LEO MCKINSTRY :
THE fallout from the A-level fiasco continues to inflict severe damage on the Government. Amid dramatic reversals of policy and accusations of serial incompetence, the position of the beleaguered Education Secretary Gavin Williamson looks increasingly untenable.
Already a badly diminished figure, he will take another battering today with the release of the GCSE results, which are certain to provoke a further row about unfairly lowered grades and dodgy computer models.
But in all the bitter controversy, the bigger picture has been missed. What the grading mess really highlights is modern Britain’s neurotic obsession with the university sector. The hysterical coverage during the past week has given the impression that winning places at university is the chief aim of the exam system and the only worthwhile ambition for pupils.
Yet, far from generating prosperity, this distorted focus is failing too many young people as well the needs of the wider economy.
IN 1960, when Britain was going through a consumer boom and still had great domestic industries, only four per cent of school-leavers went to university. Then in 1999 Tony Blair’s Labour government set a target for more than half of the young population to enter higher education. The Tories followed Labour’s lead and that 50 per cent threshold was reached last September.
Now the A-level shambles is to give universities another surge in demand, since the sole reliance on teachers’ estimated grades means that far more pupils meet the standards for entry. Under the makeshift approach introduced on Monday, the proportion receiving the top A and A* grades has soared from 25 per cent to 38 per cent. With the net of eligibility widened so drastically, many universities have added an extra 500 places. While the Vice-Chancellors might celebrate, the impact for our nation will be far more negative. As Britain copes with the challenges of the coronavirus and Brexit, ever greater supremacy by universities is exactly what we do not need.
In defending his expansionist policy more than 20 years ago, Tony Blair claimed that it would make our country “more competitive” and lessen divisions “based on privilege, class and background”. But exactly the opposite has happened.
As the domination of the degree-holding middle-class has become more entrenched, social mobility has been undermined and snobbery worsened.
We now inhabit a binary social order, where nongraduates are often treated as second-class citizens.
The state has the balance all wrong. While resources are poured into the universities, badly needed technical education and apprenticeships are shamefully neglected. In 2018 public spending on apprenticeships amounted to just £1.6billion, plus £2.5billion from employers, whereas universities had an income £38.2billion.
Last year, there were 740,000 people in an apprenticeship, compared with 2.4 million students in higher education.
As the universities grow remorselessly, the crisis of skills training is becoming worse, even in vital areas where Britain used to lead the world like engineering and aerospace.
Disgracefully, the number of apprenticeships has fallen significantly in the past three years after the Government introduced a complex new levy on firms to help fund training programmes. Overall, 72,000 fewer people held apprenticeships in 2019 compared with the previous year. The original target set by the Conservatives in 2015 of three million apprenticeships by 2020 now belongs to the realms of fantasy. Yet because skills training is so marginalised, there is little pressure on the Government to address this disastrous failure. Neither the media nor academia cares.
SO Ministers get away with more empty promises and pointless bureaucratic tinkering to give the illusion of action.
Meanwhile the universities are churning out far more graduates than our society requires, particularly in subjects like the creative arts and communications that have little relevance to the workplace.
The editor of this paper tells me that, during a long career in journalism, he has never once employed someone with a degree in media studies. Indeed, a study in 2019 found that a third of graduates are over-qualified for their jobs.
That is an absurd situation when skills shortages are rife. Out of the exam controversy should finally come a push for real reform, one that ends the institutionalised subservience to universities.
‘Non-graduates are often treated as second-class citizens’