Not so sweet 16, the turning point in education that fails young people

Published on 17 May 2016

IFS Director Paul Johnson writes in The Times.

While we hear a lot about schools and universities surely the greatest challenge facing our education system remains its failure properly to serve many of those young people who do not go on to do A levels at age 16. And it is still the case that only a minority do A levels.

Associated with this failure is a deeper failure that means that 16 to 24-year-olds in England have worse basic literacy and numeracy skills than in almost any other developed country. We have the unique distinction of being a country in which young people coming out of the education system today have literacy and numeracy skills no better than the generation that completed its education half a century ago.

This lack of basic skills among our young people is a huge economic and social problem. It holds back productivity and economic growth. It constrains the earnings and employment potential of millions.

The fact that most young people do not do A levels is not a problem in itself. What is a problem is that there continues to be a lack of clear, high-quality alternatives for far too many of those who don’t follow the academic route. To quote a recent House of Lords report: “Non-academic routes to employment are complex, confusing and incoherent. The qualifications system is similarly confused [and] often poorly understood by employers.”

The dearth of basic skills and the lack of good alternative qualifications are clearly different problems, but they are related. While the lack of basic skills reflects continued failures at primary and secondary education, it also reflects the fact that far too few young people develop their basic skills further beyond age 16. Even among those who go on into higher education around one in ten has numeracy or literacy skills below the level supposedly tested by a grade C at GCSE.

The greater problem is the relative neglect of those who do not follow the A level and university route. These are more likely to be young people from less advantaged homes and with lower achievement at secondary school.

Yet the FE sector is the one big part of the education system to have suffered heavy cuts in resources over recent years. Spending up to age 16 has been protected and schools with sixth forms have been able to use some of that to protect sixth-form spending. The introduction of fees at £9,000 a year has allowed many universities to increase funding devoted to full-time undergraduate teaching. Meanwhile, spending on further education in general, including 16-to-19 education, has been cut.

Yet funding isn’t even the biggest problem. That lies in the complexity, incoherence and often poor quality of the qualifications on offer. A levels are a well-recognised brand. There is no equivalent single brand or clear route on the vocational track. School-leavers, teachers and employers are all often unclear about the role and value of different qualifications.

In fact we know that for decades we have been encouraging hundreds of thousands of young people to study for qualifications that do not seem to benefit them, either because they don’t teach them the skills employers want or because employers don’t recognise the value of the skills they provide. It’s no wonder the whole system has been tarred.

So what should we do? Progress has been made since 2010. The qualifications regime has been simplified and more has been done to ensure that English and maths skills are integrated into post-16 education. Some of the most egregious misaligned incentives in the FE funding system have been ironed out. Apprenticeships have been extended and employers involved in them more. But we need a much more fundamental reappraisal.

First, while apprenticeships must be an important part of the future, the way they are being rolled out is worrying. The vast majority of the increase in numbers in the past five years has been among over-25s, with little increase among those aged under 19. And the decision to target three million new apprenticeships by 2020 is a colossal failure to learn from experience. Big targets lead to more and more people being pushed through less and less valuable qualifications. That is what happened under the last Labour government.

Second, much more still needs to be done to simplify and standardise the vocational route at age 16. We need a clear route that all involved understand, providing clear ways into employment or further study and which always involves earning valuable qualifications.

Third, we really do need to ask why on earth we still structure our secondary and post-secondary education system around a set of exams — GCSEs — taken at age 16. No other country in the developed world does this. If we expect young people to remain in education until at least 18, which is now the law, then we should make the education system look like that’s what it is designed to achieve. If we had a single phase running from 14 to 18 we would be in a much better position both to ensure a coherent vocational curriculum for those who want it and to ensure that basic maths and English skills continue to get taught to all who need them up to age 18.

According to international tests our 15-year-olds are not doing disastrously. I wouldn’t put it more strongly than that. Yet by the time we measure the literacy and numeracy skills of 16 to 24-year-olds we are among the worst in the world.

This is a disaster. It needs a response. Part of that response is to do more to improve standards in schools. Part of it must be to rethink what happens at 16.

This article was first published by The Times is is reproduced here in full with permission.