EDUCATION FOR THE GOOD SOCIETY - Support

10. Education and theeconomyEwart KeepIntroductionThis chapter aims to identify the root causesof our problems with the relationship betweeneducation and the economy and labour market. Itdoes not seek to provide a detailed blueprint forfuture policies in this area, but instead tries to laydown some basic ground rules for formulatingsuch policies.The nature of the problemThis paper starts with a paradox – one that hasdogged policy towards education, learning andskills in England for at least the last quarter of acentury (perhaps longer) and which has underminedmany policy ambitions in this field. It isthe paradox of simultaneous over and underambitionabout what education (in its broadestsense) might best be provided with publicsupport, and what social and economic problemsit might be expected to address.This problem was at its most intense underNew Labour, whose political project was riven bya massive tension between pessimism about whatwas ideologically and practically possible andpermissible in the broader social and economicspheres and the very high levels of ambitionthat were loaded onto one area – educationand training – as the key vehicle for deliveringprogressive social and economic outcomes. Asthe author has argued elsewhere, 1 educationand training came to provide a form of magic,get-out-of-jail-free card for politicians, wherebygovernments could achieve intervention-freeintervention in the economy (boosting the supplyof skills, but not intervening in the product orlabour market) as well as loser-free redistributionfor individuals, whereby everyone could becomebetter educated and therefore obtain access tobetter jobs.Over-ambitionThe over-ambition has been the expectation thatthere is an almost endless list of policy problems,most of them complex, messy and often of longstanding(for example, low levels of inter-generationalsocial mobility, and low waged employment)that the education and training systemcould be expected to address. Issues which haveroots in our class structure, the organisation andregulation (or the lack thereof) of our labourmarket, and the division of income and wealththat the economy and labour market dictate haveall been heaped at the door of publicly fundededucators and trainers. This has left schools,colleges and universities to try to do what BasilBernstein long ago warned was impossible: tocompensate for the failings of wider society.The biggest ghost at the policy feast has beenthe nature of the relationship between educationand the labour market. Put simply, policy-makers,and on occasion educationalists too, have chosento believe that changes in education can act as asubstitute for structural change and reform in thelabour market. Many of the goals that educationhas been set – higher levels of social mobility,better jobs for young people, gender and otherforms of equality, reducing in-work poverty –are not solvable by education alone, particularlywhere the supply of jobs, and therein the supplyof good jobs, is limited and finite and where alleducation can do is alter an individual’s place inthe job queue and in zero-sum game positionalcompetition for what is on offer from employers.The actual policy goals in all these areas are onlyrealised inside the labour market and, in manyinstances, the underlying causes of the problemalso reside there.Let us take one example: our abiding record ofrelatively low levels of post-compulsory participation,which is ceaselessly blamed on inadequaciesof teaching, school and college organisation,and curriculum and assessment regimes. AsFrancis Green has noted, in reality much of theproblem lies with the lack of demand (and thelack of incentives to learn that this creates) for abetter-educated workforce by UK employers:Unfortunately, Britain has long been caught in alow-qualification trap, which means that Britishemployers tend to be less likely than in most1 See Ewart Keep and KenMayhew, ‘Moving beyond skills asa social and economic panacea?’,Work, Employment and Society,24(3), 2010, pp.565–77; and EwartKeep, ‘The English skills policynarrative’, in Ann Hodgson, KenSpours and Martyn Waring (eds),Post-Compulsory Education andLifelong Learning across the UnitedKingdom: Policy, Organisation andGovernance, Institute of Education,2011, pp.18–38.Education for the good society | 49