The Leaky Pipeline of Our Education System

In January, the indefatigable researchers at the Institute for Fiscal Studies produced their eighth Annual report on education spending in England. It’s 100 pages of fascinating facts, figure and analysis about every aspect of a sector whose level of annual public spending - £122bn - is second only to the NHS.

To educate each individual child in England, if they start in Early Years and go through school, college, and on to higher education, now costs just over £38,000. For comparison, average private school fees are around £20,000 a year, so the £38,000 spend per learner on over fifteen years of state education would only get you two years in the private sector.

What is the taxpayer’s return on this investment? We have an education system which produces historically high volumes of young people with qualifications up to university level, which contains some of the best schools, colleges and universities in the world, and yet is not able to meet the skills needs of large swathes of our economy and is leaving us with eye-watering numbers of economically inactive young adults. It’s a chronically leaky pipeline, with over 16% of 18-24 year olds ending up  NEET, not far off the 19% leakage from our much-criticised water system. How can this be?

From a systems perspective, there are four answers. First, is a compulsory education system that since the Gove reforms ten years ago has become progressively disconnected from any focus on skills. School pupils are judged primarily by their ability to pass exams, schools held accountable for little more than exam results. Practical subjects – creative and technical – have been shoved into the margins of the curriculum, and laboratory or fieldwork elements of subjects such as Science have been reduced to a minimum. This is made worse by the paucity of any teaching of essential employability skills in most schools.

The second problem is our poorly designed 16-19 system, which funds an idiosyncratic mixture of FE Colleges, Sixth Form Colleges, school sixth forms, and University Technical Colleges all jostling with each other in different combinations in local authorities across the country. For historic reasons, 16-19 has received the least generous funding of all phases of education, and many young people are offered a very narrow range of A level subjects and a meagre diet of vocational education in small sixth forms, unless they go to a college. Since virtually no school teachers have been to FE, and almost all have been to HE, there is an inbuilt bias towards favouring the academic route as the pathway to success, regardless of the preferences, talents or interests of the students. There has been no government effort to rationalise this incoherent and misfiring system.

Thirdly, there has been no attempt to manage the mismatch between skills supply and demand, at least until very recently. In the new Industrial Strategy there are repeated references to skills gaps and shortages in key industry sectors, such as Engineering and Manufacturing. Neither students or providers have any tangible incentives to consider high-demand vocational subjects, and since they are typically the most expensive subjects to deliver, enrolment has flatlined in almost all areas.

Last but by no means least is the fourth problem; the absence of any lifelong education strategy or vision. The Lifelong Learning Entitlement due to launch in 2026/27 is the only initiative in the pipeline, and since it relies on the untested assumption that working adults will be happy to take on student loans, it’s unlikely by itself to be a game-changer, despite being a very promising idea.

There is no sign yet, despite the Labour movement’s proud history of pioneering lifelong learning for workers, of any more ambitious thinking from the Labour government. The arguments for boosting opportunities for adults in the workforce are widely accepted, but the DfE has buried its head in the comfort blanket of qualification reform, while the DWP, newly arrived on the scene, is preoccupied with the most obvious manifestation of our failed system, the 16-24 NEETs crisis. While we wait for any new options to come out of the Growth and Skills Levy, those working adults who need to upskill or reskill to keep up to date in the face of technological change, just have to work it out themselves, and pay for it themselves, or hope their employers might support them.

There are some welcome signs of change. The Francis Curriculum and Assessment Review has initiated some promising new reforms, particularly in relation to broadening the curriculum and developing better level 2 pathways. The Post-16 White Paper has at last recognised the pivotal role of the FE sector, and addressed head-on the recruitment crisis in FE teaching, though frustratingly, not the pay crisis. Higher Education is being more closely drawn in to the skills agenda and the proposals to grow Higher Technical Qualifications and also to introduce “ break points” in three year degree programmes, are all encouraging.

But our education system is currently like a sports team full of talented individuals playing in different styles without any collective team plan. We don’t need uniformity, but we do need much more effective coordination and a shared sense of purpose. We need to invest in a system that isn’t just about passing exams and accumulating qualifications, but about developing and sustaining the vital workplace skills that power our economy. There’s a heck of a lot more to do to get full value for our £122 billion annual education spend.