Good morning. Scoop! Rishi Sunak is planning to implement an
international baccalaureate-style system in England as part of
his reboot, our team reveals. Some more thoughts on that below.
Rishi Sunak wants to replace A-levels with a broader,
baccalaureate-style qualification, Peter
Foster, George Parker, Chris Cook and Anna Gross reveal.
According to an insider familiar with the plans, this would
require all 16-year-olds to study core subjects, including maths
and English, if they stay in school beyond GCSE level.
There’s a lot to get into here in policy terms. The proposal is
an old one, and it has a lot of cross-party support, including
in the past from Tony Blair. I think Sunak is absolutely right
to say that A-levels are unnecessarily narrow and that
everyone in the UK should study some form of maths until 18.
Miranda Green has produced an excellent documentary about the UK’s
struggles with maths, and one solution that some
politicians want in England is the spread of a “core maths”-
type qualification, separate from a higher maths qualification.
Both Scotland and Wales have a numeracy qualification that is
distinct from maths and available as an NQ in Scotland and as a
numeracy GCSE in Wales. Kenneth Baker, the Thatcher-era
education secretary who was in many ways the most consequential
holder of the post, also thinks that a separate core maths
qualification is a good approach (Baker is one of the talking
heads in Miranda’s film).
I see the rationale here but I’m instinctively against it, for
the reasons given by Alf Coles, professor of mathematics
education at Bristol university (also in Miranda’s film):
I would be worried that it would divide along class and
socio-economic lines. And I think if you look at other
countries — China, for example — almost everybody in China
achieves a very high level in mathematics. So I just don’t
think it’s the case that there’s a proportion of the
population who will just never get maths and shouldn’t be
taught it. To me, it seems like it’s one of children’s
rights to be offered some of these cultural achievements in
mathematics.
For me, the danger is that we give up on students early in
their school career. We’ve got evidence of children who have
not attained very highly in maths, being able to be
successful on Pythagoras and trigonometry and things that
are way ahead of what would have been expected of them in
the curriculum. And I would be really sad if what went along
with the sort of more functional qualification was the
closing-down of possibilities.
One of my most conservative beliefs is that the most effective
reforms work with the existing culture of an
institution or a nation. And in UK culture, twin-path systems
very rapidly become two-tier ones.
Every successful post-war education secretary, from Anthony
Crosland to Baker to Michael Gove, has tended to take the view
of: “Look, what can you expect? Some children just aren’t going
to do very well.” As Coles rightly points out, examples from
overseas show that this attitude is wrong. (England has been
climbing up the rankings for Pisa, the OECD’s international
assessment of educational attainment. So it’s not that we happen
to have had a better class of child since the introduction of
the Adonis-Gove reforms.)
I think a “core maths” qualification path very rapidly will
become a second-tier qualification. I would argue that a quick
look at which Scottish and Welsh pupils end up taking the
numeracy NQ and GCSE shows this is already happening.
Moving to a baccalaureate is the best solution to the problem,
which is why the Mike Tomlinson report ended
up there in 2004. But it is also expensive,
time-consuming and difficult to implement, which is why Blair
never actually introduced a baccalaureate. It’s also why in the
here and now, experts are sceptical that Sunak’s plans will
happen anytime soon. As one academy chain leader tells
our reporters:
“The system has no energy for reform at the moment and the
[education] department doesn’t begin to have the capacity to
think about this.”
But the good news is that there is cross-party agreement here —
making maths compulsory to age 18 was part of Ed Miliband’s 2015
general election manifesto — so you can see how the conditions
exist for Sunak to get the ball rolling. A lot of big
achievements build on what went before, whether it is Blair in
Northern Ireland building on what John Major did, or Gove in
education building on what Blair did.
That’s the good bit, here’s the bad bit. There is, I’m sorry to
say, no evidence that Sunak is doing any of the stuff
you’d need to get the ball rolling on a big national project to
reform England’s qualifications system.
I mean, just as an example of that: How, exactly, can this
proposal be reconciled with the sharp
real terms cuts to public spending that are pencilled in
for after the election? Will funding it take precedence over the
government’s tax-cutting ambition? To push through a cut,
ministers are desperately searching for revenue behind the sofa,
whether by pruning HS2 or exiting from the triple lock on
pensions.
The first step towards a proper baccalaureate and maths at 18 is
having enough maths teachers. As Sam Mitchell, head of maths at
Shoreditch Park Academy, tells Miranda:
I can’t tell you how long we will have maths adverts out for
jobs at this school. So the idea of being able to recruit
double the amount of maths teachers or have people who can
teach those skills and are trained to teach those things is
pretty farfetched, looking at teacher recruitment at the
moment.
Ultimately, you can’t have a serious plan for anything, however
worthy your aim, if you continue to engage in fantasies about
taxation, as both the UK’s major parties do. As Martin Wolf wrote
at the start of the week:
Taxation is ultimately driven by spending. How much (and
where) a country spends, and how it pays for it, is a
political decision. It defines the sort of country it wants
to be. That is the issue, not fantasies of cuts that pay for
themselves or magically engender growth.
For Sunak this could be a worthy and important way to secure
himself an enviable prime ministerial legacy. And the PM is
asking the right questions if the plan is to use his next 16
months to move the UK towards a baccalaureate system, as well as
making maths compulsory to the age of 18. But if he wants to do
it, he needs to free himself and his party from its fantasies
about cutting public spending and cutting taxes.
As a parochial north Londoner, it takes a lot to get me to cross
all the way to the other side of the city, but I am very much
looking forward to talking to Trevor Phillips about his book
Windrush (co-written with his brother Mike). Do come along if you can, and if you
can’t, do give the book a whirl.
However you spend it, have a wonderful weekend!
Don’t forget students aged 16-19 and teachers at
secondary schools and further education colleges in the
UK can read the FT for free. Apply here for a free
online subscription. All FT subscribers and those on the
free schools programme can subscribe to the Schools Digest
newsletter that features subject-specific
articles selected by our teacher advisers.
-
Pain ahead even as inflation falls |
The Bank of England’s decision to hold interest rates at
5.25 per cent came
as Rishi Sunak’s third piece of good news on the
economy this week, but both the prime minister and
Jeremy Hunt had good reasons for keeping their sense of
relief in check.
-
‘We don’t want to diverge’ | Leading
Conservatives have launched a new attack on Keir Starmer
for wanting
to “rejoin the EU in all but name” after the
Labour leader said he did not want Britain to diverge
from EU rules.
-
Pension boost for today’s teenagers |
Big reforms to the UK pension system, expected to boost
the retirement pots of young workers by tens of
thousands of pounds, may
not be implemented until 2025, warn experts.
-
Hang fire | Labour will not
reverse Rishi Sunak’s changes to the phaseout of
fossil fuel boilers, the party said yesterday, in a sign
of the acute political sensitivities around heating
policy.
-
Beefing up | Rachel Reeves, the shadow
chancellor, has vowed to prevent a repeat of last year’s
disastrous mini-Budget by strengthening
the powers of the UK’s fiscal watchdog,
declaring: “Never again.”
|