the Star Academy chain run by Hamid Patel, take children from working class and disadvantaged backgrounds, give them a traditional academic education, secure them excellent GCSE passes across a range of rigorous subjects and launch them on a path to future success.
At Mercia School, disadvantaged pupils perform better at GCSE than the average performance across Sheffield for all students. Ninety-seven per cent of their young people are in education, employment or training after year 11, well above the city and national average. More than half their students go on to a Russell Group university. Not just 50 per cent going to university. But above 50 per cent going to one of the top 30 universities in the country.
Yet when Lucy Powell and Andy Burnham look at a school which gives the poorest students in a challenging northern city the opportunities they themselves enjoyed, they see not a model to emulate and spread but an achievement to be derided.
Their plans to dilute schools’ emphasis on attainment, steer more students away from stretching GCSEs and limit the number of young people who enjoy a rounded academic education to the age of 16 is literally reactionary. They want to hold working-class kids back.
There is an irony too bitter for words in such a policy being enacted by two Russell Group graduates from working-class backgrounds who sit in the most Oxbridge cabinet for generations, one graced by a privately-educated Chancellor and old boys of Westminster and Eton.
The assault on academic excellence for all is cloaked in the language of elevating the technical and vocational – seeking to value the hard hat as much as the mortar board. Putting aside the revealed preferences of this government for awarding the glittering prizes of government to the mortar-boarded alumnae of privileged schools, the reality is that the technical and vocational are elevated by making the courses which bear that name more rigorous and demanding, not demanding ‘parity of esteem’ by diktat.
We have been down this disastrous road before. Under the last Labour government a well-meaning desire to see the vocational valued meant that qualifications in cake decorating which required minimal effort, and which would make any professional patissier weep at their inadequacy, were deemed to be ‘worth’ the same as a testing maths GCSE. These false equivalences were abolished when I was Education Secretary following a report into the widespread lack of ambition in vocational qualifications from the brilliant Professor Alison Wolf.
Since then, greater rigour has been applied in technical and vocational education. But there is further still to go, to make the level of skill acquired greater and the grading system more demanding.
Instead, however, of raising the bar in technical learning, this government is lowering its own ambition for the number of students who can grasp the academic core.
This is not just criminal for anyone who believes in extending equality of opportunity, it is democratically dumb and economically self-harming. If we are to have citizens who can discern good arguments from bad, who are inoculated against misinformation and engaged in a vigorous democratic culture, then the skills imparted by academic subjects – from the logic inherent in maths to the analytical ability required by the proper study of the humanities – is vital.
The encroachment of new technology and artificial intelligence on our lives, and workplaces, requires us all to be smarter, quicker and defter in the deployment of our own intelligence. Many of the tasks which are now considered skilled labour – for example, every element in the transport chain from the manufacture of vehicles to driving them – will soon be automated. The future belongs to those with the ability to analyse, question, think originally and creatively and deploy the higher-level reasoning that academic education imparts.
That is why decrying the numbers who go to university, as Burnham has, is so myopic. The 50 per cent ‘target’ set by Tony Blair was not a Stalinist imposition. Idle youth were not rounded up, press-ganged and imprisoned in a gulag archipelago of academic borstals for three years. It was a laudable ambition to achieve for the country what Mercia School achieves for its pupils – greater opportunity. Blair was right. Labour’s rejection of Blairism is a disavowal of its single most successful period in government. And a rejection of its most important policy aspiration – seeking to create greater choice and contestability and demand higher standards in the public services.
Yes, the higher education sector is blighted by too many failing institutions, inadequate courses, grade inflation and woke curricula. But so were schools before I became Education Secretary and we dealt with all of those weaknesses, building on the best of Blairism, and turning our state education system into the best in the Western world. The only reason real reform didn’t extend to universities is because they were then in the hands of a department run by Liberal Democrats. The answer to education failure is not to steer people away from education but to improve it. But who has the stout hearts and sharp swords to do that now?
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