Britain's children are being betrayed by our woeful education system ... and have been failed for 150 years
By Correlli BarnettLast updated at 11:28 AM on 17th October 2009
As the largest private employer in the country, we depend on high standards in our schools, because today's schoolchildren are tomorrow's team.
'They will be the ones we need to help build our business.
'Sadly, despite all the money that has been spent, standards are still woefully low in too many schools. Employers like us are often left to pick up the pieces.'
Thus spoke Sir Terry Leahy, the Tesco chief executive, in harsh condemnation this week of the failure of this country's education system to produce a world-class workforce.
Victorian school: But the problems with the education system that existed 150 years ago have not been solved by today's politicians
His comments were followed yesterday by the publication of the biggest review of primary education for 40 years, which said that the state's 'Stalinist' control over teaching means children are suffering from inadequate education.
It said that an obsession with testing had dragged down standards so that pupils now get a less rounded schooling than those in Victorian times.
These two devastating attacks on Britain's education system echoed a previous grim indictment of British schools in the form of a Royal Commission report.
It said: 'Our evidence appears to show that our industrial classes have not even that basis of sound general education on which alone technical education can rest. In fact, our deficiency is not merely a deficiency in technical education, but in general intelligence.'
And the date of this devastating indictment? It was 1868. Yes, more than 140 years ago.
Moreover, this Victorian Royal Commission added a dire warning: 'Unless we remedy this want of general intelligence we shall gradually but surely find that our undeniable superiority in wealth and perhaps in vigour will not save us from decline.'
Yet for the past 141 years, this warning and many later ones have gone unheeded by British governments - no matter whether Liberal, Conservative, Labour or New Labour.
As a result, our lack of educated capability in the workplace has never been remedied - even today.
According to a recent report by the Department for Work and Pensions, Britain has nearly one million 'Neets' - 18 to 24-year-olds in neither education, nor employment, nor training.
Yet, in the past four years, employers have hired about a million workers from Eastern Europe. The reason, according to the Government, is that British workers lack 'basic employability skills, incentives and motivation'.
So the unheeded warning of that Royal Commission back in 1868 has, tragically, turned out to be a gruesomely accurate prophecy.
This country's leaders did fail to develop the nation's 'general intelligence' (or 'basic employability skills') through a first-class education and training system.
Britain, indeed, was overtaken as an industrial and commercial nation by our better-trained rivals.
Tesco boss: Sir Terry Leahy complained big employers were forced to 'pick up the pieces' of a failing state education system
And so, in the event, our Victorian wealth did not save us from a slow decline from world leadership to our present nadir under Gordon Brown, with unimaginable levels of national debt and a colossal long-term trade deficit.
Where did we go wrong? The truth is that, ever since the Victorian age, attempts to improve the nation's education system have always been one step behind our international rivals - always the half-cock results of tinkering and Treasury bean-counting.
Universal state primary education was not introduced until 1872, half a century after Germany and France did so.
By 1895, there were more than four million children in these schools - but the majority of them ill-clad, dirty, nit-ridden or with decayed teeth; many also suffering from chronic throat and lung problems.
Here were the forebears of today's underclass.
Until Britain eventually set up a state network of secondary schools in 1902, the odds against an elementary-school child going on to secondary education were 270 to 1.
Then by 1909, three-quarters of British youth between 14 and 17 were in no kind of education at all - the Neets of their time.
No wonder the City of London in the 1900s had to hire German clerks because of a lack of suitably educated British youngsters.
When, in 1889, a Royal Commission reported on the superb networks of polytechnics and engineering colleges on the continent, the pathetic British answer was to pass a percentage of the duty paid on sales of whisky to local authorities to spend on new technical institutes - if they so wished.
The result was not a national network, but a random scatter of uneven quality.
Jump forward to the years just before World War II and the British still remained far worse trained than their international trading rivals - particularly the Germans, whom they were about to fight.
At the apex of the educational pyramid in 1939 was a privileged handful of university students (a tiny proportion compared with numbers in France and only a third of those in America).
At the bottom of the pyramid, 99 per cent of working- class children left school devoid of any kind of qualification, whether scholastic or vocational.
In the middle of the pyramid, the secondary school population, aged 14 to 18, amounted to less than a tenth of those in that age group. And, while pre-war Germany had nearly two million youngsters in parttime vocational training, Britain had a mere 20,000.
The same dismal pattern can be seen with university education. In 1938-9, subjects which we called 'applied science' (or what Germans described as 'Technik') accounted for barely 5,000 students out of a total of 50,000, whereas the humanities were studied by more than 22,000.
Britain had no equivalents to the 300 German technical colleges, let alone the ten German technical universities.
No wonder, then, that from the start of pre-war rearmament and right through World War II, Britain was handicapped by shortages of technicians-graduate technologists and production engineers - as well as by a far too narrow industrial base in advanced technologies such as radio engineering and machine tools.
We too easily forget that without massive imports from America of thermionic valves and precision components, the brilliant radar inventions of our world- class scientists would have remained mere laboratory toys.
Still not working: Schoolchildren in Britain today are less-well equipped to deal with the rigours of working life than their European counterparts
By the end of the war, it was brutally plain to Whitehall that this country's shortcomings in education and training threatened our future success as an industrial trading nation.
Radical reform of the whole system was desperately needed. The result was a spate of visionary official blueprints from 1944 onwards that outlined what had to be done.
But the governments of the early post-war era, both Labour and Conservative, squandered this unique opportunity. All of the great ideas were either stillborn or doomed to fail.
As a result, there were no new technical universities; no expansion of part-time vocational training.
But most disastrous of all was the failure of post-war governments to fulfil the promise in the Education Act of 1944 to create a new system of secondary schooling.
The Act had specified three types of school to cater for different kinds of young talent: secondary modern, secondary technical and academic grammar.
This tripartite system was what continental nations have always had - and Germany still has.
The three different types of school were intended to be equal in status and funding.
But grammar schools got the best funding, the best buildings and the best teachers, while the cash-strapped secondary moderns and secondary techs were forced to operate out of outdated, shabby and cramped premises.
So the 11-plus exam simply condemned the non-academic to education dustbins.
This catastrophe paved the way for the social engineers of Harold Wilson's Labour government in 1965 to replace the botched tripartite system with the huge, all-in comprehensive.
Of course, these weren't introduced in order to train the nation's youngsters to succeed in a tough world market, but purely in the name of 'fairness' and 'equal opportunity'.
Despite the constant tinkering by subsequent governments with the national curriculum, meddling by quangocrats and the introduction of one-off gimmicks, Britain has never recovered from that lost post-war opportunity.
As a result, pupils in state schools now lag well behind their European opposites in standards of literacy and numeracy.
Major problem: Former Prime Minister Sir John Major turned polytechnics into universities, diluting degree subjects
Tesco's Sir Terry Leahy is absolutely right.
What's more, further up the educational ladder, we are nowhere near equalling the European, American and Asian output of graduate engineers and technologists.
Too many British university students are wasting time on so- called 'rice pudding' topics (soft and easy to digest) such as media studies, rather than studying tougher subjects such as maths, physics, chemistry and engineering.
The root cause of this continued failure also lies with the blinkered mindsets of those who ran our mid-Victorian public schools and Oxbridge.
It was they who lastingly shaped the values of the British political and mandarin class right down to the present day.
For them, the classics or English literature were better than science. And, even then, 'pure' science (original research) was nobler than applied science (technology).
It is little wonder that, when Britain belatedly created state secondary education after 1902, the civil servant in charge imposed a strictly academic syllabus which imitated the ones at public schools like Rugby and Winchester.
Nothing vocational - much too vulgar!
Ever since, the prejudices of the bookish few dictated the education of the unbookish many.
The same is true for universities - from late Victorian redbrick to the concrete campuses of the Sixties - with the proportion of students studying science heavily outweighed by those studying the humanities.
This was compounded by an act of high-minded madness by Prime Minister John Major, who turned polytechnics into universities with the result that their original, career-minded purposes were diluted by yet more 'rice pudding' subjects.
Major should have done the complete opposite and downgraded all universities (except for a handful of top research institutions) into polytechnics.
But Britain's most crippling legacy from Victorian educational ideals lies in a political and mandarin class that remains the product of a humanist culture instead of a technological one.
Only a small minority of MPs are qualified scientists or engineers, let alone have pursued a career in those vocations.
For example, former New Labour secretary of state for trade and industry Patricia Hewitt was an honours graduate in English literature from Cambridge - not exactly the best background for the woman charged with sorting out the wreck of Rover.
Ed Balls (Secretary for Children, Schools and Families), Lord Mandelson (Business Secretary), Ruth Kelly (former Education Secretary), David Willetts (notorious Conservative egghead) and, yes, David Cameron himself are all philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) graduates from Oxford.
This is a highly academic madrassa for moulding future politicians, Whitehall mandarins and media pundits.
It is more concerned with the sociology of industrial societies than with the vital study of technological competition faced by Britain in the modern world. An English version of the hard-nosed, maths-based French Ecole Nationale d'Administration it is not.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, Britain calamitously failed to educate and train the nation to meet the threat from European, American and Japanese competitors.
Well, we know how that battle turned out. Today, Britain faces a new threat from the fast-expanding industries of China, India and, for that matter, Brazil.
If we fail to equip ourselves with even better skills than these new competitors, how will 60 million people crammed in this small island ever stand the chance to survive and prosper?
By Correlli BarnettLast updated at 11:28 AM on 17th October 2009
As the largest private employer in the country, we depend on high standards in our schools, because today's schoolchildren are tomorrow's team.
'They will be the ones we need to help build our business.
'Sadly, despite all the money that has been spent, standards are still woefully low in too many schools. Employers like us are often left to pick up the pieces.'
Thus spoke Sir Terry Leahy, the Tesco chief executive, in harsh condemnation this week of the failure of this country's education system to produce a world-class workforce.
Victorian school: But the problems with the education system that existed 150 years ago have not been solved by today's politicians
His comments were followed yesterday by the publication of the biggest review of primary education for 40 years, which said that the state's 'Stalinist' control over teaching means children are suffering from inadequate education.
It said that an obsession with testing had dragged down standards so that pupils now get a less rounded schooling than those in Victorian times.
These two devastating attacks on Britain's education system echoed a previous grim indictment of British schools in the form of a Royal Commission report.
It said: 'Our evidence appears to show that our industrial classes have not even that basis of sound general education on which alone technical education can rest. In fact, our deficiency is not merely a deficiency in technical education, but in general intelligence.'
And the date of this devastating indictment? It was 1868. Yes, more than 140 years ago.
Moreover, this Victorian Royal Commission added a dire warning: 'Unless we remedy this want of general intelligence we shall gradually but surely find that our undeniable superiority in wealth and perhaps in vigour will not save us from decline.'
Yet for the past 141 years, this warning and many later ones have gone unheeded by British governments - no matter whether Liberal, Conservative, Labour or New Labour.
As a result, our lack of educated capability in the workplace has never been remedied - even today.
According to a recent report by the Department for Work and Pensions, Britain has nearly one million 'Neets' - 18 to 24-year-olds in neither education, nor employment, nor training.
Yet, in the past four years, employers have hired about a million workers from Eastern Europe. The reason, according to the Government, is that British workers lack 'basic employability skills, incentives and motivation'.
So the unheeded warning of that Royal Commission back in 1868 has, tragically, turned out to be a gruesomely accurate prophecy.
This country's leaders did fail to develop the nation's 'general intelligence' (or 'basic employability skills') through a first-class education and training system.
Britain, indeed, was overtaken as an industrial and commercial nation by our better-trained rivals.
Tesco boss: Sir Terry Leahy complained big employers were forced to 'pick up the pieces' of a failing state education system
And so, in the event, our Victorian wealth did not save us from a slow decline from world leadership to our present nadir under Gordon Brown, with unimaginable levels of national debt and a colossal long-term trade deficit.
Where did we go wrong? The truth is that, ever since the Victorian age, attempts to improve the nation's education system have always been one step behind our international rivals - always the half-cock results of tinkering and Treasury bean-counting.
Universal state primary education was not introduced until 1872, half a century after Germany and France did so.
By 1895, there were more than four million children in these schools - but the majority of them ill-clad, dirty, nit-ridden or with decayed teeth; many also suffering from chronic throat and lung problems.
Here were the forebears of today's underclass.
Until Britain eventually set up a state network of secondary schools in 1902, the odds against an elementary-school child going on to secondary education were 270 to 1.
Then by 1909, three-quarters of British youth between 14 and 17 were in no kind of education at all - the Neets of their time.
No wonder the City of London in the 1900s had to hire German clerks because of a lack of suitably educated British youngsters.
When, in 1889, a Royal Commission reported on the superb networks of polytechnics and engineering colleges on the continent, the pathetic British answer was to pass a percentage of the duty paid on sales of whisky to local authorities to spend on new technical institutes - if they so wished.
The result was not a national network, but a random scatter of uneven quality.
Jump forward to the years just before World War II and the British still remained far worse trained than their international trading rivals - particularly the Germans, whom they were about to fight.
At the apex of the educational pyramid in 1939 was a privileged handful of university students (a tiny proportion compared with numbers in France and only a third of those in America).
At the bottom of the pyramid, 99 per cent of working- class children left school devoid of any kind of qualification, whether scholastic or vocational.
In the middle of the pyramid, the secondary school population, aged 14 to 18, amounted to less than a tenth of those in that age group. And, while pre-war Germany had nearly two million youngsters in parttime vocational training, Britain had a mere 20,000.
The same dismal pattern can be seen with university education. In 1938-9, subjects which we called 'applied science' (or what Germans described as 'Technik') accounted for barely 5,000 students out of a total of 50,000, whereas the humanities were studied by more than 22,000.
Britain had no equivalents to the 300 German technical colleges, let alone the ten German technical universities.
No wonder, then, that from the start of pre-war rearmament and right through World War II, Britain was handicapped by shortages of technicians-graduate technologists and production engineers - as well as by a far too narrow industrial base in advanced technologies such as radio engineering and machine tools.
We too easily forget that without massive imports from America of thermionic valves and precision components, the brilliant radar inventions of our world- class scientists would have remained mere laboratory toys.
Still not working: Schoolchildren in Britain today are less-well equipped to deal with the rigours of working life than their European counterparts
By the end of the war, it was brutally plain to Whitehall that this country's shortcomings in education and training threatened our future success as an industrial trading nation.
Radical reform of the whole system was desperately needed. The result was a spate of visionary official blueprints from 1944 onwards that outlined what had to be done.
But the governments of the early post-war era, both Labour and Conservative, squandered this unique opportunity. All of the great ideas were either stillborn or doomed to fail.
As a result, there were no new technical universities; no expansion of part-time vocational training.
But most disastrous of all was the failure of post-war governments to fulfil the promise in the Education Act of 1944 to create a new system of secondary schooling.
The Act had specified three types of school to cater for different kinds of young talent: secondary modern, secondary technical and academic grammar.
This tripartite system was what continental nations have always had - and Germany still has.
The three different types of school were intended to be equal in status and funding.
But grammar schools got the best funding, the best buildings and the best teachers, while the cash-strapped secondary moderns and secondary techs were forced to operate out of outdated, shabby and cramped premises.
So the 11-plus exam simply condemned the non-academic to education dustbins.
This catastrophe paved the way for the social engineers of Harold Wilson's Labour government in 1965 to replace the botched tripartite system with the huge, all-in comprehensive.
Of course, these weren't introduced in order to train the nation's youngsters to succeed in a tough world market, but purely in the name of 'fairness' and 'equal opportunity'.
Despite the constant tinkering by subsequent governments with the national curriculum, meddling by quangocrats and the introduction of one-off gimmicks, Britain has never recovered from that lost post-war opportunity.
As a result, pupils in state schools now lag well behind their European opposites in standards of literacy and numeracy.
Major problem: Former Prime Minister Sir John Major turned polytechnics into universities, diluting degree subjects
Tesco's Sir Terry Leahy is absolutely right.
What's more, further up the educational ladder, we are nowhere near equalling the European, American and Asian output of graduate engineers and technologists.
Too many British university students are wasting time on so- called 'rice pudding' topics (soft and easy to digest) such as media studies, rather than studying tougher subjects such as maths, physics, chemistry and engineering.
The root cause of this continued failure also lies with the blinkered mindsets of those who ran our mid-Victorian public schools and Oxbridge.
It was they who lastingly shaped the values of the British political and mandarin class right down to the present day.
For them, the classics or English literature were better than science. And, even then, 'pure' science (original research) was nobler than applied science (technology).
It is little wonder that, when Britain belatedly created state secondary education after 1902, the civil servant in charge imposed a strictly academic syllabus which imitated the ones at public schools like Rugby and Winchester.
Nothing vocational - much too vulgar!
Ever since, the prejudices of the bookish few dictated the education of the unbookish many.
The same is true for universities - from late Victorian redbrick to the concrete campuses of the Sixties - with the proportion of students studying science heavily outweighed by those studying the humanities.
This was compounded by an act of high-minded madness by Prime Minister John Major, who turned polytechnics into universities with the result that their original, career-minded purposes were diluted by yet more 'rice pudding' subjects.
Major should have done the complete opposite and downgraded all universities (except for a handful of top research institutions) into polytechnics.
But Britain's most crippling legacy from Victorian educational ideals lies in a political and mandarin class that remains the product of a humanist culture instead of a technological one.
Only a small minority of MPs are qualified scientists or engineers, let alone have pursued a career in those vocations.
For example, former New Labour secretary of state for trade and industry Patricia Hewitt was an honours graduate in English literature from Cambridge - not exactly the best background for the woman charged with sorting out the wreck of Rover.
Ed Balls (Secretary for Children, Schools and Families), Lord Mandelson (Business Secretary), Ruth Kelly (former Education Secretary), David Willetts (notorious Conservative egghead) and, yes, David Cameron himself are all philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) graduates from Oxford.
This is a highly academic madrassa for moulding future politicians, Whitehall mandarins and media pundits.
It is more concerned with the sociology of industrial societies than with the vital study of technological competition faced by Britain in the modern world. An English version of the hard-nosed, maths-based French Ecole Nationale d'Administration it is not.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, Britain calamitously failed to educate and train the nation to meet the threat from European, American and Japanese competitors.
Well, we know how that battle turned out. Today, Britain faces a new threat from the fast-expanding industries of China, India and, for that matter, Brazil.
If we fail to equip ourselves with even better skills than these new competitors, how will 60 million people crammed in this small island ever stand the chance to survive and prosper?
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