APPENDIX 51
Memorandum submitted by Professor Alison
Wolf
Alison Wolf, Sir Roy Griffiths Professor of
Public Sector Management, King's College London
This country has an extremely long history of
governmental concern with actual or potential skill shortages.
In the following paragraphs I will attempt to extract the major
lessons of this history. Most are negative (though no less informative
for that): but I end with a major positive lesson with some clear
policy implications.
The first large scale inquiry into possible
shortfalls in skills training and technical/vocational education
took place in 1867 a period when the UK was still the clear world
leader in industrial production but becoming increasingly anxious
about rising competition from Germany. (At this point, the country
had a smaller population than Germany or the USA—30 million
compared to 41 and 38 million respectively. Japan was just about
to stage the Meiji restoration (1868), which set the scene for
its rise as modern and industrial power.)
This first inquiry was followed by a steady
flow of similar inquiries and commissions, whose common thread,
was, interestingly, a preoccupation with the German economy and
German competition, as well as with technical and engineering
skills, and with manufacturing industry. I list below the main
such reports for the period 1867-1969. Most led to, at most, a
few changes to the system of part-time "further" education
or, in some cases, to short-lived experiments with technical schools
and technical grammar schools.
From 1969 onwards, Royal Commissions go out
of fashion, but the pace of policy-making and the number of reports
increase (notably from such bodies as NEDO—the National
Education Development Office, which existed from 1962 to 1992—and
the CBI, as well as from central government. ) A full list of
these would stretch to pages (but for relevant discussions see
Hodgson et al 2002;Wolf 2002; Wolf et al 2006) Key policy innovations
were the Industrial Training Boards, with compulsory levies, created
in the 1960s, active in the 1970s, and abolished in the early
1980s; and the Manpower Training Commission, established in the
early 1970s and highly active in the 1980s and early 1990s. New
occupation—specific qualifications—National Vocational
Qualifications—were developed in the late 80s, covering
95% of all then-extant occupations; and General National Vocational
Qualifications, for use in full-time secondary and further education,
followed. (GNVQs were abolished last year, but NVQs remain. )
GNVQ titles/syllabuses included Manufacturing and Engineering
(as separate subject areas) but very few students ever took a
Manufacturing GNVQ.
In all cases, skill shortages and the need to
upgrade the skills of the current as well as the future workforce
were the major justification for policy, and especial attention
was focused on manufacturing industry. In the case of the Manpower
Services Commission, management skills were the concern of a large-scale
"Management Charter Initiative" which, in the early
1990s, developed management standards and a range of NVQs in management,
which were expected to achieve high levels of uptake and have
a major impact on management skills, especially in small and medium
enterprises. (These have undergone two sets of major revisions
and are still available as formal qualifications.)
More recently, we have had the National Skills
Task Force, which was established by David Blunkett when Labour
first took office in 1997, to address the perceived skills crisis,
Its final report ("Skills for All") was published in
2000 and made 26 recommendations for governmental action, to form
part of a new National Skills Agenda. Some, though by no means
all of these, have been implemented.
Most recently, we have had the Leitch report.
(2006: "Prosperity for all in the global economy—world
class skills") Much of the latter's analysis, and emphasis
on the need to "upskill" the workforce in response to
rising overseas challenges will be extremely familiar to anyone
who has read the reports of the late 19th century, let alone those
of the 1970s. The major change is that, instead of Germany, the
most recent reports pay most attention to the rising power of
China (and a lesser extent India), and the number of engineering
graduates being produced by these countries. However, Germany
does still figure as an important point of comparison, in the
context of the qualification levels of the current workforce.
Another point of continuity between earlier reports and the most
recent inquiries is the relative lack of attention paid to the
United States, even though the USA has been the world leader in
innovation, productivity growth, and income per head for well
over a century.
What lessons can one draw?
The most important must be that government training
and skills policy has rather little impact on the real economy.
During the period described, the UK economy grew by a rather constant,
if rather unexciting, average of around 2%, while, around it,
other countries exhibited far greater gyrations. Most of the inquiries
held in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries
produced rather little action; and in the 1960s and 1970s, when
the UK economy was performing very badly, a number of influential
authors argued that the failure to establish good technical education
on the German model was a major reason for this economic weakness.
However, the economic turn-around of the 1990s, and the sustained
success of the UK economy in the last decade, have been achieved
without any such technical education system being created.
Sir Geoffrey Owen's superb analysis of the decline,
and re-birth, of UK industry (Owen 1999) concluded that, in all
but one sector (mechanical engineering), the failure—or
relative success—of apprenticeship and on-job training was
of very minor relevance to the industry's history. The great success
story of the post-war years, namely pharmaceuticals, was off the
radar of post-war education planners, who were preoccupied, as
usual, with engineering and manufacturing skills.
Suppose, however, that one adopts a counter-factual,
and imagines a Britain in which a much larger number of young
people are trained in the skills required for manufacturing industry,
and large sums are also made available to such industry in order
to sustain and improve the skill levels of the existing workforce.
Could this plausibly have increased our recent growth rates, and
current prosperity? Or made us confident of greater prosperity
in future?
It is difficult to imagine exactly how. The
one economy in the developed world which remains heavily dependent
on manufacturing is Germany's, and its strength is in highly specialised
areas—notably machine goods—for which world demand
is high but not unlimited. It also enjoys a very distinctive apprenticeship-based
training systems which successive UK governments have tried, and
completely failed, to imitate, but which allows for highly flexible
response by company trainers to changing markets and skill demands.
If this country had been determined to subsidise
manufacturing of a less specialised type, it would have been trying
to preserve British competitiveness against countries- especially
China—whose competitive position in this area is overwhelming,
but could not have been predicted thirty or even twenty years
ago. However skilled a Western European workforce, it cannot,
at anything like conceivable wage rates, compete against the manufacturing
facilities of low-wage successfully developing countries, which
will be able, for the foreseeable future, to continue meeting
world demand for consumer goods at prices far below those that
the UK could offer. It is worth pointing out that, in 1980, or
even 1990, not only did no-one foresee this development. They
also did not, and could not, foresee the explosive development
of the internet, or internet-related and -based industries and
services. So a major training programme which trained people in
highly specific "manufacturing-related" skills on the
basis of industry as it existed in 1980 or 1990 would, in effect,
have been training them for redundancy.
In this respect, the British manufacturers of
1870 and 1884 turn out to have been highly prescient. Their requests
of government were rather different from those made by many modern
companies. They did not request direct subsidies for either their
training activities or for their labour force (through imported
labour or wage subsidies). On the contrary, witness after witness
stated that they could manage their own business now and in the
future without government help or intervention. What they did
want, however, was a better educated population of school leavers,
and especially one with more and a better scientific education.
If we recruit young people with a good, general level of scientific
understanding, witness after witness informed the commissions,
we can then take care of the specific training we need for our
particular businesses. But if we do not have such well-educated
young people, then we are indeed not in a position to compete
with German manufacturers who do.
More than a century later, the same analysis
applies. It is not within government's capacity to predict, or
provide, the specific training required by rapidly changing and
highly diverse enterprises; nor should they be subsidising existing
companies at the expense of new and future entrants. They should,
however, be providing a good general education which includes
a high level of scientific and mathematical literacy. One of the
ways in which the ICT revolution has genuinely changed the requirements
of manufacturing industry is in the demands it makes for employees
to understand the underlying relations between parts of complex
processes, and interpret statistical and numerical information
relating to these: and the more advanced the manufacturing concern,
the more true this becomes. (See Hoyles et al and the recommendations
of the Smith Report, 2004) The continuing existence of a long,
poorly educated "tail" among Britain's school-leavers,
and the generally low levels of maths and science attainment,
are the real issue for a government concerned with manufacturing
industry's skill needs.
| 1867-68 | Report from the Select Committee on Scientific Instruction
|
| 1872 | Report from the Select Commission on Scientific Instruction (Devonshire Report)
|
| 1884 | Report of the Royal Commission on Technical Instruction (Samuelson Commission)
|
| 1895 | Report of the Royal Commission on Secondary Education
|
| 1906 | Report of the Consultative Committee on Higher Elementary Education
|
| 1915-16 | Report of Committee of Privy Council for Scientific and Industrial Research
|
| 1918 | Final Report of the Departmental Committee on Juvenile Education in Relation to Employment after the War
|
| 1919 | Labour Conditions and Adult Education. Ministry of Reconstruction
|
| 1926 | Report of the Consultative Committee of the Board of Education on the Education of the Adolescent (Hadow Report)
|
| 1927 | Report of the Committee on Industry and Trade (Balfour Report)
|
| 1928 | Report of the Committee on Education and Industry (Malcolm Report)
|
| 1937 | Cooperation in Technical Education
|
| 1938 | Report of the Consultative Committee of the Board of Education on Secondary Education with Special Reference to Grammar Schools and Technical High Schools (Spens Report)
|
| 1945 | Recruitment and Training of Juveniles for Industry. Joint Consultative Committee of the National Joint Advisory Council (NJAC) to the Ministry of Labour
|
| 1945 | Report of a Special Committee on Higher Technological Education (Percy Report)
|
| 1946 | Report of Committee on Scientific Manpower (Barlow Committee Report)
|
| 1949 | Report of Special Committee on Education for Commerce (Carr-Saunders Report)
|
| 1950 | The Future Development of Higher Technological Education. National Advisory Council on Education for Industry and Commerce
|
| 1951 | Higher Technological Education
|
| 1955 | Report on the Recruitment of Scientists and Engineers in the Engineering Industry
|
| 1956 | Technical Education. Ministry of Education White Paper
|
| 1958 | Training for Skill (Carr Report): NJAC Subcommittee, reporting to the Ministry of Labour and National Service
|
| 1969 | National Advisory Council on Education for Industry and Commerce: Haslegrave Report (Report of the Committee on Technician Courses and Examinations)
|
| |
1867-1969: Major Government Reports relating to vocational
and technical education
October 2006
|
