Education, research and innovation should not
Every country in the world is reeling from the impact of dealing with the pandemic. The temptation, as already demonstrated by Britain during the short-lived prime-ministership of Liz Truss, is to seek easy answers and hope they will work. Spoiler alert. There are no easy answers.
But there is an opportunity that can come from these difficult times. It is for us to agree on what we need to build a longterm sustainable and prosperous future in which we can all share. That opportunity is to invest in education, science, research, technology and innovation.
Heard it all before? Of course you have. Have we done what is required? There are some great examples of what needs to be done but we have not committed ourselves (I mean, all of us) to building the kind of smart society and economy this opportunity represents.
If pushed, most political parties would say they know what needs to be done because it is blindingly obvious that the 21st century will belong to knowledge-based economies and societies. What stops us making this happen is constant and misguided change.
The components of a successful education system are not a mystery. The building blocks are well-known and well understood. But, since the 1980s, we have been constantly changing our approach to education as one ideologically driven fashion sweeps over the last one.
We also know a small country at the bottom of the world must forge a future for itself. We did that last century by focusing on being a great agricultural nation. Agriculture, as the past few years have shown, is still critical to our survival.
But we have known for a long time that producing commodity products is never going to pay for 21st century aspirations. Instead of being an agricultural nation, we need to be a knowledge-driven food nation offering high value products to the world.
And we need highly educated people who can produce the science and technology that innovation requires not just in food but in areas that are a fit with who we are and what we can be good at.
Yet for decades we have completely failed to put in place the sophisticated systems needed to drive our prosperity.
Look, for example, at the way within a short space of time, we have shifted science from a Ministry of Research, Science and Technology to a Ministry of Science to a set of functions within the Ministry of Business, Employment and Innovation. The words science, research and technology do not even appear.
There has been no gain from these changes. It borders on mindless.
To contrast the way we have failed to
build a knowledge based society and economy, it is useful to compare Finland – a long, skinny, once agricultural nation of 5 million people that was dependent on a single market – with ourselves.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, Finland had to rapidly rebuild itself as a sophisticated economy able to compete in Europe. They made this happen, as the Finnish Prime Minister told us during her recent visit, because there was broad societal agreement that education, science, technology and innovation were not political issues. Instead, they were the focus of thoughtful evidence-based policy.
Meanwhile, here, we worked our way through the deregulation reforms of the 1980s and have been bickering about what to do next ever since. If it was not so serious, what we have done to ourselves would be a sitcom.
Next year, because there is an election, we have another opportunity to change this. We – meaning the voters – need to call time on education, science, research, technology and innovation as political footballs. What we want to hear is parties agreeing that the road out of our cul-de-sac is marked by knowledge and what we do with it. It is this that will give us the opportunity to be a prosperous society and put in place policies that ensure we all benefit.
If we do not do this, the long-running trend towards greater inequality and division will continue. This division is a monster that will devour us if we let it.
No easy answers. But we do know the answer. My wish for Christmas, then, is that the politics stop and the agreement starts, so we can build a 21st century fit for us all to live in.