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One hates to exaggerate, but the skills crisis in Britain really is a disaster. Unless we do something, and soon, the entire country will qualify for a disability allowance. While the Government, like its predecessors as far back as Margaret Thatcher, continues to re-arrange the deck chairs on education’s promenade deck – making and unmaking comprehensives, establishing “academies”, resuscitating grammar schools, most of all, testing, testing, testing – the fact remains that Britain’s children are growing up into some of the least-well-equipped in the developed world.
Only young Americans are more fatuous. The irony, that the U.S. remains the most technologically inventive nation on Earth and that Britain, as we love to boast, is the world’s fifth-largest economy, comes down to three things: private education for the élite, the exploitation of immigrants, and a ruthless disregard for the rest.
In the case of the UK, we survive at the top level because of the City of London and a dozen or so big international corporations, such as Rolls-Royce and BAE Systems, both of which complain of a growing dearth of high-quality recruits. The fact that foreign corporations like Hitachi, Nissan and BMW, have based themselves here, taking advantage of our location, language and “liberal” employment laws, has served us well – so much so that we keep selling them what remains of the family silver. But that may not last much longer if the Government is unable to keep Britain in the European single market.
Sir James Dyson, the vacuum-cleaner tycoon, who believes a deal will be struck with Brussels that avoids a “suicidal” trade war, told the BBC last week that the skills shortage was a key reason why his company wasn’t expanding faster in the UK, as distinct from Asia.
“We want to expand here. The problem is there aren’t enough engineers. If we could double the number of engineers tomorrow, we would do it. But we can’t – so we have to grow slowly – much more slowly than we would like to.”
The construction industry is similarly hard-pressed. Paul Payne, the managing director of builders One Way told Sky News:
“The main issue facing the industry continues to be the ongoing and ever worsening skills shortages. As we, and a number of other major firms, have said, there’s just not enough people operating in the sector to work on all the projects currently in the pipeline. If the market continues to expand and becomes more positive, we could reach a stage very shortly where projects are put on hold solely due to skills shortages.”
A little after the referendum vote, two leading figures from the container port of Felixstowe told the Today programme that, though they, too, supported Leave, their companies desperately needed East European immigrants just to keep their businesses afloat. There weren’t enough native Brits, they said, who knew how to operate the complex machinery in the port. Nor were there anything like enough British truckers qualified to drive the 40-tonne lorries that lie at the heart of the nation’s export drive.
Almost a quarter of job vacancies in 2015 were caused by the widening skills crisis across the UK The Commission for Employment and Skills recently reported that of 928,000 vacancies that arose in 2015, 209,000 (22 per cent) were due to a skills shortage. Skilled trades continued to have the highest density of vacancies. A disturbing 43 per cent of jobs could not be filled because those applying simply lacked the required ability and knowledge.
This is shocking – or it ought to be. Without the immigrants who now fill so many of our front-line positions, including the Border Force, the UK would be spiralling down the plughole. If the Europeans are sent home (which must not be allowed to happen), we’re screwed.
The situation has, of course, been building for many years. The only thing most young people, or their parents, understand about modern technology, or any technology, is how to use a smartphone, but they could no more tell you what digital means than they could build a rocket to go to the Moon.
Which reminds me of a wonderful scene in the South African sc-fi film, District 9, in which it is revealed that none of the aliens who survived a crash in which the crew of their spaceship all died had a clue how their ship could travel faster than light. It turns out they were all travel agents on their way to an inter-galacatic conference.
That’s us, isn’t it? We’re all travel agents, booking our own holidays online, or salemen, working in offices, performing the same routine tasks day after day until it’s time to go to the pub or watch TV. Eventually, we will all be selling each other coffee – except that foreigners do that as well.
Education secretaries, from Shirley Williams, Margaret Thatcher and Ken Clarke, via David Blunkett, Estelle Morris and Ruth Kelly, to Michael Gove, Nicky Morgan and Justine Greening, have droned on since time began (or so it seems) about the way state schools are failing our young people. They talk about “ownership”, “inclusiveness”, discipline and the nature of the curriculum. But, except for the top 10 per cent of pupils, nothing really changes.
What we actually need is a German-style system that enables young people to develop their talents and recognises their abilities, whether as scientists, engineers, teachers, philosophers, artists, machine operators, welders, plumbers, electricians… or travel agents. It can be done. It should be done. And part of doing it is the recognition by the state, and society generally, that skilled workers, who know what they’re doing, are worth their weight in gold and should be paid appropriately. Such solid citizens should also be respected, as they are in Germany
No one, I imagine, including the Head Master of Eton, would disagree. But all we get are revisions of how the so-called brightest and best can be creamed off from the thickies. Education secretaries and prime ministers love to sound forth on equality of opportunity. Their talk is all about race and gender. But what about the untapped capacities of the millions of young people who are actually rather bright, and often extremely dextrous, but don’t much benefit from academic study? What we do need are properly-funded schools in every corner of the kingdom, staffed by dedicated, well-paid teachers, who know the strengths and weaknesses of their pupils and are free to direct them accordingly. There should be more classes available in metalwork, mechanics, engineering, plumbing, electrics and IT. There should be greater scope to study foreign languages, personal and corporate finance, teamwork and design. In short, there should be less farting about and more instruction.
Don’t tell me such opportunities already exist. Don’t tell me stories about celebrities who remember with gratitude and tears in their eyes the one special teacher who set them on the right path. Most British people remember their time at school as a waste of time. Many would be hard-pressed to recall the name of their maths teacher or the poor sap who failed to teach them French.
By the age of 14, most children’s futures are an open book. What we need are teachers able to read that book and tweak the Epilogue. Teenagers of an academic or scientific or technological bent should be streamed towards university. Those who are good with their hands or instinctively understand how things work should be encouraged to develop their skills so that they can apply for all those apprenticeships that we are told government and industry are bursting to provide. Finally, those who show no particular aptitude for anything (and they exist) should at least be taught how to behave in public, why drinking ten pints a night is not necessarily a good thing, why saving is beneficial and how hard work, even if you start off as a supermarket shelf-stacker, can result in a better life in the years ahead.
The question is, has anyone got the necessary skills to do that? Or will we just hear more about, grammars v. academies, curriculums v. personal development, universities v. the dole queue, and, above all, testing? Is it still the Government’s hope that 50 per cent of school leavers should go to university, where half of them at least will learn little that is useful and end up burdened with debt? Or will it – finally – begin to rebalance the system so that, without obsessing over “success” and “failure,” youngsters acquire the skills and practical knowledge that the country, and the economy, truly need. It’s not rocket science. If it was, we could do it. It’s common sense.
Are you listening, Justine Greening? Your own school, Oakwood High School, in Rotherham, started life in 1952 as a technical school. Then it became semi-comprehensive, whatever that means, before going fully comprehensive in 1967, at which point it lost its sixth form to the nearby Thomas Rotherham College (motto, Lest We Appear Ungrateful). In 2001, having been awarded Technology College status, it changed its name to Oakwood Technology College, only, in 2012, to “rebrand” itself once more as Oakwood School. In 2010, it was due to be rebuilt under New Labour’s Building Schools for the Future programme, except that that scheme was abandoned by the incoming Coalition. Today, as an academy, it is being upgraded in accordance with the new Priority Schools Building Programme.
When will it all end? When will schools and teachers be allowed just to get on with their work and start turning out the young people we need to sustain a 21st century economy? Don’t ask me. I’m not an MP, and Parliament knows best. Oh yes.
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Iain Martin and the team make sense of the news, providing commentary and analysis on the stories that matter in politics, geopolitics, economics and culture.