New Labour and educational attainment in Britain

Posted on Wednesday 31 October, 2007
Filed Under Education

 


A decade of New Labour in office has transformed Britain’s education system from “below average to above average”, Gordon Brown said today in his first major speech on education policy since becoming prime minister.

Up to a point. You can get chapter and verse on how the UK compares to other developed countries by downloading these statistics from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development here.

On some yardsticks, Britain does top the OECD average. Just. But our relative performance has clearly been slipping and then slipping some more for decades on end. Here’s one fairly representative fact-bite:

In the adult population, a comparatively large share of individuals in the UK did not complete upper secondary education and face considerable and increasing penalties in the labour market …

Ranked by upper secondary educational attainment in the population, the UK occupies the 14th position among 55-to-64-year-olds in the 29 OECD countries with data (i.e. those who completed school some 40 years ago) but only the 22nd position among 25-to-34-year-olds, who completed school a decade ago. By contrast, Korea ranks 23rd among 55-to-64-year-olds but 1st among 25-to-34-year-olds …

So, while upper secondary attainment rates have increased in the UK, the increase has been greater in many other countries.

So much for a decade’s worth of Blairite education, education, education. Two years ago, the National Audit Office reported that over a million children receive substandard education at poorly performing schools. That’s one pupil in eight. Not I performance I would chose to boast about if I were Brown.

Earlier this year, it was revealed that 11 years of compulsory schooling has left some 7m adults functionally illiterate, while 11m cannot add two three-figure numbers. The blame for that attaches not just to New Labour but to successive governments of all parties, of course. However, it is up to New Labour to put things right.

British jobs for British workers? Fat chance, if employers can take on well-educated Poles, entirely capable of elementary mental arithmetic and much else besides, on lower salaries.

Brown’s remedies seem to be largely based on target culture, target culture, target culture. Schools will either have to meet centrally-imposed goals or face closure.

I have no specialist knowledge of education policy and would be interested in the opinions of teacher readers in the comments box. But the way I read these proposals, they look more or less like shifting existing policy up a couple of gears, even though they have not been an obvious success.

Surely the key to raising education attainment is to recognise it as a class issue. The best-performing LEAs include Richmond Upon Thames and Surrey. The worst include Newham, Tower Hamlets and Hackney. Spot the pattern, anybody?

Last time I saw the stats, the top 50 schools ranked by A level perfromance are all private. Only 20 of the top 200 are in the state sector. Private schools educate one child in 15, but account for one in four university students, and half of Oxbridge students.

The only way that working class kids will ever get an even break is through a wider democratic socialist political agenda designed to bring about a more egalitarian society.


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Comments

7 Responses to “New Labour and educational attainment in Britain”

  1. Shuggy
    on October 31st, 2007 at 16:41

    I have no specialist knowledge of education policy and would be interested in the opinions of teacher readers in the comments box. But the way I read these proposals, they look more or less like shifting existing policy up a couple of gears, even though they have not been an obvious success.

    A blogger who doesn’t think they know everything there is to know about education? How refreshing! And, as it turns out, you’re largely right. The answer – or part of the answer, anyway – would be to do the opposite of what successive governments have been doing since Thatcher, which would be to reverse the trend of centralisation that the target culture represents. This isn’t going to happen, obviously.

  2. GW
    on November 1st, 2007 at 00:29

    Then we had LMS Local Manegement- And here in Wales “Bilingualism” (SIC)

    Most Teachers try hard. BUT one or two that I have met should not be trusted to train a puppy.

    Inevitably those who are not fit to train a puppy belong to the Ultra right, or regretably, the Ultra Left.Or the ‘Yakida’ tendancy.

    GW, a former school govenor (SIC)

  3. Mark
    on November 1st, 2007 at 14:33

    A Democratic Socialist education policy (A minimal statement): I would have thought end selection (Covert or overt); abolish grammar schools; remove private education’s charitable status.

    New Labour lied through its teeth when it said education improvements would improve the economy. America has a terrible education public system, but is the richest country in the world…

  4. Sue R
    on November 1st, 2007 at 15:11

    Why bother to educate your ‘native’ workforce when educated people of all countries are vying to get into this country? Or, failing that, you can import jobs via globalisation what with modern computing capacity. I’m sorry if that does not sound very socialist, but I do feel more and more that this government is leading the population up a blind alley.

  5. Last of the Blairites
    on November 1st, 2007 at 21:00

    By the way, I don’t think you can really blame Labour for the educational acheivement of those who left school a decade ago.

    Try the school leavers of 2012 – by my reckoning they’ll be the first to have been through school when there has always (inshallah) been a Labour government.

    But given that Labour has recognised the importance of the first three years then think of 2016.

  6. Last of the Blairites
    on November 1st, 2007 at 21:02

    America has a terrible education public system, but is the richest country in the world…

    So we closed all our schools down we’d be rich? How stupid are you?

  7. Igor Belanov
    on November 2nd, 2007 at 10:24

    No, I think what he means is that New Labour focuses on education in such a philistine manner- as a means of increasing wealth and improving the individual’s status. Education in the broad sense and on a mass basis does not necessarily lead to economic growth and prosperity but it does have the potential to enrich people’s lives. This is what any left policy should focus on.