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RADIO 4
CURRENT AFFAIRS  
 
ANALYSIS
LEARNING TO LEARN
TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY
Presenter: Frances Cairncross
Producer: Zareer Masani
Editor: Nicola Meyrick
 
BBC
White City
201 Wood Lane
London
W12 7TS
0181 752 6252  
 
Broadcast Date: 20.04.00
Repeat Date: 23.04.00
Tape Number: TLN015/00VT1016
Duration: 27’ 15"
 
 
Taking part in order of appearance:
 
Chris Woodhead Chief Inspector of schools

Dr Peter Robinson Senior Economist, Institute for Public Policy Research

Professor Gareth Williams Head of the Institute of Education’s Centre for
Higher Education Studies

Anna Vignoles Research Fellow, Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics

Bill Nuti President of Cisco Systems Europe

Tom Healey Principal Administrator, Centre for Educational Research and Innovation at the OECD

Charles Leadbeater Author of "Living on Thin Air"

Marilyn Butler Rector of Exeter College and Professor of English Language and Literature, Oxford
 


Cairncross : Education, education, education, says New Labour. Fine - but is it for the government to decide how much of it we need?

Woodhead : I don't think it's the role of government to chivvy and harry people to educate themselves more. I think it's for government to encourage and for government to remove barriers to education that are stopping people who want
to educate themselves further getting that education.
But it's quite a fine line that needs to be trodden here. There are a lot of people that are quite content with the way in which they are leading their lives and I think that it is right and proper that they should be left in that state of contentment.

Cairncross : That robust view comes not from a disgruntled member of
the opposition but from Chris Woodhead, the chief inspector of schools. He has reacted firmly against a streak of bossiness that sometimes creeps into New
Labour's pronouncements on education. The government urges not just better standards at school, but more and more access to higher and further education. The assumption is usually that education enriches both individuals and the country. But is that true? Dr Peter Robinson, Senior Economist at the Institute for Public Policy Research, is doubtful.

Robinson : Spending on higher education certainly of course makes individuals better off. We know that graduates tend to have much higher levels of employment and much higher wages. The benefits for the economy are less clear. It's true that richer countries tend to have more people at university but it's entirely unclear where the direction of causation runs there. It could simply be
that richer countries are able to send more of their people off to college and that going to college is a bit like a consumption good rather than an investment.
Richer countries like to spend more on cultural pursuits and on education. There's very little evidence to suggest that if you pump more resources into higher education that that is going to have a payback for the economy as a whole.

Cairncross : Higher education has expanded in Britain in the past decade roughly twice as fast as in other rich countries. About a third of all school-leavers now go on to full-time study. That is not surprising: whatever its
effects on national wealth, higher education clearly enriches individuals. Indeed, research at London University's Institute of Education suggests that a degree is worth a wage premium of 12% for a man and 34% for a woman over A levels alone. Does that mean that going to college promotes greater social equality?
Professor Gareth Williams is Head of the Institute of Education's Centre for Higher Education Studies.


Williams : Well let us take the example of men and women. We all know that there are big differences between men's earnings and women's earnings but it is the case that the variability of earnings between men graduates and women
graduates is much less than the variability of earnings between men and women non-graduates. And there is some slight evidence I have seen which suggests that the same thing may be true of people from various ethnic groups too; in other words that being in a disadvantaged ethnic minority is relatively less for graduates than for non- graduates. This is common sense in a way.

Cairncross : Does that suggest to you that the biggest benefits from extending access to higher education are likely to come in the poorest parts of the country, in the poorest parts of the world?

Williams : On the whole I think that is the case, yes, because they have furthest to go. If you have no skills, learning some skills has a potentially very considerable benefit. Such evidence as we have is that bringing more people
into education brings greater benefits than the equivalent amount of resources devoted to ever more education for those that have already got quite a lot.

Cairncross : The lower the starting point - for a country or for an individual - the bigger the returns education seems to bring. That has implications for using education as a way to promote social inclusion - the buzz word for equal opportunity. The breakneck expansion of universities has not been accompanied by an equal expansion of high quality vocational education. And yet, that may be more appropriate for many people. Chris Woodhead says that
many parents he has met don't see academic qualifications as a guaranteed route to success.

Woodhead : One man stays very clearly in my mind. He himself was a plumber. His lad was quite academically able but the boy wanted to join the family firm and the father was very keen that that should happen and he said that he, the
son, would end up with a good income through this particular employment and he saw no point at all in gathering academic qualifications for the sake of
academic qualifications. So I think there's a lot of people that are very realistic about how you can earn a decent wage in England in the 21st century. And if the argument is that you necessarily need to have a degree or better still a post-graduate degree to make ends meet, then I think that's a pretty suspect argument that a lot of people see through.

Cairncross : Do you think the education system as it operates at present caters for people like that boy who wanted to join his father's plumbing firm?


Woodhead : No, I think that at school there is a tendency to elevate the academic over the vocational and we have quite a big problem here, a cultural problem. I want very much youngsters, 14-16, top end of the secondary school, who are not particularly enthusiastic about academic subjects, who are not talented academically to have the opportunity to study vocational qualifications and I think if we were to do that we might set them on a road which is going to lead to a better job. I think that we have culturally tended to elevate the academic over every other kind of training and that I think is a great mistake and looking at it from the point of view of the economy, we may - put it no more strongly than that - but we may be ending with too many people that are qualified academically to do jobs that don't exist.


Vignoles : The problem of over-education is basically one where an individual has education that seems to be in excess of that required to do their job and our evidence suggests that around 20-30% of the workforce might fall into this
category.

Cairncross : Anna Vignolles, a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, has been looking at how far people have more education than their job appears to require: estate agents with
PhDs, for instance, or hairdressers with honours degrees.


Vignoles : The graduate who was over-educated, when you looked more closely, had poorer quantitative skills. We also found some evidence that certain types of graduate were more likely to be over-educated, particularly humanities, arts graduates. What we've shown is that there are wage premiums associated with certain skills and certain qualifications. And for example we found a high return to maths A level. And this suggests wages are being used as the signal here to direct potential workers into different qualifications and subject areas. But the point being is that individuals need to be informed about this prior to making their choices. And remember in this country we have a curriculum that requires people to make choices very early on. Prior to starting their A level course you know some people are making choices at fourteen and fifteen.

Cairncross : One thing is clear: the best single improvement that could be made in the quality of Britain's labour force would be to increase its numeracy. It is far more important to educate teenagers well than to expand higher education. However, signalling to fourteen and fifteen year olds, even about the extra pay that goes to good mathematicians these days, is not easy, which may be why
the numbers doing maths A levels are 24% down on a decade ago. One signal no bright teenager could miss, though, is the arrival of the Internet, and with it the knowledge economy, in which numeracy and indeed literacy appear to matter more than ever before.


Nuti : There is a huge shortage of jobs in the IT industry today. It's estimated about 600,000 jobs are open worldwide whereby the average salary for one of these knowledge workers who understands how to take advantage of the internet, understands internet design, manufacturing and the implementation and maintenance of the network is about 50-100% higher, the compensation
package, than for an old world economy job.

Cairncross : At the sharp end of the knowledge economy is Cisco Systems, an American information technology giant that is now as large as Microsoft. Bill Nuti, President of Cisco Systems Europe, has the ideal perspective on the way the new knowledge economy is changing the market for skills and for educated workers. He is also, as the former boss of Cisco's East Asian division, particularly well placed to compare what happens here with how the Asian tigers
approach education.

Nuti : It's going to mean more and more to the future of those countries than it has in the past. They have made a tremendous investment in higher education. They are changing their school systems very rapidly to build curriculums for where the jobs of the futures will be.
What you are finding is in East Asia there's been a huge focus on the part of government, because it's about job creation and understanding that the jobs of the future are in technology. And if they can create a basis where they can grow from their educational systems to feed and funnel technology into companies that require it, there's going to be a huge amount of economic advantage in the
future.

Cairncross : Indeed, it is the sight of those rapidly growing Asian economies, seizing the advantage by investing heavily in the education of their youthful workforces, that has been one of the main spurs to expanding higher education in Britain. After all, if ideas and information can whizz inexpensively from one end of the world to another, it becomes easier for companies to buy some of the skills they need abroad. Tom Healey is principal administrator at the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation at the OECD, an organisation that has a large programme looking at education in the rich world. How does national education policy affect a country's competitiveness in this more mobile world?

Healey : Certainly skilled labour has become much more mobile internationally and services provided by knowledge intensive occupations have become more easily purchased across national boundaries. And that might indeed support
a case for greater internationalisation of education provision and not necessarily a case for supporting further education in one country. But I think there is
still in terms of national competitiveness, in terms of the capacity to on the one side attract foreign investment, in other cases to embody knowledge and innovation in products and services, there is still a need I think to retain a critical supply of highly skilled people within each country. In recent times three OECD countries that have grown particularly rapidly in terms of productivity and growth in GDP include Korea, Finland in very recent times, and Ireland. And these certainly are countries which started from a relatively low level of human capital, at least Korea and Ireland, back thirty forty years ago, but accumulated very rapidly. And also especially in the case of Korea, seemed to achieve quite a high level of quality of education in terms of achievement in mathematics and science for example.

Cairncross : So for countries starting from a low base, there certainly seems a strong link between rapid economic growth and investment in new educational skills. There are also signs from some of the more advanced countries that a scarcity of workers with IT and other new-economy skills threatens to hold back economic growth. In the United States, Silicon Valley has been arguing for
relaxing controls on immigration so as to bring in more of them. In Britain, ministers claim the economy is short of 100,000 IT people. That worries the DfEE - not for nothing is it the Department for Education and Employment. Sometimes, though, the fashionable emphasis on the knowledge economy seems to override all the other factors that shape education. Are we right to worry so much about it? Indeed, has the economy changed radically enough to justify the enormous change of emphasis in education? Peter Robinson of the Institute for Public
Policy Research.

Robinson : The knowledge economy has joined a whole other set of phrases which drip from the lips of politicians and are loved in the policy-making circles. However there's very little academic oomph behind the use of that kind of
phraseology. If we try and measure what's happening to the economy, then clearly the knowledge-based economy has been arriving for decades. We've had growth in high-tech sectors, growth in business and financial services and in
education and health which are often defined as part of the knowledge-based economy too. It's very unclear however that we really see dramatic acceleration in the share of the economy which is taken up by these kinds of high order manufacturing activities and services.

Cairncross : The argument is that it's these activities and services which call for the larger supply of graduates which in turn is the justification for expanding spending on higher education and on universities. Isn't that right?

Robinson : What's referred to as the arrival of the knowledge-based economy means changes in the structure of employment which certainly require more people to have higher education. But these changes have been going on for
decades and it's not clear that there is an acceleration in the pace of change in the labour market. So it's not clear that we need further vast expansion of higher
education to deal with this newly emerging so-called knowledge-based conomy. More importantly, research carried out within the DfEE suggested that we didn't need any further expansion in higher education until the second decade of the new millennium because the current levels of enrolment were going to produce more than enough graduates to fill the needs of the labour market.

Cairncross : Indeed, one might argue that the knowledge-based economy goes back to Caxton's time, and with it, the basic requirements of a good education. It is still, surely, as important as ever to be able to read and write, to be numerate, and to learn such basic human disciplines as reliability, punctuality and courtesy. What has changed is the need to be able to acquire new skills quickly, in a fast-changing economy. To take an obvious example, nobody in their mid-twenties would have learned at school to use the Internet, let alone to design a web page. Yet more and more 20-somethings make their livings by doing exactly that. One of the people who has done most to shape the government's thinking in this area is Charles Leadbeater, author of a book called "Living on Thin Air". He emphasises the importance, not of what people learn
formally, as they do at university, for instance, but of the knowledge they acquire informally.

Leadbeater : One must realise that learning takes place in all kinds of settings and there may well be skills that people learn not at university and not in formal education that are highly highly valuable. Often you know they're much
more valuable. So a lot of skills in cooking, service, tourism, retailing, marketing, advertising, television are not taught at university and never will be and
actually a lot of the most creative people will not learn those skills there. They'll learn them at work doing things for themselves. So I think it's wrong for us to
kind of fall for qualification-itis, to believe that you only know something if you've got a qualification. And actually tacit knowledge of a kind that's very difficult to imitate may become more valuable in a knowledge economy where everyone's got qualifications. The ability to come up with ideas of your own and be distinctive may take on added value when everyone's got a kind of standard qualification.

Cairncross : People acquire knowledge - tacit and not-so-tacit - in many different informal ways. But some clearly want something more for there is also a large and growing demand for formal education. One of the most striking
changes taking place is the rise in the proportion of older students in further and higher education - almost one in ten 30-64 years olds in Britain is taking some
kind of course. Governments in all the OECD countries increasingly advocate what they fashionably call "lifelong learning". Indeed, that, says the OECD's Tom Healey, is vital both in reducing social exclusion and in creating a flexible workforce.

Healey : With constant changes in the labour market, in technology, with concerns about the growing digital divide for example, there is a need to think about how further and higher education can be used to include a broader range of adults. For many occupations an initial type of qualification is not at all the passport to a permanent career. And even in the public sector, there is
a growing flexibility, growing awareness as well for a range of skills. And what this suggests I think is the need for a constant re-visiting of educational needs over the life cycle. Technological progress can take place rapidly and unexpectedly in various areas and different types of skills can become obsolete very quickly.
Probably the crucial aspect is flexibility and the need for, especially for older age groups to remain constantly at the forefront in terms of skill development. This is going to become increasingly important as the younger cohorts entering the labour market become smaller and as the population pyramid changes in the next twenty years or so. The difficulty I think is to move beyond a model in which we put all our eggs in one basket.

Cairncross : So, with fewer youngsters coming on to the job market, the need for lifelong learning grows: indeed, it becomes easily the fastest way to change the overall skill level of the workforce. But how should that sort of learning
be provided? One thing that may make continuing education easier, argues Charles Leadbeater, is the same new technology that has increased the need for constantly updating people's skills.

Leadbeater : I think that we have only just started to scratch the surface of what could be possible in how education is delivered and what it consists of. And the idea that education is going to university or even indeed going to school for a set number of years and receiving a set number of lessons for a set qualification I think will seem rather antiquated in ten or fifteen years time. Now knowledge is exploding all over society. Companies are sources of knowledge, consultancy firms. You can access knowledge through the internet and through digital
television. So the university's kind of monopoly of knowledge in that sense, its ability to acquire deliver and store knowledge, is being eroded. They are going to have to compete. That's going to mean specialisation, it's going to mean much greater competition. Some brands will win out. I think it's ridiculous that the LSE as a brand should be confined to a tiny sphere of London. I think you should be able to study for an LSE degree wherever you are, just as you can buy a product from Boots wherever you are in the country. I mean a good analogy is to think of learning like cleanliness. At the end of the 19th century there was a real problem that the middle classes were clean but the working classes were
dirty. Now the solution came from Harold Lever who invented soap. People went to shops, bought soap and used it. Now is learning more like that, something that we should think of as something that we use and acquire?
It's an individual responsibility in which the market may play a very important role in delivering it. So in other words for adults it may be that they need very short specific courses at particular times and they may need them to be delivered very flexibly using new technology and delivered as a form of entertainment almost rather than a lesson.

Cairncross : But can a course at the London School of Economics really be branded like soap and sold on the Internet in a virtual hypermarket? Surely university education requires too much continuous effort to be the intellectual carbolic of the 21st century. People can learn on-line, but only if, early in their lives, they have already been trained to absorb information and skills. And indeed that, says Marilyn Butler, Rector of Exeter College, Oxford, and Professor of English Language and Literature, is the most valuable of all the skills that education imparts.

Butler : The most important part of education is learning how to learn. People do teach themselves basically and they must. I mean you don't really have information put into you by another person. A lot of information is spread
out in front of you. And the internet which is sometimes thought of as amazingly new is not really amazingly new. That's what knowledge has always looked like. The whole process of teaching yourself is to teach yourself to feel
comfortable with your knowledge and to put your knowledge into patterns so that you can remember it and use your experience to check versions of life. I mean it is very important and very very useful to have facts, one hopes
reliable facts, quickly accessible and available on the internet but in fact it's not in itself knowledge.

Cairncross : So new technology will not immediately bring off-the-shelf learning, although it will certainly bring many people greater access than ever before. An on-line maths course may be much less useful than a maths course
at Oxford - but if it's the only choice, it will be a great deal better than nothing. If people seek out such courses, they will at least be doing so because they feel
they need to learn that way. The same cannot be said of many of those who sign up for traditional degree courses.
That brings us right back to the question raised by that research project at the LSE: do we need overeducated estate agents and hairdressers? Indeed, does Marilyn Butler think we can still justify giving people a liberal arts education?


Butler : A lot of education is not intended to be directly vocational. I mean the majority of students don't go on to be teachers, to be academics. It's most likely - it always has been most likely - that they'll do something non-specialised. I mean certainly if they do English or History, they'll end up as civil servants very typically or managers. The whole way of thinking about education as a way of organising thought presupposes that you will be applying the skill that you have to do that to any topic whatsoever. And I think I would actually strongly
defend the humanities which appear to be the most non- vocational, the most useless subjects. Those subjects seem to me to be some of the best subjects for life. It's because they are really humanly centred. So you're very close to the circumstances of life in your interest in History and English. It's a very foolish character of Jane Austen's unfortunately, Mrs Elton, who keeps boasting of her inner resources but it does seem to me that people with humanities degrees do have inner resources.

Cairncross : But how do employers feel about those inner resources? After all, if the reasons for urging more folk into higher education are primarily economic, then surely we want to be confident that there will be an economic return, and not just a cultural and spiritual benefit.
Perhaps surprisingly, Cisco Systems' Bill Nuti sounds as though he might have just walked out of one of Marilyn Butler's lectures.

Nuti : What we at Cisco look for from anyone is the life experience that a university education gives you. It’s the maturity of an individual as they move through a university system that actually helps to I think improve a person's chances of being hired at Cisco. The most decisive factor in my opinion is their life experience, whether it's how their parents have reared them, whether
it's the school system that they come out of or whether it's their own intelligence. Emotional intelligence is probably the key factor to success, I think in the internet economy. It's about creativity, it's about cross-functional thinking, cross-functional acting. You're more likely to get that skillset from people who have a broad range of skills, not a particular core competency in a subject matter, whether it be mathematics or humanities. I don't think university is today about going after a particular job. I think it's about how you round yourself out as an individual so you're prepared for a multiplicity of opportunities in the workforce. What the key is is to get a very well-rounded education.

Cairncross : So the senior high-tech businessman reaches much the same conclusion as the Oxford professor of English: emotional intelligence, or what Jane Austen dubbed "inner resources", are the most valuable skill of all. Ironically, that venerable institution, a good all-round university education, remains a convenient way - although not the only way - to infuse this special ingredient, teaching people to sift and absorb new ideas. And that is why there is a good economic case for government to encourage people to go on learning as long as they usefully can.