Nansi Ellis

Education provision post-16 in England narrows young people’s options too soon, forcing them to make choices about their future direction while they’re still trying to work out who they are, and to base those choices on their success or otherwise in an academic – and packed – curriculum. Proposals for an Advanced British Standard (ABS) are welcome in their recognition of these issues, but it’s not ambitious enough in lots of ways. Here’s how it could do better.

1. Aiming bigger for young people and for education

Making a big change to education requires big vision. Government has aims for the ABS – to be the best in the world! Ambitious in improving outcomes! And more clearly – ‘ensure more young people progress into skilled employment, apprenticeships, or high-quality further study by age 19’. Of course education should prepare young people for work and further study.  But preparing young people for what they’ll do when they’re 19 seems a somewhat limited ambition. 

Why is it important?

To decide what changes to make, we should ask why making changes is important. The consultation explains that the changes will help young people to ‘reach their potential’, and to ‘grow the economy and to increase the UK’s competitive advantage’. But we would build a better system by thinking beyond what young people will do at 19. Changes to education are important because the way we work, the sorts of jobs that will be available, is changing.

Most people would also say we want more than just job skills for our young people. The world outside work is changing too, our responsibilities to each other, our communities and to the world; our understanding of our bodies, minds and relationships. We need to learn how to live better. The broader question as we contemplate change is what kind of young people do we want to emerge from our education system? Or to take from the Nuffield review in 2009: ‘What counts as an educated 19 year old in this day and age?’ Are we supporting them to ‘fit’ the new world or empowering them to make change? And it’s OK to want a bit of both.

Answers to these questions should make policy-makers think more broadly about the changes needed at 16-19. But clearly, these are the same young people, and in many cases the same teachers, who are part of the broader secondary school system. People don’t suddenly learn how to learn or teach in different ways; most students won’t suddenly know what they want to study or what kind of work they want to do. For those with educational needs, with family needs or financial needs, those who live with disadvantage or prejudice, those choices may be even more difficult to make. What we want for young people at 19 has to permeate through the whole of the education system. 

2. Exams, exams, exams

Making a big change to education needs big thinking, and in particular it needs open acknowledgement of biases. The ABS is constrained by the continued belief that everything needs to be graded, and that exams are the best and fairest way of doing that. A more open process of policy-development would start from a question about who needs to know what: what evidence does an 18 year old need to take with them as they leave, does an employer or an admissions tutor need in order to judge capabilities, does a government need to judge schools? It would consider which subjects, which knowledge and skills are best judged by written exam. 

Can we change the way we examine?

When Michael Gove sought to bring back ‘terminal’ exams – those that happen at the end of the phase of education – part of his rationale was that the raft of modular exams led to pupils constantly being under the shadow of testing. It was true that young people sat many exams during the 16-19 phase, and that a return to terminal exams has (perhaps) reduced that number. But the shadow of exams still looms large over everything that students do, and influences the way they learn and the way they are taught. 

If our aims for this phase include building teamwork and leadership skills, empathy and self-knowledge, then the ways in which we assess need to reflect that. There will be knowledge – and skills – that lend themselves to paper and pen tests. And there will be others that could be assessed far better through portfolios, vivas, technology. These may be harder to moderate, harder to make ‘rigorous’, they may take longer and there may be different groups of young people who are disadvantaged by a change of approach. All these issues can be worked through, if only we acknowledge that the work needs to be done.

3. Solving the teacher problem

Big changes to education need to be open to possibilities of broader changes across the system. The ABS is constrained by the idea that it will be delivered in broadly similar ways to how A levels, T levels and BTECs are taught. If that’s the case, the changes stand or fall on the likelihood that we can recruit more teachers – to teach the additional hours and the ‘majors’ and ‘minors’. Yet we haven’t managed to do that in the current system. 

Where will the teachers come from?

According to the NEU, “One in six English teachers and one in five mathematics teachers do not have a post A-Level qualification in the subject. We need an additional 4,300 mathematics teachers and 2,600 English teachers to cover current needs.” The ABS proposals would need a further 5,300 teachers according to the same report.

So we need to think differently about how post-16 education is organised, who teaches it, or where those teachers will come from – or perhaps all of those things. Where is the openness to think about different ways of structuring timetables and subject content, or different people with expertise to support learning, or different ways and places for students to learn, including (but not limited to) through technology? In FE, lecturers may continue to work in their professional jobs, bringing up-to-date knowledge and skill from the world of work into their teaching. In HE, lecturers may be involved both in the workplace or in research. Are there ways in which engineers, physicists, musicians, translators could become teachers while also continuing in their workplaces? Are there aspects of the broad curriculum that could be led by health visitors, employers, financial advisers? Of course this is problematic, and there will rightly be concerns about safeguarding and teacher professionalism. But we change nothing if we don’t ask the big questions.

4. Involving people who know what’s needed

Thinking big carries risks – which is why big policies need to be thought through with those who will be impacted and those who will implement them. Perhaps there have been conversations between civil servants and teachers, or teacher unions – I don’t know – but public consultation responses suggest that any concerns haven’t been listened to. There’s little evidence here that anyone has worked with, observed, or even spoken to people in Pupil Referral Units or Special Schools, rural schools and colleges or those in areas of high deprivation – or employers in those areas.

Can we have better conversations?

Written consultation is necessarily a limited and limiting way of involving people. This one sets out the ABS that Ministers want to see, and invites comments on how to make it work, rather than asking the deeper questions of policy. Which will make it hard for the policy itself to survive contact with reality. Provision for pupils with special needs is an afterthought, young people in rural areas with limited (or expensive) public transport have little choice, too few employers can offer placements or work experience.

There is the promise of a ten-year timeline for implementation. This gives an opportunity for real conversations with professionals, parents, employers and young people, time to build shared understanding of the problems, to consider deeper changes, to prototype and trial different models for change, and to develop ownership of the solutions. Better conversations include the outliers, the schools and colleges, students and areas of the country where change is the hardest, to build a system, together, that can deliver the big aims for education. Yes, this carries risk – but the risks (political, financial and educational) of imposing new qualifications are perhaps greater now than they were twenty years ago, when Tomlinson’s diplomas fell.

5. Learning the lessons

Big changes to education policies can’t happen in isolation. There are lessons to be learnt from past reforms – successful and less so – and from the present education system. Changes in education also need to reflect changes in broader policy areas.

Where should we look?

Changes to 16-19 year old education have been proposed in the past: the Nuffield Review (2003-2009); Tomlinson (2004); even the current T levels changes – and yet there is little evidence that any of the lessons have been learnt in considering the next changes. It’s worth reading, as an example, Paper No 7 in Edge’s series of Learning from the Past, to understand some of the difficulties that beset the 14-19 Diploma programme – including the complexity of the plans, late involvement of practitioners in the design of the qualification, and the focus on qualifications at the expense of a holistic, systematic approach. But it’s not just the distant past that holds lessons – changes need to build on the successes of the current system, and mitigate its problems, and policy-makers need an honest appraisal of what those problems and successes are.

We can look at how changes have been made in other countries, and other UK nations. Not so much to copy or to denigrate, but to understand how those changes have been made. The Independent Assessment Commission looked at Singapore, New Zealand, Queensland and Norway for example, while Edge compares a range of different models of a baccalaureate proposed or in use in England.

A holistic proposal for 16-19 education would also consider other pressing issues in education: how digital tech, including AI, could change how education works, the impact of crumbling school buildings, pupil mental health, poverty and deprivation. Education doesn’t, and shouldn’t, develop in a vacuum. And it would look more broadly at other policy areas, particularly to understand the skills needed in a workforce of the future, and for a changing world. These would include Industrial Strategy, the NHS workforce strategy, Local Skills Improvement Plans, and the Climate strategy.

We need to be more ambitious – for the system as a whole

Important though it is to get education right for young people, framing the changes in the 16-19 silo is the wrong way to do it. There are too many other problems that need fixing, and these proposals don’t even break the surface.