The Tragedy of British Education

Alan Johnson has recently announced plans to increase the school leaving age to 18. The announcement has been widely trailed, and is being backed up by research that has suggested half of school leavers at 16 later regret their decision to drop out. The decision is not just significant for the change in lifestyle that it will bring about for many; nor for the added cost that having more young adults in full-time education will bring to the government budget. If the transition to education until 18 is handled correctly, it may well sort out the problem that has hampered the British education system for over 100 years.

The 1902 Education Act set the tone for the way Britain has thought of education throughout the 20th century. Balfour conceived of the Act as a means of giving state funding to prop up church schools; politically it was a disaster, as many believe that it led Joe Chamberlain to launch his tariff reform campaign that split the Tory Party. More significantly, though, it failed to take the rising fields of technical education seriously, and entrenched in the British psyche that the only kind of education that was of real value was a classical, academic education. That led to the failure of the grammar school system; it is the reason behind the devaluing of A-Levels to a ridiculous extent today. Yet the 1900s had a great opportunity to expand and formalise a system of technical education that would have rivalled any in the world.

Local authorities in the 1900s were only allowed to provide an elementary education for all students; thereafter they were expected to go to work or, if exceptional, could get to grammar school (assuming, of course, that parents could afford fees and uniform). It quickly became obvious, however, that children’s capacity for learning – even if not good enough for entry to grammar school – did not end when government decreed it should, and many local authorities developed junior technical schools (JTSs) that provided training in the sciences after the basic elementary education had finished – and some of these were strikingly successful in the education they provided.

Nevertheless, the policy of successive governments was to close these operations down. They were using money that was given for one express purpose, and anything beyond that was illegal. These actions were backed up by the attitude of Morant, the Permanent Secretary to the Board of Education, who believed in a classical education, and that the entire education policy should be geared towards encouraging grammar schools, which in turn should train their pupils to read Classics at university.

The British view of a scientist, too, remained hopelessly out of date – the enthusiastic amateur working alone in academic endeavour, waiting for his big breakthrough. No wonder that the big German and American universities quickly started outstripping us in emerging fields like Chemistry. They invested in them heavily; there were huge numbers of students studying sciences, especially in comparison with Britain where, as ever, they trained their classicists in huge numbers.

This had a knock-on effect on the Butler Education Act of 1944, in that although the grammar school system was always intended to be tri-partite, the prevailing attitude meant that the 11-plus became a mere pass/fail exam. The third option – the development of technical schools for greater vocational education – never really came to pass. Why? Because there was only one kind of education worth investing in. And it didn’t involve equipping those who weren’t the most academically able with the skills to go out and make a trade.

The mindset still continues today. There’s a recognition that Britain hasn’t done enough to encourage the development of vocational education. But rather than building up a genuinely high-quality vocational system, every step taken has to compare vocational qualifications to academic ones – hence the notion that a GNVQ is worth 4 GCSE passes at grade C, or the absolutely stark raving bonkers idea that Vocational A-Levels are appropriate training for university, counting as ‘double A-Levels’ under the UCAS system. The attempt to frame vocational qualifications in academic concerns only undermines both – no-one seriously thinks the vocational qualifications live up to their billing, yet in attempting to make the skills examined more analogous, academic qualifications lose much of their rigour.

So how might increasing the school-leaving age to 18 help solve this problem? Well, it would be a catastrophic mistake to try and force those who don’t want to be at school to stay in formal, classroom education full-time. That’s a recipe for problems in the classroom, and increasingly stressed-out sixth form teachers who will have to deal with people who actively resent still being at school.

Moreover, many leave school because they found GCSEs or equivalents hard to deal with – so it makes no sense to try and cram them in to the next level of education. No, if the move to raise the school leaving age is to work, then it will need to be modelled on something like the German system. Rather than spending all school hours in the classroom, students are free to start apprenticeships or other technical schemes of education, returning to the classroom only for a day or two a week. In Britain, that would allow a focus on the key skills such as English and Maths, while allowing most of the student’s time to be spent on practical tasks.

The government needs to reverse the policies that have failed Britain for over a hundred years, and take vocational and technical education outside of the academic classroom. And in demanding the school leaving age be raised to 18, they may just have found the formula that can help them.