Andy Burnham’s technical education reforms are doomed to fail
Reforming technical education is a laudable ambition but we have been here before. There are three questions Andy Burnham must answer before anyone takes him seriously, says Lord Agnew
There is laudable ambition in the Prime Minister’s announcement of technical routes in education from 14, parity with the academic path and employers brought properly into schools. For a new Prime Minister to make it a priority within ten days of taking office is a good signal.
The framing is good too. A hard hat valued as much as the graduation cap is another sign that this Prime Minister knows a thing or two about communications.
But I have sat through enough of these announcements, on both sides of the ministerial desk, to know that the ambition is the easy part. I have served in governments that promised parity between technical and academic education; delivering it is another matter, and delivery is a question of money.
There does not appear to be any. Further education is the sector every government praises and then quietly raids. Funding was cut after 2009 and never restored; colleges are still operating well below where they stood in 2008 per student. Yet this announcement talks only about prioritising existing budgets, and the scheme is understood to be paid for out of increases announced long ago. Money announced once cannot be announced twice. Every pound going into the new pathways is a pound coming out of something else inside the Department for Education, and nobody has said what.
I know what that looks like from the receiving end. The academy trust I founded in the East of England has extended the school day by three hours, at a cost of £1.5m a year, because the children in front of us needed more time on task than the standard day allowed. That money comes out of the same departmental envelope the Prime Minister now proposes to spend on technical pathways. Nobody will announce the decision to stop funding things like that. There will be no press release, a line will move in a spreadsheet in the spring, and a school somewhere will find it can no longer afford the thing that was working.
How this ends
Having spent time at the Treasury, I know how this ends. The reform survives the press release and dies in the allocation round.
Follow the money further and you reach what makes me angriest in public policy. We spent a generation telling every young person that a decent life runs through a degree, then handed them a loan to pay for it. Hundreds of thousands are carrying debt into their 30s for courses that never raised their earnings by a penny. They did what the adults in their lives told them to do, and we sent them the bill.
As Chair of the Lords Numeracy for Life Committee, I have spent recent months taking evidence on Britain’s innumeracy crisis. Around 17m adults in England, half the working age population, have numeracy no better than that expected of a primary school child. It is an Innumeracy Tax, paid daily in higher interest, worse deals and careers that never get off the ground.
Ministers barely understand the books they are trying to cook
It is also why announcements like this go unchallenged. Governments can present the same money three times over because nobody makes them show their working. Indeed ministers barely understand the books they are trying to cook.
So, three questions before we praise the Prime Minister for yet again defying Westminster convention and focusing on the real issues.
Which budgets inside the Department for Education are being cut to pay for this?
What happens to the 14 year old who arrives in Year 10 unable to handle numbers?
And what single figure, published every year, will tell us in 2030 whether any of it worked?
Answer those and I will be the first to say so.
Lord Agnew of Oulton is Chair of the Lords Numeracy for Life Committee and a former Academies and Treasury Minister.