Put Skills Back into Schools

Amongst the flurry of announcements from the new government, one of the most important for the future of education was that of a root and branch school curriculum review, due to be completed by 2025. Encouragingly, it will be led by a widely respected expert, Professor Becky Francis, currently CEO of the Education Endowment Foundation, who is well known for her work on educational inequality.

As many observers have noted, while the post-18 sector is increasingly focused on skills, the school sector has become completely dominated by a focus on knowledge. The time is well overdue to address this misalignment between compulsory and post-compulsory education in England, and to put the skills agenda back into schools.

On this issue and many others, Professor Francis has the benefit of the significant amount of work done by the Times Education Commission, which undertook a year-long review of the school curriculum, the results of which were published over two years ago (“Bringing Out the Best”, the Times, June 2022). An impressive range of experts and influential figures from within the education sector and beyond pulled together a detailed and well-evidenced report, which amongst many other findings noted the “chasm” between the worlds of education and employment.

This divide can be traced back to the reforms to the school curriculum introduced by Michael Gove in 2014, and continued by former Schools Minister Nick Gibb, which had at their ideological core an insistence on a “knowledge-rich curriculum” to the exclusion of everything else. Vocational options, along with practical and creative subjects, were pushed to the fringes of the secondary school curriculum and in many cases dropped altogether.  This has proved deeply damaging – not least to the thousands of young people trapped in the relentless pressure-cooker of academic performance  - and we wholeheartedly agree with the Times Commission’s view that as well as becoming knowledgeable, pupils need “to develop the practical, social and emotional tools that will allow them to thrive as they go out into the workplace”.

This theme was echoed in the press release accompanying the launch of the Curriculum and Assessment Review, which repeatedly refers to the need to better prepare children with the practical skills needed to be successful working adults. This is a big step in the right direction, inserting a golden thread of skills development into our school education system which will align it far better with further, higher and adult education provision and with the needs of employers. The challenge will be to do this without adding to teacher workloads or requiring significant new funding.

For practical reasons any recommendations from the Francis Review are unlikely to be implemented before September 2026. We would therefore urge the government to take some immediate steps to improve the situation for today’s young people. Reintroducing the option of Key Stage 4 school pupils attending FE colleges to take vocational courses part-time would be a direct and straightforward way of getting the ball rolling. Changing school accountability measures to include the number of pupils supported to progress into apprenticeships would be another.

Lifelong learning should begin at school and at the moment too many youngsters – particularly from disadvantaged backgrounds – are being turned off learning by the rigid and narrow curriculum diet they receive at school.

We will certainly be submitting evidence to the Review in September. If any of our members, friends and allies have ideas or case studies that could be included in our submission, please get in touch with Andy Forbes or Mike Mavrommatis.