Lord Baker’s technical colleges tilt against classical curriculum
IN THE workplace, the British have largely solved the problem of social class by pretending, day-to-day, that it does not exist. But in education, the engine that produces tomorrow’s workforce, an ideological battle rages.
Should everyone be put through a traditional schooling — what was once called a classical education, favoured by the elites and still a great UK export industry? Or should there be a better technical career path from the age of 14 for young people of a practical bent?
Ironically, Britain’s principal warrior for better job-training at school is a member of the House of Lords. And Kenneth Baker, once one of Margaret Thatcher’s loyal ministers, seems from his dapper appearance and plummy vowels an unlikely provocateur. But trailing after the sprightly 81-year-old peer during a recent visit to Sheffield, I found the former education secretary quietly subverting Conservative government policy, and challenging the direction of its central reforms.
Lord Baker, the architect of the national curriculum and other reforms of the 1980s, now believes it should be abandoned from the age of 14. He has spent the past five years setting up a network of university technical colleges (UTCs) — institutions providing vocational training for nearly 10,000 pupils who find the standard curriculum a poor fit for their proclivities and ambitions.
Creating this “movement”, as he calls it, has put him on a collision course with the Department for Education; the current Conservative ministers require the study of a language, one of the humanities, plus the core subjects of science, maths and English, up to the age of 16.
Ministers, he had told me earlier, were “on the wrong jag”— his quaint term to describe the academically focused cul-de-sac up which he believes the Tory party is driving England’s schools.
For Lord Baker, the squeezing out of technical subjects is “completely crazy”, and he laments the lack of focus on skills shortages.
At Sheffield’s UTC, boys and girls are learning robotics from a technician seconded here by Siemens, in a mini-factory sponsored by Festo.
“I just like making things,” as one student put it. The subjects may be hard — maths, physics and engineering — but in the lab, they have a clear, practical use.
“There’s no larking about,” boasts Lord Baker. And he is right. The atmosphere is studious.
“At 14, we treat them as adults. I always tell them this is the beginning of their working life.”
At present, these colleges, set up with local employers and universities on the board, are educating only about 0.5% of 14- to 16-year-olds.
But sensible members of other political parties (there are still a few) applaud Lord Baker’s dogged push for an alternative to what he calls “the national obsession with three Alevels and university”.
So, why have repeated attempts to establish a pipeline of skilled workers failed, in spite of the twin laudable aims of making future generations more employable and meeting skill shortages in the economy? Snobbery is the root cause, Lord Baker claims — a belief that technical education is about “shabby premises and dirty jobs down in the town”, whereas parents and teachers traditionally aspire to an ideal of “the grammar school up on the hill”.
The Baker UTC guerrillas cite interesting experiments with career colleges in the US and Canada, as well as in Austria, where 80% of young people take a vocational route after the age of 14.
He admits to swimming against the tide. Two weeks ago, a minister said he would prefer to see a young Brit achieve a D in French than a B in a vocational qualification. To me, it seems a poor pass in French is, to quote the 1980s spoof franglais, “un passeport a nowhere”.
But the government wants to turn the accusation of snobbery on its head — ministers argue that academic excellence should not be the preserve of posh kids.
And as a nation whose abiding handicap is still class divides, Britain may need to decide which of these presumptions is worse: the idea that a proper education can mean only knowing the nation’s history in detail, being able to locate every country on the map and developing a relationship with literary classics. Or, the view that this revered model is neither engaging nor useful to many young people.
Lord Baker seems still to delight in his lifelong evangelism for better state-sector education — after we part, he pops up on television to air his differences with the government again. “Must press on,” he tells me, as he goes off to make more mischief. © Financial Times 2016
So, why have repeated attempts to establish a pipeline of skilled workers failed? Snobbery is the root cause, Lord Baker claims