EDUCATION FOR THE GOOD SOCIETY - Support

other countries to require their recruits to beeducated beyond the compulsory school leavingage. Among European countries, only in Spain,Portugal and Turkey is there a greater proportionof jobs requiring no education beyond compulsoryschool. There is some way to go beforeBritish employers place similar demands onthe education system as are placed in the majorcompeting regions in Europe. 2Education policy cannot directly address thisissue, but labour market and employment policycan, for example through the imposition of awidespread requirement for licence to practice.This is not to say that education does not havea part to play in the solution of some of theseproblems, but the expectation that on its own oras prime mover it can be tasked with dealing withstructurally embedded failings over the causes ofwhich it has no direct influence whatsoever isa recipe for setting educational institutions andtheir staff up to fail, while leaving the originalpolicy problem unresolved.Under-ambitionoriented or gifted. The end result has been asteady drift away from any notion of a liberal orexpansive education (however conceived) andits substitution by low-level, narrowly focusedworkforce training. What has been deemedacceptable fare for the lower end of the abilityrange, occupational ladder and socio-economicstrata has been the very thin gruel offered by animpoverished version of vocationalism.Lord Adonis, writing on the 30th anniversaryof Callaghan’s ‘Great Debate’ speech at RuskinCollege, gave the following somewhat disingenuoustake on progress:At Ruskin, Callaghan made school improvementnot simply a national issue but, more particularly,a Labour and working class priority... he pouredscorn on the idea that working class educationwas about ‘fitting a so-called inferior group ofchildren with just enough learning to earn theirliving in the factory’. Instead, first-rate schoolingshould be the birthright of ‘the whole labourmovement’. Three decades later, educationalexcellence for ‘the whole labour movement’ –in its broadest sense – is at last Labour’s coremission. 32 Francis Green, Job Quality inBritain, UKCES Praxis Paper 1, UKCommission for Employment andSkills, 2009.3 Andrew Adonis, ‘30 years on,Callaghan’s words resonate’,Education Guardian, 17 October2006, p.3.4 See evidence for this argumentfrom Andy Green, ‘Core skills,key skills and general culture:in search of a common foundationfor vocational education’,Evaluation and Research inEducation, 12(1), pp.23–53, 1998;and Michaela Brockmann, LindaClarke and Chris Winch (eds),Bricklaying Is More than FlemishBond: Bricklaying Qualifications inEurope, European Institute forConstruction Labour Research,2010.When it comes to under-ambition, the problemhas been more insidious, but every bit as serious.Here the difficulty has been on two levels. First, abelief at the core of both the Thatcher–Major andNew Labour projects, that reform of the economyor the labour market (except for further liberalisation)was either impossible or undesirable (orboth) and that therefore education and trainingwas one of the only ways that government couldbe seen to be doing anything about problemswith competitiveness and employment and therewards it generates. As a result, education andtraining providers were left trying to deliveroutcomes that would in some way sidestep orcounterbalance and compensate for wider andlarger forces and incentives within the structureof the labour market and the economy.At a second level, problems have sprung fromthe unwillingness of policy-makers to understandthe deep pessimism and narrow utilitarianismthat is now an integral part of their basic assumptionswhen thinking about what can be offered byway of initial and continuing education, particularlyto those who are not seen as academicallyIn reality, much of what continues to be on offerhas little in mind beyond ‘fitting a so-calledinferior group of children with just enoughlearning to earn their living in the factory’, thoughthis objective now tends to be labelled ‘employability’and the work is now more often stackingsupermarket shelves. Thus the UK continuesto be distinguished by having vocational qualificationsthat offer no substantive broad-basedelement of general education (on which returnto learning and subsequent progression couldbe based). 4 For example, National VocationalQualifications were designed to provide onlythose narrow, job-specific competences thatwould indeed fit those unlucky enough to beoffered them with just enough learning to beable to perform the bundle of tasks that madeup a particular job at a particular moment intime. The retreat from lifelong learning and itssubstitution by workforce training, via initiativessuch as ‘Train to Gain’, is another reflection ofthe highly utilitarian strand of thinking that cameto dominate New Labour thinking on what adultlearning might be for and about.50 | www.compassonline.org.uk