Annual Conference keynote speaker, Prof Anna Vignoles, reflects on how we must invest in our education and skills system which underpins our research and development system and ultimately our economy.
You cannot have a thriving Research and Development (R and D) system nor indeed a thriving economy without first building a thriving education system. Our education system is obviously vital for many things, including the health and welfare of our society and crucially it underpins our R and D system which feeds into our economy.
Investment in human capital is not a sufficient condition for growth, you do need capital investment, innovation and other institutional factors to align too. However, if a workforce lacks skills, a country will struggle to get the productivity gains it needs to grow. Firms may also fail to innovate in a low skills environment where they can throw labour at the problem rather than bringing in changes to increase productivity.
Education and more specifically the type and distribution of skills in the workforce also matter for how equally the benefits of growth are shared. If education and skills grow in tandem with technological innovation this can boost productivity and grow the economy in a more equal fashion. But without improvements in education and skills, we can end up with technological change driving rising inequality – the skilled attract ever larger salaries and the less skilled get replaced by technology and left behind in low wage jobs. And this is before we see the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) which, while no doubt productivity enhancing, will also displace many jobs, including professional and white collar jobs.
Parts of the UK R and D system are undoubtedly world leading. Many UK universities are world class by any metric. As a consequence, we have been very successful at attracting international talent to our universities, with around a third of research staff hailing from outside the U.K.. This is something to celebrate. Indeed, both our global excellence and the financial health of our universities currently depend hugely on international talent. However, our ability to attract people from elsewhere has hidden some of the problems in our own education system that threaten the talent pipeline. Furthermore, there are vital parts of our wider R and D system and indeed our economy that lack skills that are less easily imported. Technicians are so vital to our R and D system but tend to be less globally mobile. And if business and indeed the state cannot get the skilled people to translate the excellent research we do in the UK into better ways of doing things, our research strength doesn’t add as much as it should to the economy.
Many of our EU colleagues came to our universities for their postgraduate studies and stayed – benefiting UK higher education and our economy. That flow of talent has slowed, partly due to the change in fees charged to students from the EU following Brexit, partly perhaps due to perceptions of how welcome they may be and practical issues like visas and the competitiveness of our PhD stipends. It is too early to determine the impact of all these changes but whilst universities are rightly impressing on the government the importance of international students, it would appear that home grown talent is likely to become more important over time.
There are some indicators that all is not well in our wider education system
There are very long-standing shortages of teachers in some subjects and a high teacher quit rate. The proportion of teaching being done by non-specialists is also high in some subjects in more deprived schools. In our poorest schools – those with the highest rate of free school meals, 60% of maths lessons are not being taught by someone with a maths degree. Even more startlingly, one in ten science lessons are being taught by someone without any kind of science degree (Worth, 2023). This affects what we can teach and one might argue that it will be hard to remain a scientific super power if our education workforce is not in good shape, from our early year professionals, primary and secondary teachers, through to academics.
Another indicator is that despite not being particular out of line with many competitor countries in terms of the proportion of graduates in our workforce, we still have a relatively high proportion of people with low levels of qualification and skills, compared to other countries. We lack skills at every level, and particularly analytical, quantitative and social skills, which are in short supply judging from the higher price employers have to pay for such skills.
Further, work by the Institute for Fiscal Studies suggests a very unusual feature of the UK labour market. Our youngest workers are less skilled than older workers, whereas the reverse is true in almost every other country for which there is data. This is partly explained by the fact that adult learning and firm provided training has been in decline for a very long time.
We are also missing some talented people from our R and D system. Various groups of children and young people are far less likely to achieve well in the system and get left behind – most strikingly those from lower income backgrounds and in less well served regions. This is partly explained by the fact that family disadvantage, particularly child poverty, is the main driver of pupil achievement and we have had a markedly worsening economic situation for our most disadvantaged families, particularly in our poorest regions. Just over 40% of students in Merseyside get grade 5 or above in GCSE Maths. It’s nearly 70% in Rutland and 56% in Surrey. And because gaps in academic achievement emerge so early, to fix it we need to invest and plan for high quality provision from early years onwards.
So what are the solutions? We need to invest in schemes to attract global talent, like we have with our Leverhulme International Professorship scheme. Certainly competitor countries are doing this. More generally, we need to keep our grant funding internationally competitive. While funders like ourselves play a major role, particularly for some disciplines, the issue of association with EU research schemes is clearly vital. In the short term, we also must remain welcoming to international students and talent.
Most importantly, we need to recognise that our education and skills system is the bedrock on which our future plans rest and make sustained long-term investment from the youngest ages. We need to invest for the whole workforce, not just for graduates. Our most neglected bit of the sector is undoubtedly Further Education (FE) – something I could have said anytime pretty much in the last 30-years.
We also know that teaching quality is one of the major factors influencing pupil achievement – more important than class size or which school a pupil attends. So we must do better in restoring teaching as a high quality job. That is not just about pay, it is about working conditions. We need to recognise that declining investment in the very people who will deliver high quality education is not the way to build a world class R and D system.
We also need to ensure people at all levels of qualification have a sufficiently broad range of skills to thrive in the labour market. To do that, we need to stop hoping that we can run every bit of our education and skills system from Whitehall. Instead we need to build on local relationships between institutions, our schools, FE colleges, universities, and businesses, to ensure the workforce actually has the skills needed, that we reverse our downward trend in training and adult learning and provide a more fertile environment for R and D to translate into economic and social progress.
And above all we need to overcome the biggest challenge of all – namely that education is an investment that pays back over the very long term, far longer than the political cycle.
The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy.
