Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60
- 62)
MONDAY 12 JANUARY 2004
MR CHRIS
HUMPHRIES AND
PROFESSOR ALISON
WOLF
Q60 Mr Gibb: No, purely comprehensive
schools.
Professor Wolf: Also because I
agree that any class is mixed ability. Somebody teaching maths
at Trinity College Cambridge still has mixed ability. There are
many good things happening. For example, many of the subject associations
in secondary schools have had a fantastically positive effect
on much of the secondary curriculum in this country. To talk about
other things I wish they could come in: I wish they could have
more impact again. Clearly a lot of the academic teaching at sixth
form level is also excellent. There are lots of things which we
should not throw away and one of the things we should also be
very aware of is something where we have a very good record in
this country and have had a very good record and that is of allowing
second chances. Perhaps I can take the opportunity to get this
on record. One of the things which worries me about some of the
trends at the moment is that we may be becoming more like our
European neighbours, where it is very hard, once you have made
a decision and you are on a track either to change track or, if
you fall off, ever to come back again. This relates to the issue
of whether we are looking at 14-19 and FE together. There is a
real danger there. No, there are things which are seriously wrong
and, coming back to your question about plumbers, the standard
of the basic education of a country is something which its government
must indeed take very, very seriously because it impinges on all
other aspects.
Q61 Mr Gibb: I wonder how we got
where we are today. Why are our literacy and mathematical skills
so poor? All the mathematics statistics show that it is very,
very poor compared with other countries.
Professor Wolf: There is of course
a question about the exact levels and somebody mentioned the issue
of basic skills levels. You may know, since it is now public knowledge,
that the original international adult literacy survey from which
we get these figures showed the French to be so infinitely much
worse than us that the French Cabinet had an emergency meeting
and pulled the results. You have to ask a little bit about what
exactly is being measured, how far it is a problem of measurement,
how far it is that we are looking for skills which in the past
we did not look for. The question is perhaps not so much how we
got there but how we did not realise that we needed to do more.
I have no evidence which would show that the average literacy
levels or the distribution of literacy 50 years ago was much greater
across the population than it is today. It is as much about failures
of omission as of commission. This circles back to my own particular
concern: perhaps one of the problems is that in modern government
we try to do so many things so actively that we get lost in endless
small reforms and lose sight of big pictures. It seems to me that
the big picture for a government in education is ensuring that
all its citizens have the major, central, important skills—I
do not think I would want to call them basic skills—that
they need for the sort of economy and the sort of country and
the sort of life that they want citizens to have.
Mr Humphries: We have to be very
careful. You have heard us making all sorts of statements about
the education system, but remember what we have been talking about—and
we have been pretty universal between us in terms of talking about
exactly the same thing. We have an education system which is serving
around 50% of the population incredibly well. It is the reason
still that our education system is the envy of much of the world.
It is the reason why the UK is probably the number one country
whose advice is sought on educational developments by countries
around the world. In terms of vocational education, believe it
or not, we probably get asked as a country for more advice for
other countries on vocational education than even countries like
Germany and Austria and the Netherlands, who supposedly have the
system which is envied. My concern has been the other 50%. Look
at our HE results; they are fantastic. Our universities are envied.
Do not misinterpret what I have been saying; I think Alison might
well say the same. What we are talking about is the other half
of the system and doing for the 50% which is currently not well
served, the job we have done for the first 50%. I am certainly
not here shooting wildly.
Q62 Mr Gibb: My question was why?
Why are the 50% performing so badly? What has caused that?
Mr Humphries: I would argue that
we have done it because the fundamental design of the system,
which has actually changed very little in many ways since 1944,
has always been to act as a filter to identify those who will
go on to higher education. You asked the question about plumbing
as well and whether this is anything to do with plumbing. I do
not think it has anything to do with plumbing at all. As the awarding
body which trains all the plumbers, I can assure you that there
is no risk of us having a shortage of plumbers any more when I
look at the number of students involved in plumbing. In fact what
I am concerned about is the fact that we may have far too many
people with plumbing qualifications and not enough work to go
round if they all come out the other end. What happened was not
the fact that the education system did not equip people, but society's
expectations and blatant prejudice, as well as views about what
leads to good futures, say academic good, vocational bad. Young
people started walking away from engineering and construction
in all sorts of ways from the early 1980s onwards. What happened
was that suddenly someone noticed that there really is a relationship
between skill shortages and salaries and that it was becoming
reflected in plumbing and young people started voting with their
feet and going into plumbing in September 2001 on a scale you
would not believe. The market began to work just slowly and painfully
against a backdrop of society's expectations and attitudes which
said vocational poor, academic good. What we are beginning to
see is that young people, perhaps faster than their parents or
indeed policymakers, are beginning to see the way in which market
really works and are voting with their feet. What we have to do
is recognise in our education system that the choice of plumbing
is as valid a choice as law or medicine and that we need them
just as much as we need the others and begin to create a society
in which young people hear us say that, see us say it, see politicians
say it, see the media say it and see salaries and investment in
the education system designed to produce plumbers as valued as
the investment in the education which produces lawyers. I think
it is prejudice which has got us where we are.
Chairman: We have had a very good session.
We have kept you here for over two hours. We have ranged but we
have also got under the skin of the whole subject, for which I
am very grateful. I am grateful for that last word on plumbers.
He is not here today, but there will be singing and dancing in
St Albans at the news. That is an in-committee joke. It has been
a very good and very serious session; we enjoyed it and we have
learned a lot. We know where you live, so we might be in communication
again. If you feel there is something that you wanted to say to
us—this is a serious inquiry, we are going to do it very
well—we should be very grateful for anything you think you
missed saying to us and you know where our specialist advisers
live too. Thank you.
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