Educational Opportunities: Working Classes

Baroness Falkner of Margravine Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, for initiating this terribly important debate and for her passion in sticking to this subject over many years.

I am delighted to follow the noble Lord, Lord Livermore, because I too want to pick up on that end of the educational spectrum—the post-16 to 18 choices made by our young people. In our educational policy to date, the underlying assumption has been that levelling up requires a few limited pathways of social mobility. Therefore, if you are more cognitively able, it is university, and for the less advantaged, we have further education colleges and apprenticeships.

The route through university now results in more than 50% of under-30s in the UK being university graduates, which, along with that shiny degree, also carries significant burdens of debt. However, there is growing consensus that technological change—automation and AI—is changing the quality, quantity and types of jobs that will exist as children in today’s schools make choices in the next five to 10 years. Whereas in the past, technological change was job-augmenting, the next wave of change—the fourth industrial revolution —is likely to be job-displacing. Although our new-found emphasis on technological education is welcome, it is not sufficient either to augment future jobs or to mitigate job displacement.

What jobs are vulnerable? The Oxford economist Carl Benedikt Frey, whose work is about labour market impacts of technology, shows that recent developments in machine-learning will put at risk a substantial share of employment across a wide range of occupations in the very near future. In Britain, the estimate is that about 35% of the workforce is in jobs at high risk of automation. Most of these jobs will be white collar and will probably result in a scenario where we get what is described as “job polarisation”. The cognitive elite will still have jobs—after all, judges, academics, scientists and software developers will always be fine—but, at the other end, so will baristas and hairdressers. The problem will be for all the people in the middle.

What is to be done? Our current system of education overall needs a rethink. Since 1945, educational systems have encouraged specialisation, so students learn more and more about less and less. However, as knowledge becomes obsolete more quickly, the most important thing will be to relearn and then to relearn again, rather than learning to do one thing very well. Therefore, what you learn in college and university will not be enough to keep you going for the next 40 years.

I go back to where schools comes in. The City of London Corporation is adopting a “fusion skills” agenda, which is pioneered in its schools. It is a response to what employers are demanding in terms of transferable skills that are capable of being reconfigured and adapted over time. It defines fusion skills as

“a mix of technical and creative skills which … encompass a broader ‘bundle’ of skills categories including digital, creative, social, interpersonal competencies as well as a range of cognitive skills such as judgement and decision making, critical thinking and problem solving.”

To conclude, is the Minister aware of this new type of agenda, and will she take the time to have a closer at what the City of London Corporation is doing on fusion skills as a way to the future?