We await the Levelling Up White Paper. It is not easy to read the tealeaves of this turbulent political time to work out when the delay is likely to be terminated, although the last rumour I heard has it down for Wednesday. It has been on the cards for publication for some months, although not as long as the response to the Augar Review. In both these documents one may expect the word skills to be much in evidence. It is a term that, rather like levelling up itself, does not lend itself to a simple definition, but can mean different things to different people in different contexts. That can be handy for politicians of any complexion.
Skills – and adult upskilling – both matter if levelling up is to be achieved. As Thomas Aubrey wrote in a recent blog for the Bennett Institute
‘Many studies indicate that the main driver of productivity growth is the ability of an education system to improve human capital to make the most of new technology.’
Multiple studies and reports have examined variations in attainment levels between different parts of the country. If the above statement is correct, then any variations – and there are plenty – will have knock on effects for the local economy. To give a specific example of such education variation, based on data for 2019/20 looking at the percentage of under 19s who have obtained a Level 2 qualification (i.e.5 GCSEs at grade 4 or above, or A*- C in old money), it has been shown that nine out of ten of the best performing local authorities lie within the Greater London area. However, the tenth, indeed the highest in ranking of all, is Rutland, no distance at all from Nottingham, which across all the local authorities has the worst overall score. Rutland, with a score of 93.5%, is a full 25% above Nottingham (67.7%).
Those students who don’t get a Level 2 qualification are inevitably going to be disadvantaged in the job market, and are likely to be unable to take advantage of higher-level skills, whatever they might be. This area is where the response to Augar should be coming into its own, along with the Lifetime Skills Guarantee for post 18 education, intended to facilitate access to higher technical qualifications as much as degrees. Thus the lifetime ‘skills’ will cover a wide potential range, and who will be doing the teaching where, will likewise be very varied. The present mishmash of qualifications from apprenticeships to BTECs and T Levels – aimed at 16-19 year olds primarily – are enough to baffle anyone (employer or putative employee). While so much is up in the air, cohort after cohort of students is being disadvantaged. In regions where job prospects are low, or at least skilled and well-paid jobs are in short supply, the motivation to apply oneself to get decent skills may be hard to find, the more so if children have only ever seen their parents struggle and they cannot imagine a better life and better prospects. The connection between levelling up and skills is obvious, although the trap of an area being caught in a low skills equilibrium is pervasive and persistent.
Amidst all this, there is no doubt that increasingly many jobs require a sufficiency of numerical and statistical fluency, as well as the ability to read graphs and use spreadsheets. More so than ever before. Whether going into retail or building trades, or more professional settings such as environmental science or law, these skills have never been needed so much. For those students who do get their Level 2 qualification and proceed to Level 3 (A Levels or the vocational qualifications), they may well drop maths and think they never need it again, only to find later on that their lack of numeracy and mathematical confidence catches up with them. The Royal Society, jointly with the British Academy, has just put out a commentary spelling out the importance of pursuing some maths at Level 3, even when that is not one of the subjects (e.g. A Level) taken. Core Maths is designed to fill this gap.
Back in 2011, I was Chair of the Royal Society’s Education Committee and hosting a speech given by the then Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, when he said
‘I think we should set a new goal for the education system so that within a decade the vast majority of pupils are studying maths right through to the age of 18’
a sentiment with which the audience at the Royal Society was totally in agreement. A year later, I was representing the Royal Society at an event about quantitative skills at the British Academy, at which the importance of statistics for social scientists and humanities’ scholars was stressed – and also brought home at a personal level by the then Science Minister David Willetts, who encountered the mysteries of regression analysis during his PPE course at Oxford without having the tools to handle them. More and more jobs require this literacy – and this most certainly includes politicians. Core Maths is meant to be the answer to the problem, but it has not necessarily penetrated as far as it should into the education system. The commentary the Royal Society has just published is explicitly encouraging universities to expect Core Maths qualifications for admission to a much wider range of courses, far beyond those for which Maths would be a natural subject to take at A Level.
It will be seen that levelling up and numeracy are definitely related when skills are discussed. Levelling up, like skills, means different things to different people, but most certainly it should mean an improvement in local economic conditions where things are currently bad, so that inequality is reduced across the country and those living insecure financial lives have better opportunities. Furthermore, to revert to the Aubrey quote I gave before, if more money is being committed to research and innovation (as in the latest Spending Review) it requires that there are workers in companies able to get hold of that innovation and turn it into profit and productivity, even if they have not been involved in the innovation itself. If there are insufficient such workers – insufficient absorptive capacity – then the full advantage of developments cannot be taken. This too will have a strong regional component, building on educational disadvantage.
In this category of workers I am not talking primarily about university graduates in technical areas, vital though they are, I am talking about those with intermediate skills who will do much of the practical improvements, putting ideas into practice and making sure the logistics work. Within universities, the Talent Policy Commission has been looking at the crucial role technicians play, often insufficiently recognized, in higher education. Their full report will be published this coming week, but an earlier report from last autumn specifically looked at the role technicians play in knowledge exchange activities. Similar analysis applies within companies; intermediate technical skills are too often overlooked by those considering training needs and employment and the pipeline of talent not taken into account where it needs to be, a point clearly made in a report by Paul Lewis in 2019 for the Gatsby Foundation 9 (Technicians and Innovation).
Joining these different strands – more money in the innovation system, more absorptive capacity with a more highly skilled workforce, including in what may now fall under core maths – are all crucial strands in levelling up. If inequality is to be reduced across the UK, then ensuring that educational outcomes are comparable in Rutland and Nottingham, in Barnet and Blackpool, is one key step on which to build. There is a long way to go in making the current systems integrated and coherent.
