Education Policy – Adam Tugwell

Qualified academically or not, we are all capable of greatness or of being complete and utter fools

As humans, we love difference. We love it so much that we use it as a way to qualify other people by colour, gender, sexual orientation, financial and material wealth, social background, taste, appearance and in many other ways too.

Many of the benchmarks we carry within our own personal make‑up, as we attribute value to others, are unconscious or, to the world outside us, completely hidden.

The fact that we make these judgements behind closed doors means that no matter how hard do‑gooders attempt to legislate or control our behaviour, controlling other people’s thinking at a personal or private level is a battle that even the most politically correct amongst us will never win.

The obsession with qualifying others

We have become obsessed with legitimising our qualification of others when it suits us. Society provides markers intended to help, yet we use them to create differences that stand far outside their original purpose.

For a long time, academic qualification has increasingly been used as the preferred way to distinguish ability, attitude, application, intelligence and countless other traits. To the audience, these markers become a convenient way to judge whether someone is “qualified” or not.

By bypassing the cold, hard reality that academic qualifications – whether GCSEs, A Levels, Degrees, Masters or PhDs – are simply benchmarks created in someone’s (usually an academic’s) thoughts, the elephants of our society have fallen head over heels into the trap of believing that academic standards portray the genuine quality or value of every individual. They do not.

Angela Rayner and the cruelty of perception

Yesterday, we witnessed these maleficent social anchors at their worst, when Shadow Education Secretary Angela Rayner was ridiculed for having what are considered to be four very poor GCSEs and, academically speaking, no more.

Whilst Labour and their principal spokesperson for Education demonstrate little credibility in terms of the policies they have been putting forward with an eye on the upcoming General Election at their Party Conference this week, there are few of us outside Westminster who could list on one hand the number of politicians from any Party who we could hand‑on‑heart consider credible in fulfilling their roles properly and representing the people well.

Perception is everything – particularly when it comes to the influences on our thinking and lives played out on social media and TV.

Just because an MP or politician looks good on camera, comes across as confident, sounds competent or can boast an academic CV that includes Eton, Oxford or wherever it may be, the reality may be – and in many cases is – that they are not “qualified” by being any such thing.

The lost value of real‑world experience

We have learned, and increasingly been conditioned against, the value of life experience and the practical understanding of people, business, community, and the views that time in the real world brings.

We have reached a stage where we look for things that make high‑profile people stand out for all the wrong reasons, mistakenly thinking those reasons are right.

There is rich irony in the fact that it was the Labour Government of 1997–2010 that pushed qualification bias to its extreme by suggesting that everyone should have a degree.

This malignant and ill‑conceived step has contributed to the biggest shift in perception about what qualifies a person. It has pushed us further away from regarding each individual as equal and the same.

The consequences of commercialised Higher Education

The meddling of Angela Rayner’s political predecessors bears much responsibility for the commercialisation of Higher Education. The rancid truth is that many young people have been condemned to financial servitude by a past Labour Government, encouraged to take degrees that nobody in industry values.

Others are being left behind simply because they are excluded by a system that frowns upon anyone not academically inclined, or because they know that a lifetime of debt is not something they can realistically afford.

Education, in its real sense, is only partially academic. No matter how any person is educated, they are equally capable of greatness or of behaving like fools. The suggestion that people are only capable of anything great if they have good academic qualifications is fundamentally flawed.

A better way forward

When we finally have a Government led by politicians who are responsible and not so easily led, the hard decisions over how we educate and support our young people will be addressed properly.

The focus will return to the basic reality that as teenagers, we are pretty much all either “heads” or “hands”. Once we value the fact that not everyone in their early teens is ready or able to spend another seven years in books, we can get back to providing real parallel educational – not academic – pathways.

Developed properly with business, and with the opportunities that Leaving the EU will give us, rewarding lives for people – whatever their background or birth – will, for many more of them, be fully assured.

Qualified academically or not 24Sep19 PDF_Vers2_17Jul26 Download

I seem to have the phrase ‘cause and effect’ branded in my thought processes right now as I look at all of the problems with Government and no less so when recently reading yet more bad news about struggling school pupils failing to catch up. But is anybody really surprised?

One of the greatest problems with modern government and law-making is that once an issue has been addressed, the people who have been put in place to deal with that issue then have nothing to do – unless of course they create something else to justify their existence. Have a good look at every area of life where some kind of policy has been created or exists and you might just begin to see what I mean.

The problem with this process is that whilst you can easily see that some things do benefit from being revised from their original form to meet a need which was not originally considered or indeed, to bring that a policy or law up-to-date to meet or to be applicable to contemporary need, the rise of the bureaucrat and ‘professional’ politician has led to unnecessary meddling and the creation of having laws for laws sake. This is particularly evident in matters such as education.

The value of education has been appreciated for a long time but the system we have probably began the headlong descent that we are now experiencing when the concept of real apprenticeships was lost and the school leaving age was raised to 16 in 1972. Speak to what some might call ‘old school’ educators and they will tell you that children were either ‘heads or hands’; the inference being that they were academic or practically inclined. Would you hear a teacher say the same in a similar conversation today? No.

The 1997-2010 New Labour project oversaw much of the destructive push towards blanket qualification levels which now seem to be the accepted way to enhance an evolving society. Put simply, the approach of such meddlers is to work on the basis that the easiest way to improve education is to make the education fit the population, rather than encourage the population to meet the demands of the time. Now is that real equality or just a twisted view of it which is taking our once highly educated and envied Nation backwards?

Everyone is different for many reasons, not least because of their genetics, demographics and social conditioning. It is therefore sheer folly to believe that by applying the one-size-fits-all mentality that you will create a perfect and fully functioning society by making everyone equal ‘by default’. We currently see high levels of youth unemployment and dissatisfaction with the system (Something apparently highlighted by the August 2011 Riots), but again no real attempts to address the causes of these problems being made by the very people who could genuinely make a difference.

There are many young people who don’t want to be in ‘school’ and others who just don’t get the benefit from a dumbed-down degree system where 3 years of undergraduate study provides what could be a lifelong debt and a qualification that industry views as useless, all against the backdrop of a Government that cannot afford to provide such diversions in the first place. The balance has been lost and somebody needs to get this all back where it should be so that each and every individual can follow a route to a career which gives them the best opportunities to realise all that they can achieve based on what they are capable of doing; not what some idealist in London thinks it right that they should do.

Rather than scratching heads about the escalating problems created by the decline in standards in education, why not get back to a basic appreciation of the fact that everyone has something unique to offer and that in itself requires real diversity of opportunities and not one which is offered by an encyclopaedic exam syllabus. Put 14 year-olds who have no academic inclination – or don’t recognise one at that age – into real 7-year vocational apprenticeships in industry and SME’s where time and application give them the career footing that they would otherwise never achieve?

Why not begin to rebuild the ‘time-served’ bank of talent and experience that no amount of schoolroom activity can provide our dwindling industries and hungry-for-help businesses with, in a cost effective way which reduces the burden on the State and will probably address all manner of other issues hurting society at the same time such as youth crime?

I can almost hear the ‘it won’t work because…’ right now. What – because of employment laws or other legislation? – That’s exactly the point and the very reason we are getting into more and more of a mess isn’t it?

Equality in Education has been destroyed 31May12 PDF_Vers1_29Mar26 Download