Productivity in the UK, Vocational Education

 

The Lazy Girl
Henry Nelson O'Neil (1817-1880)
Photo Credit: Tunbridge Wells Borough Council [CC BY-NC]

An audio clip, featuring potential prime minister Liz Truss has appeared, which criticises the British work ethic.

... In the recording, which dates from Truss's days as chief secretary to the Treasury, she put Britain's low productivity down to "working culture": she believed "more graft" was needed.

... She might also come clean about her enthusiasm for Chinese working practices, which she compared favourably with British ones in her recorded conversation. The working norm in China is known as "996" - 9am to 9pm six days a week. I doubt a 72-hour working week would go down a storm with the Red Wall.* 

Nor would it solve the productivity problem, the causes of which are multiple, as are the potential solutions. Getting people to work longer hours is not among them. In Switzerland, the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany - the richest big countries in Europe - workers put in fewer hours per year than in Britain and are both more productive, in terms of output per hour worked and more prosperous, in terms of income per head.

What links those high-achieving European countries, other than economic success, is an education system ... our education system has favoured academic over technical subjects. The Swiss, Danes, Dutch and Germans all take vocational education seriously. Britain's disdain for skills flows right through the system from their near-total absence in schools to the lack of specialist expertise in politics and the civil service.

[*UK constituencies, traditionally Labour, who voted Conservative in the last election]

(Emma Duncan, The Times, 2022)

Sir, Emma Duncan is right to focus on the education system as part of of the problem with British productivity. However, it is not just the lack of a thriving technical and apprenticeship scheme in the UK that is a problem, but the British attitude towards traditional working-class occupations.

In Switzerland people doing doing typical working-class  jobs go through rigorous and lengthy training and emerge justifiably proud of what they are able to achieve. Similarly they are widely respected for their highly professional standards. Thus there is far less distinction between the status of traditional working-class jobs and professional jobs. This means that there is not the British problem of vocational training being seen as a "conspiracy by the ruling class to keep the workers down", as Duncan says. Another aspect is that the majority of Swiss politicians will have gone to the same schools as the people over whom they rule, so there is a better understanding between those who rule and those who are ruled.

(Hugh Clarke, Chesieres, Switzerland, The Times, 2022)

Diane Coyle, Bennet professor of public policy at Cambridge and a director of the Productivity Institute.

"The UK's productivity is low but that has nothing to do with how hardworking or lazy people are. It grows when workers have better equipment and software to work with."

(The Observer, 2022)

Vocational Education

Bury Technical School

unknown artist

Photo Credit: Steven Smith /Art UK [CC BY-NC]

Boris Johnson is hardly the first prime minister to highlight the gulf between academic and vocational education in Britain and lament its damaging effects on both individual life chances and national economic performance... this has been a problem that has bedevilled Britain for at least a 100 years. Yet never has the need to address this challenge been more urgent. Even before the pandemic, it was clear the education system was failing to deliver many of the technical skills that sectors such as the digital economy, engineering, construction and care require.

The Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts that unemployment could hit 13 per cent in the next few years from 4 per cent now.  Millions of people may find themselves in need of retraining. And it is far from clear that the system is equipped to provide them with the skills to switch to new careers.

... Britain has been successful in driving up university attendance to above 50 per cent of school leavers from about 30 per cent a few years ago. But the reality is that too many graduates leave university loaded with debt and unable to find a graduate-level job. Meanwhile the number taking technical courses has been in freefall, despite clear evidence of strong demand for many technical skills.

... The result is that just 10 per cent of adults hold a higher technical qualification, compared with 20 per cent in Germany.

... Why Britain has so persistently failed to address this problem is a mystery.

... Others have noted a lack of funding as resources were diverted to universities, endlessly changing qualifications, a lack of clear division of responsibilities between central and local government, employers and unions that makes skills-based training so effective in many other countries, notably Germany. Nonetheless the biggest obstacle may be cultural, or what Mr Johnson referred to as the "pointless, snooty and frankly vacuous" attitude towards technical education. That will be harder to fix.

(Times Editorial, 2020)

Boosting the profile and the status of the electronic communications, engineering, construction and care sectors would be a start. If these sectors are recognised as "high worth" entities then their pay should reflect this. This would mean government intervention. 

Germany has always been seen as a leader in vocational education so why have the politicians not copied some or all of their policies? Their degrees in technical education are seen as of similar value to "academic" ones. Their policy of "dual training" combines theory and training embedded in a real life-work environment. 

How many secretaries of state for education have there been in the last 50 years and how many of them have served their full term at education? Chopping and changing does not create the necessary stability to see through much needed reform in vocational education. 

*Tony Blair once joked that you could declare war in a speech about skills and no one would notice.

The lack of interest in vocational education has long been a cause of hand-wringing shame among the policy-minded political class.

Boris Johnson's end to the "snooty" distinction between the academic and the practical joins a long line of his predecessors making much the same appeal.

... Rishi Sunak's winter economic package, which replaced the furlough scheme with a less generous subsidy for short-hours working, was notably short on new skills policy.

... Mr Johnson suggested that the coronavirus crisis was an opportunity to speed a mass reallocation of labour that automation and other technological change was going to require anyway. That's a brave message to deliver to those expecting a P45. Unless it comes with meaningful help - and soon - it is unlikely to be kindly received.

(Francis Elliott, The Times, 2020)

*The technology institute founded by the inventor Sir James Dyson will soon have the power to award its own degrees - the first of a new wave of alternative providers.

The Dyson Institute of Engineering and Technology, which opened in 2017 on the site of Dyson's design centre in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, has 150 engineering undergraduates who pay no tuition fees and receive a full-time wage during their four years studying and working alongside Dyson staff.

The Office for Students, the higher education regulator in England, has said the institute can award degrees in its own name from next year, the first to do so under legislation that created the route in 2017.

Dyson is estimated to have spent more than £30m on the institute and its campus, which includes study-bedroom pods. It claims to attract more applications from qualified school-leavers than many Oxbridge courses, with 14 applying for each place.

(Richard Adams, The Guardian, 2020)