It's not about the ologies

Tweet One of the core tenets of Thatcherism was that competition is inherently a good thing, because competitive markets drive costs down and efficiency up.  That was the underlying argument for the marketisation of the health service, for instance – and of course the examination boards.

In the latter case the expectation was that instead of each examination board having a monopoly within its own geographical area as was previously the case, they would compete for ‘customers’ (or ‘schools’, as they are more usually known).  It was always understood that the probable result would be fewer boards each having more customers; but the aim was that the overall cost would be less.

I’m not in a position to state definitively whether it worked; but I suspect that it did - in that narrow economic sense at least.  There are two problems though.

The first is that whilst the purists regard the way in which costs are reduced and efficiency increased as irrelevant as long as it actually happens, it is far from being irrelevant in terms of its other effects.

And the second – as could and should have easily been foreseen – is that marketplace competition doesn’t operate solely on price.  Once they’ve done all they can to reduce costs, competing organisations start looking for other differentiating factors.

In the case of the examination boards, the obvious differentiating factor was always going to be pass rates.  When the schools are being judged on league tables of exam results, then choosing the exam board most likely to help them climb the rankings becomes more important then the cost comparison.

At first sight, the surprise is not so much that that system is now unravelling, but that it’s taken so long to reach that point.  But if we consider the motivations of all the different stakeholders, it’s no surprise at all.

Governments, of all parties, want to demonstrate that their policies are working.  What better way to do that than regular increases in pass rates?

Schools want to demonstrate that they are improving their performance and climbing the league tables.  What better way to do that than regular increases in pass rates?

The examination boards want to grow their ‘business’ and attract more ‘customers’.  What better way to do that than regular increases in pass rates?

Pupils, of course, always wanted to get the best results possible, and their parents (otherwise known as ‘voters’) want the same thing as well.  What better way to demonstrate that than regular increases in pass rates?

‘Teaching to the exams’ is nothing particularly new, but all the incentives have been for schools to do more of it.

Effectively, there’s been a collusion by consensus in which all of those stakeholders’ aspirations have apparently been met, with no stakeholder having any real incentive to ask too loudly the difficult questions about whether the inexorable rise in results actually reflected any real underlying improvement in knowledge and skill.

In principle, it is surely right - indeed overdue - for the UK Education Minister to challenge this process.  And recognising what he called the ‘malign’ impact of Thatcher’s reforms is equally overdue.  But changing the rules part way through an examination cycle was a spectacularly cackhanded way of trying to address the issue, and incredibly unjust on those pupils in England who don’t have a Welsh Government to reverse the decision.

It now looks inevitable that Wales and England will be taking different examination routes in future.  Doing that in a rush as a result of a spat doesn’t seem the right basis for such a major decision, but we are, as they say, where we are.

What I hope will not get lost – but greatly fear will indeed get lost – in this debate is more detailed consideration of that issue about ‘teaching to the exams’.  There still seems to be far too much emphasis being placed on the rigour of the exams, and far too little on whether and to what extent examination results tell us very much about the knowledge and skills of the examinees. 

And in so far as employers and others are complaining about the output of the education system, it is surely about knowledge and skills, not the number of passes in ologies.

Investing in Skills

Tweet This week, I've had cause to read another of the Welsh Assembly Government's many consultation papers. This time it's "Investing in Skills", setting out how the government intends to prioritise spending and support.

Much of it, as with so many government papers, is motherhood and apple pie; but the section on targeting sector priorities raised some concerns in my mind. It was the sentence "The limited evidence available suggests that most learners make broadly rational choices of learning, given the wage returns to different qualifications." which first raised my eyebrows.

The meaning is not immediately clear; it's the sort of sentence which on a quick reading might not have registered at all; but what it actually seems to be suggesting is that 'rational' choices of learning are those which lead to the qualifications which in turn give the highest earnings power. The corollary of course is that choices not based on that criterion are irrational. This interpretation is confirmed by the helpful footnote referring to exceptions with the words, "health and beauty therapy courses are popular despite evidence of relatively low returns".

It underlines a very utilitarian approach to training; and indeed that theme runs through the document, with its proposals to effectively ring fence part of the spending allocation to FE institutions for those courses considered to be most immediately useful by the Sector Skills Councils. One consequence is that courses which are currently fully-funded but which are not in the priority categories may no longer be fully-funded in future; learners will be expected to contribute to the costs. The potential consequences, for learners, FE institutions, and the range of courses available are obvious.

Now there's nothing wrong with employers (and the SSCs are largely composed of employers' representatives) setting out their training needs, and there's nothing wrong with those training needs receiving a degree of priority. That could be seen as a means of promoting the needs of the Welsh economy. But there are two aspects which concern me.

The first is that employers, by and large (and there are always exceptions to every rule), tend to take a pretty short term view of training. That is, they're good at identifying, and often providing, training to meet their own narrow immediate needs; they're rather less good at identifying future needs, let alone the needs of replacement industries.

The second is the assumption that training only benefits the economy directly if it is immediately relevant to today's economic needs. A point which I picked up in a meeting I attended recently is that tomorrow's NEETs can often, sadly, be identified at the age of 5. There are some key factors which identify the likely future employment status of children when they are at the beginning of their primary school years – and one of those factors is the educational attainment of the parents.

We always need to be careful of the distinction between a causal relationship and a correlation; but there is strong evidence to suggest that low levels of educational attainment and training beget low levels of educational attainment and training. If we assume that a reduction in the number of NEETs is itself economically beneficial (quite apart from the obvious social advantages), then addressing the factors which are creating tomorrow's NEETs has a direct economic advantage.

In short, providing training and qualifications of any level, even if the immediate economic benefit of that training is not obvious, will help to improve the level of educational attainment of the next generation and therefore have a delayed economic benefit. A skills strategy which over-emphasises meeting today's needs, on the other hand, may be helping to perpetuate a deep-rooted problem. Joined-up government means taking a much wider view.