National obsessions

To accuse the English of being peculiar is probably fair comment. But are they particularly peculiar when it comes to attitudes to education?

Education policy will always reflect a country’s circumstances and ambitions, as well as its obsessions and sense of what is and is not of value.

Many of these are of their time – the move to higher tuition fees in England, for example, reflected the government’s focus on austerity, and a desire to shift the teaching grant off the public books.

But it also reflected a desire by the universities minister at the time, David Willetts, to protect the unit of resource, and measures such as the 30-year loan write-off were designed to ensure that university participation continued to grow – as it duly did.

Fast-forward a decade and a bit, and the debate on fees continues – we now await the spending review in the autumn to find out the government’s response to the Augar proposals, although in our news coverage we offer some insights into current thinking in the Treasury in particular.

The more urgent debate is about skills, and how level 4 and 5 qualifications can play a greater role in England’s economic future, a question addressed by the Skills for Jobs White Paper in January.

This is also of its time, as we enter a period when unemployment is spiking, the levelling-up agenda remains pressing, and the country considers its economic future in a post-Brexit world.

But the White Paper comes with the whiff of scepticism about the expansion of participation in higher education that has lingered around the Conservative Party since Willetts left office in 2014.

It seems to hint that we might aim to “level down” some of those who currently go to university, rather than help those leaving education at level 3 to continue to levels 4 and 5.

This apparently indestructible idea that the country may be guilty of “over-educating” is addressed head-on in an essay by Willetts this week.

It is a concept we should find “repellent”, he says, adding: “My starting point is that we are all under-educated. There is always more to learn and more to try to understand.”

Few readers of Times Higher Education would disagree with this, one assumes. But Willetts also suggests something else about national attitudes towards the point and value of higher education.

Discussing the use of a new metric for graduate outcomes, and in particular the question of occupational classification – what is and is not a “graduate job” – he argues that it is a “classic English assumption that the task of education and training is to end up with a round peg in a round hole”.

If this is a reference to the idea that one should be educated only up to and no further than the specific skill set required for the job one takes on graduation, then that seems to me to be rather a new idea – and one explicitly linked to higher tuition fees and a consumerist focus on return on investment.

However, asked to elaborate, Willetts says he was thinking rather of the belief that we need to get the perfect match of the individual to the course or job, which attaches a lot of weight to selection and little to future potential. This, in turn, rests on an assumption that a student’s abilities are fixed, whereas in the US, he argued, there is a belief that we are much more malleable.

One manifestation of this might be the 11-plus exam, which sorts children by apparent ability at such a young age, another the obsession with selectivity at university, rather than value added.

Also writing for THE this week, Tim Blackman, vice-chancellor of The Open University, picks up the baton in an analysis of the skills agenda, which also reflects on the recent White Paper’s view that too many undergraduates are choosing “low value” degrees.

“This narrative of low-value degrees is a peculiarly English one,” he says, arguing that the focus should really be on structures that allow fluidity between what might be termed “academic” and “technical” routes, including at different stages in a student’s life, rather than a “linear progression along a single occupational pathway, with everything depending on the final assessment, and based on largely short-term needs”.

This short-termism is, for Willetts, another deep-seated problem – and one that could be exacerbated by the greater use of data tracking what graduates do (and how much they earn) shortly after they leave university.

Tracing and valuing long-term returns is hard, but that doesn’t mean that short-termism is an acceptable alternative. And if England is now a country that values lifelong learning, then the clue is in the name: no one is in this for the short term.

john.gill@timeshighereducation.com