| Good morning. My thanks to Jim, Robert, Lucy, Jonathan and particularly to Jen and Georgina for filling in during my holiday. For today, some thoughts on a few of the non-fiction articles I read and their implications for the weeks and months ahead to come. I really love Daisy Christodoulou’s Substack, No More Marking. As an unapologetic “trad” and a believer in knowledge-rich curricula, I make no apologies that it is regularly a comfort read in that it is really well written, with plenty of data . . . but also I agree with it deeply. Christodoulou has written several fantastic pieces on Andy Burnham’s plans for education and her concerns about them, but my favourite is this one, on “The Problem with Parity of Esteem,” in which she sets out some of the reasons why previous attempts to introduce a wider variety of vocational qualifications for children aged 14 to 16 did not work: I would say that the underlying error which caused a lot of these problems was that policymakers were never completely clear about the purpose of vocational school education. Was it to provide a clear pathway to the 15-20 per cent of jobs in technical sectors for the 15-20 per cent of students with the most interest and aptitude for those jobs? Or was it to provide an alternative to GCSEs for the 30-40 per cent of students struggling to get five good GCSEs? A lot of the time policymakers would assume that these two purposes were basically the same. Their thought process seemed to be as follows: students who struggle with academic learning will be “good with their hands”. So we can therefore get the 30-40 per cent of students struggling to get five good GCSEs to do vocational courses instead. We’ve then conveniently solved two problems: we’ve solved the problem of disaffected teens turned off by academic learning, and we’ve created a pipeline of future technical specialists. The problem is that there is not a one-to-one match between these two cohorts. Of course, we can all think of a student who hates the classroom but comes alive in the workshop. But that is an anecdote, not data, and to the extent we have relevant data, it suggests that academic aptitude and being good with your hands have a modest positive correlation, not a negative one. And a lot of the most valuable vocational courses have quite challenging academic demands: the electrical installation course requires knowledge of algebra and trigonometry, plus mastery of a wiring regulations handbook that is twice as long as Pride and Prejudice. Of course there will always be individual exceptions, but it is difficult to imagine many students with grade 2s [Es and Fs] in English and maths thriving on such a course. Burnham’s announcements on 14 to 16 education are thus far quite abstract, but one reason to worry is that there is, again, the same confusion about what he is trying to do. Is the focus on greater vocational education about providing routes into lucrative, highly skilled trades such as being an electrician or a plumber? Or is it about providing an alternative path for those who might otherwise become Neet? My concern is history teaches us that aiming to do both means you do neither. For balance, another Substack I very much enjoy, because it gives me a good synaptic workout whether I agree or disagree with it, is Edrith by Iain Mansfield, a former Conservative spad at the Department for Education, now at Policy Exchange. Mansfield writes on what Burnham’s critics are missing: We want our school system to do a variety of things — and not all of them can be achieved at the same time. In particular, two goals that are at least partly in tension are: That every academically-capable child, regardless of their background, should be stretched to fulfil their full academic potential, progressing to university and beyond. That those children who are not academically able are given the opportunity to develop other talents, so that they also can take up productive and rewarding roles in society. Some things we might do in schools further both aims. It is important for everyone to be able to read, so phonics teaching and a focus on literacy are vital. Good behaviour policies, creating environments where children are safe and able to learn without disturbance, similarly benefit every child. The list goes on. But there are also trade-offs. At one level this simply involves prioritisation: where do we put our resources, whether that is money, the best teachers, or government policy focus. But there are also more hard-edged trade-offs. The longer you force every child to take an academically focused curriculum, the more likely you are to ensure no children in the first camp fall through the net. But the more likely, also, you are to have less academically capable children become disengaged with the system entirely, go off the rails and set themselves on the path to long-term unemployment, addiction, homelessness or criminality. Mansfield’s argument is that we have an education system that is very poorly geared towards the needs of the “forgotten third” of pupils who do not get good GCSEs and, for the most part, have poor outcomes across the course of their lives: We can see that pretty consistently, 35-40 per cent of children in state schools fail to achieve a pass — a C in old money or a 4 today — in both GCSE English and maths. Given that schools are — rightly — incentivised to try very hard to get children to pass these subjects, for many children this statistic will also represent worse performance in other subjects also. We can see that this number is also very sticky — over time and across regions. Over the last 15 years, despite the massive focus on this issue, it’s fallen by about 5 per cent. That is not nothing: it represents tens of thousands of children per year. But at that rate of improvement, we’ll still be talking about the “forgotten quarter” in the 2050s and the “forgotten fifth” in about 2070. As it happens, “a third” is about the amount I agree with Mansfield most of the time, and similarly I think he raises an important point — about that third who currently do not get good GCSEs. (I am more optimistic than Mansfield about the ability of policy to reduce this third still further in theory, but in practice, to sustain these faults you would need some kind of 50-year consensus on education policy to emerge and endure.) But my concern remains that in practice, when we ask schools to do this, what ends up happening is that children who look like they “ought” to struggle end up being pushed into less challenging routes. Part of the success of education policy in recent decades is that the children of immigrants do better than they do in most other countries, I think in large part because we have a system that heavily disincentivises “well, of course they are going to struggle”, which I think results in worse outcomes for children from working-class backgrounds and for children from immigrant backgrounds, regardless of class. I also very much enjoyed Amelia Wood’s piece for the think-tank ThinkLabour (no prizes for guessing which party they are close to) on the reason why it is so difficult to book a driving test nowadays, and how to fix it: You see, the price of a driving test hasn’t risen since 2009. Set in law at £62 by statutory instrument, it is a political choice to raise it. The Conservatives never did. Keeping the price fixed, presumably, was a tactic to make the DVSA [Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency] more efficient and to avoid unpopular headlines (because no one likes higher prices). That didn’t matter so much before the pandemic. Inflation was quite low during the 2010s so the DVSA could just about manage. But when the pandemic brought about both a backlog and an inflation spike, the DVSA didn’t have the resources to cope. From its driving test operations earning taxpayers millions annually, the DVSA now loses £44mn on them: £24 per test. It couldn’t (and cannot) afford to pay examiners an attractive enough wage to hire more. The most obvious way to fix the system would be to whack the price of a driving test up by 30 quid and hire some more examiners. But in a cost-of-living crisis, the political calculation of four successive post-pandemic governments is that such a price rise is impossible. The decree comes down from No10: We are a cost-of-living government now, you must not raise any prices your department is responsible for. But keeping prices artificially low at the expense of a working test system costs learners far more — it keeps them out of work, it forces them to pay a scalper or for another six months of driving lessons. Nor is it based on evidence it’s what voters actually want. Wood argues — and ThinkLabour has commissioned polling that shows there is an appetite for this among the public — that introducing a faster tier would be a politically easier way of increasing the amount that goes into the system while speeding up the number of tests. This is the model that under the Conservative government worked to unblock the backlog in the Passport Office. One of the real mysteries of the 2010 to 2024 period is how few attempts there were to properly harness consumer choice and variable fees in improving public services — something that ought to be the Tory party’s stock in trade. It was in the 1980s and 1990s but it fell out of vogue and never came back in. The last bit of non-fiction I read on holiday was, predictably enough, the FT: part of my going-home ritual is to sit in the Eurostar lounge and read the paper from cover to cover. I enjoyed it all (obviously). But two particular highlights that I would draw your attention to: Christopher Miller’s account of summer in Ukraine’s most important port town, which has been hit by attacks that threaten to damage the country’s economy and a vital link in the global supply chain for food, and the news that fees to use the Panama Canal have hit a record high in the wake of the Iran war and the El Niño effect, both of which are hitting global supply chains. Burnham, it seems to me, has had a pretty good summer as far as convincing people that he “gets it” when it comes to the cost of living. But the reality is that the biggest things making us all poorer are outside his control and neither looks set to be resolved any time soon. I also read a lot of novels on my holidays! Your two recommendations for today: I was gripped and moved by Room 706 by Ellie Levenson, a thriller (of sorts) about a woman whose clandestine meeting for an affair in a hotel is interrupted by a terror attack. It’s a fantastic meditation on parenthood and marriage. I was blown away by What We Can Know by Ian McEwan, which I think is among his absolute best work. It uses as its framing device a group of historians in the 22nd century to gradually reveal the truth of something happening in the present. It’s a clever device and the future that McEwan envisages is beautiful and sad. I was quite bereft to leave it behind for the book’s final act and would happily read a whole series set in it. PM spoofed | Andy Burnham exchanged messages with somebody impersonating one of US President Donald Trump’s closest advisers in an embarrassing security breach for the prime minister’s team. Bank blast | JPMorgan Chase chief Jamie Dimon warned chancellor John Healey against creating a more hostile tax environment for banks. Extreme weather | The Thames Barrier that protects Londoners from flooding may need to be replaced up to two decades earlier than anticipated and could cost at least £20bn, according to senior government officials. Burnham’s big test | The prime minister has to choose his approach towards Britain’s fossil fuel industry and climate policy as decisions loom on the future of two totemic North Sea oil and gas projects. Pub protections | Ministers are stepping up protections for English pubs to stop them being converted into offices, shops or homes amid concerns about the death of the high street.
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