The true cost of crap education

So we have a new Prime Minister and a new cabinet. They are putting together plans to give Great Britain a rosy future. Whether you voted Conservative, Labour or Monster Raving Looney, it is in all our interested for them to do a brilliant job and prove the doubters wrong. Will they? Who knows, but if they are to come anywhere near confounding the doubters, even the boggest supporter of Keir Starmer will concede that they have a massive job on their hands and the challenges will be massive. So what is the no one challenge for the new team? For me, it has to be sorting out our failing education system. Unless we educate young people to have the tools the country needs in 2024, then there is no real future for the UK. 

But what does the UK need? Well let me tell you of two conversations I had today. One was with one of my businesses neighbours, the owner of a car repair shop. He has a thriving business, more work than he can take on, but he cannot attract staff. All of his workforce are Polish and many have moved home. There is an ever decreasing pool of workers. His business is based where my Dad used to run MacMetals, in Mill Hill, until 1984. My Dad's workforce were all local lads. This picture of the guys was taken in the long, hot summer of 1976.

All of the guys in this picture were talented motor indstry workers. Sprayers. fitters and panel beaters. Some had learnedomn the job, some had done apprenticeships. All of them earned good money and were great assets to the company. All of them did OK for themselves.

Another conversation was with a local builder, a semu retired Irish chap. These days he does small jobs for locals. He was telling me that it is almost impossible to find good workers. All of his guys are in their 60's and 70's, all just do odd bits to top up their funds. Most are also Irish. He occasionally employs younger people, but tells me that all that they can do is sweep up and fill up skips. He also tells me that generally, after a couple of weeks, when they've had a couple of paydays, they leave, never to be seen again. 

The truth is that our education system is not producing people who like to do hard work or skilled manual labour. In my business, which is a studio, I used to get dozens of people wanting to be studio engineers. A few were well qualified. Now, all I get are people who want to do our social media. Much as I understand why people may not like the concept of hard work, it is well paid. For some reason though, many young people are educated to believe that they are too good to get their hands dirty. You may say "It's easy for him, a well off business owner to say that". Well that is true, but when I left school I had a City and Guilds qualification in Building studies, decoration and design and worked in the building trade for three years, along side my music career. When we started to expend our studio business, I did much of the building work with my business partners, building walls, doing joinery, concreting, screeding and painting. We reclaimed much of our materials from local skips. I was lucky, when I was at Finchley Catholic High School, Building studies at The Byng Road Curriculum Centre was on offer for 'less gifted" pupils. The idea was that thick kids like me could get a trade. Motor Vehicle Engineering was also on offer. The truth, and many people do not want to hear this, is that for many pupils, a career in a Trade is the best way to have a decent income. Not everyone is fit for University. For me, the chance to have a day a week out of school in Barnet was a real bonus. It also taught me useful skills. I'll go as far as to say that the skills I learned there were more useful to me than any other, apart from reading, writing and arithmatic. 

Let me share another insight, what prompted me to write this blog. I had a very strange dream last night. I had a dream that, out of the blue, I received a cheque for £2,500 from Finchley Catholic High School as a final settlement as compensation for failing my chemistry O' Level in 1978. There was a letter accepting that our teacher had not been properly qualified and we'd been failed. I did fail this and my teacher was lousy, but I've not really thought about it since. It was an odd thing to dream. When I woke up thought about it. Yes I had been failed by that teacher and several others. They were simply not up to the job. I left FCHS with four O levels. I retook five at Orange Hill, the following Summer. I passed them all. Our year (finishing in 1978) was the worst in the history of FCHS. I am sure that had OFSTED been around, it would have been deemed a failing school. The odd thing for me is that many of my mates there were very bright. I still see a few of them. All had to take action to remediate the awful education we received. Some did evening classes, some did other courses. Some like me changed schools after failing O'levels and went to better schools. And some never really recovered, it cast a long shadow. 

For me, it cost me a year. For some, it cost far more. In reality though, you don't get a cheque. Your parents pay the same taxes as millions of other people, but if you happen to be unlucky enough to go to a poor school with bad teachers, you will give all of your peers a massive headstart and you may never catch up. Of course a few in my year bucked the trend and did OK, but I'd contend that if they went to a better school, they would have still done far better. In some areas, the best jobs go to those with first class honours degrees from the best Universities. Such educational attainment was never mentioned when I was at Finchley. We were comprehensively let down. There were a few great teachers at the school (John and Alison Shuttler take a bow) and it massively improved when they replaced Nick Kelly, the headmaster, but in truth, I was short changed.

The most important moment in my whole education was when my then Physics Teacher, John Shuttler took me aside, as a fourteen year old and asked me why I thought I was at school. I shrugged and said I didn't really know. He imparted a startling truth "The only reason you are hear is because this school will give you the keys to open the doors in life you need to open". I shrugged again. He said "You are here to give you the tools to succeed. You may not like the teachers or the school but if you don't take advantage of what you can get out of this place, it will drag you down like an anchor for the rest of your life". Then the penny dropped. I was wasting an opportunity. It took me a couple of years and a change of school for that to sink in. 

Which brings us to the new education secretary, Bridget Phillipson. She is taking over a system that is not working for millions of children. They are being short changed. Not only that, but we are spending billions and we are not producing young adults with the skills our employers need or that the UK needs to keep us at the forefront of science, technology, culture and media. I am not one who thinks arts degrees are a waste of money. I work in the arts, which contributes billions to the UK Economy and I think arts degrees should be viewed with at least as much respect as any other. It is an area we lead the world in. What I do think though, is that non academic pupils should have the chance to learn trades from the age of fourteen. This should be encumbent on them being numerate and literate. No child should leave school in the UK if they are unable to read, write and add up. Any child aged eleven should be able to do this and all who can't should be identified and brought up to speed with one to one lessons. I had remedial reading lessons aged nine at St Vincents as they'd identified the fact that I was about four years behind my classmates (I couldn't read). I had this for a year and by the end, I'd got through the Jack and Gill series and was deemed to have caught up. I'd managed to spend nearly five years managing to avoid letting anyone know I could only perform the most basic reading and writing tasks. I hated it, but it got me up to speed.  In this day and age, we should be able to do this without "The remedial teacher" summoning you in front of your classmates. In truth for me, once I got the idea it was easy and I didn't struggle. Being dyslexic, writing was harder, but I managed. But the point is that without one on one, you can hide. I recall being given a class text by the remedial teacher and being asked to read it. I simply didn't have a clue what it said. It was a horrible experience, but it meant that she knew the extent of the problem and we went back to basics. 

The former bassplayer in my band, Paul Hircombe, was a bit of naighty boy and served a year in HMP Bellhaven. When I asked him what it was like, he said "I was popular, I could write letters for people". He'd been shocked to learn that most inmates were illiterate. That was part of the reason they relied on crime to get by. I've read than a large percentage of the prison population is also dyslexic. That is the the true cost of a crap education. It is a big challenge for Bridget Phillipson, but if you put yourself up for the job, you have to believe you have solutions. I believe that the problem with the UK education system is that it has, for far too long, been set up to pander to the whims of middle class voters, who largely keep the Tories in power and occasionally get fed up and put a centrist Labour government in. They are the parents who will only send children to 'the top performing schools' and will adopt a religion to get in, or failing that pay to go private. What we really need is a system which delivers for the children. I have a really radical idea. I think the children should write the OFSTED reports, they should mark their teachers and they should share their concerns. We test children to death, but many still leave without basic skills. The reason? Because 85% of the kids do OK. And the other 15%? 

My brother in law is a former Deputy Headmaster. He told me something that surprised me a few years back. He said that the kids who get straight A's will always do alright and he got more satisfaction from seeing a kid who had no expectations of getting anything scrape a Woodwork O Level than seeing a high flyer go to Oxbridge. He lives in Northampton and tells me that many of the local garages etc are now run by former pupils. They were not rocket scientists, but could read, write and add up well enough to run successful businesses. To him they had an effective education. 

I wait with interest to see whether the new secretary of state is concerned for the 85% or the 15%. If she doesn't bother with the 15%, then another generation will bear the cost of a crap education and the country will not only suffer, but waste a valuable resource.