Devil's Advocate: Muddled thinking on education

Martin Brampton goes in search of the happy medium which must exist somewhere amid all the talk of hiring, firing, employment, unemployment, skills shortages and retraining. Confused? Read on...

Our society struggles to know what it aims to achieve, and nowhere is this plainer than in policies for education and training. The ambition of the IT sector skills council, e-Skills UK, is to analyse employers' future training and productivity needs. Given how little is understood about the knowledge and skills that contribute to success in IT, that is likely to prove difficult.

One immediate problem is why such an analysis is needed at all. The assumption is that we have, or are about to have, a skills shortage. The stop-go economy may perhaps have been cured by Gordon Brown, but it seems that employment in IT still lurches wildly from the prospect of mass unemployment to yet another skills shortage.

The idea that we face a skills shortage is based on the belief that the economy is embarked on a prolonged upturn. Given the fear by a number of commentators that share prices have not recovered but climbed once again to unsustainable levels, this may be unduly optimistic. Still, perhaps we should plan for the possibility.

But how much understanding do we have of educational need? Looking more widely, the government believes that 50 per cent of the population should go to university? Under pressure, though, it is admitted that 50 per cent is a wholly arbitrary figure. Why not 100 per cent? Then universities would be thoroughly universal.

And while we all seem agreed that lots of people should be educated, when it comes to paying for education the buck is forever passed. Nowadays it is often argued that the individual has to pay for education, even if that means taking on huge loans. This is justified by the claim that education gives access to better paid jobs.

The reason usually given for making people individually responsible for the cost is that it is unfair to subsidise students from taxation. Yet if the premise is true, it follows that educated people pay more tax than they otherwise would. Repaying a massive student loan is, after all, only another form of taxation, but rather less efficient than income tax. Quite apart from its impact on society's perhaps unhealthy attitude to debt.

It is hard to see why a government sponsored organisation is needed to ensure that training is provided to a wealthy and expanding sector of the economy. It strikes at a good deal of received wisdom. Claims that the public sector is somehow parasitic on the business sector make no sense when the public sector provides a service such as this. What difference does it make whether a service is paid for by a charge or by taxation?

At one time, companies, especially large ones, would do a good deal of structured training of their workers. Now, it seems most are fighting to avoid the costs of training, to push it off either to the individual employee or the government. The result is the much vaunted skills shortage. Should this dysfunctional behaviour not make us question the presumption that every problem can be solved provided the values of the business world are applied?

Turning back to IT, we have the problem of whether the need is a short term requirement for specific skills, or the cultivation of knowledge of principles that will continue to be applicable even through changes in technology details. The latter seems to have more potential for a long term payback in practical results, but the former is often preferred by employers.

The failure to confront these fundamental and difficult matters throws us back to general questions about education. Perhaps we can even defend the Education Minister's favourite target, medieval historians. It may be that to understand the differences and similarities between our own society and the seeming remoteness of medieval society is a better basis for our development than the constantly shifting nostrums offered by business studies.

Perhaps there are medieval historians or business graduates out there who could tell me?