When you go to the dentist, what do you expect? That they will check your teeth, see if you need any fillings, give you some advice on oral hygiene? You probably don’t expect that they will teach your child to read, tackle youth unemployment or solve poverty.
But when it comes to education, politicians are remarkably relaxed about loading wider social responsibilities on to schools. The suggestion from Alan Milburn, a former minister and now a senior government adviser, is that primary schools – that is, schools that educate children aged four to 11 – should identify children who might not be in education, employment or training at the age of 16. “The warning signs are there from a very early, early age. You know, frankly from preschool,” he said. “So, definitely primary schools should be identifying children who are at risk of being Neet. And secondary schools and other services should be intercepting, intervening, supporting and helping those young people to get on a different path.”
Laudable in theory, but we need a bit of realism about what it is fair to make schools responsible for, and if making them responsible for so many things is going to cause more problems than it solves.
Defenders of this approach will argue that big problems have many causes, so we need a holistic response that breaks down institutional silos. I’d argue that by making people responsible for outcomes they have very little control over, you risk demoralising them and distracting them from what they can control.
Of course, it is true that primaries, and secondaries as well, have some influence over students’ later career prospects. There are numerous studies showing the importance of numeracy and literacy to economic outcomes. Getting GCSE English and maths means a student will be much less likely to be Neet. In fact, if a primary did want to create a “Neet risk register”, the simplest thing to do would be to list the pupils struggling to read.
But that just shows the futility of this kind of policy. The main way a primary school can contribute to a pupil’s future work success is by teaching them maths and English. Requiring a separate Neet strategy would add another layer of bureaucracy to a system that is already too full of them. A boy who is struggling to read shouldn’t need a “potentially unemployed in 2034” database tag before a school can act.
We also need to recognise that while schools have influence over students’ later success, they are just one small part of a wider system. Having better basic skills and more qualifications will help individuals succeed in the labour market. But if there are persistent structural problems with the labour market, improving individuals’ skills will not necessarily create more or better opportunities overall.
Our new government disagrees. They see rising youth unemployment rates as largely education’s problem. It isn’t just Alan Milburn: the new education secretary, Lucy Powell, has suggested a causal link between schools policy and Neet rates, and this analysis is being used to justify radical reform, or as she puts it “rewiring the entire education system to give young people from all backgrounds the chance to thrive”. But is that link true? Neet rates have risen in England and Wales, despite them having very different education systems. The tax and regulatory burden of employing young people has increased in the past few years, and this may have contributed to the sudden rise in Neets over and above what goes on in schools.
More broadly, we need to look at systemic issues with the British economy. A recent analysis by John Burn-Murdoch in the Financial Times showed that US workers who are functionally illiterate earn as much as the average British worker. “The same proportion of US workers who score stunningly low on literacy earn an average of almost $30 per hour, and two-thirds of them are in work,” he said. “Their British counterparts make the equivalent of $20 and fewer than half are employed.”
Schools can make sure students have the skills they need to thrive in a modern economy, but the economy has to be set up to take advantage of those skills. Increasingly, ours is not. We need to look at all the factors other than skills that might be contributing to this: housing, energy, transport, tax, regulation, health.
And we need to be careful: if we keep improving skills without increasing opportunities, we risk creating a generation of smart but disillusioned young people, youngsters who worked hard at school and university but still ended up with worse living standards than their parents and their peers in other countries.
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Over the past 20 years, the UK has barely seen any per capita GDP growth, or any growth in median wages. In the same period, primary schools in England have risen up the rankings on international tests: according to the most recent rankings in 2021, England is one of the best-performing countries in the west on Pirls, a test of primary literacy. Primaries are a rare example of an English public policy success. We risk undermining that success by making them compensate for state failures elsewhere.
More broadly, why is it that a holistic approach to a social problem generally requires schools to take on extra responsibilities? “Joined-up government” always seems to involve schools helping the Treasury and Home Office achieve their objectives, not Treasury officials and police officers teaching eight-year-olds to read and count.
Schools are already doing a good job. Some other parts of the British state need to get better at doing theirs.
