EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
1. Major political parties in the UK have raised education to a central position in their philosophies. To understand their reasons for doing so we need to consider the role that education plays in reducing inequality elsewhere in Europe.
2. The quality of education, and the time spent in school, both have a major role to play in creating more equal societies.
3. So the role for the British government is clear – providing educational chances for UK citizens. Through such provision, Britain can become a pioneer in marrying economic dynamism with egalitarian social outcomes.
Take a look at the front benches of the two main political parties in the UK. Both contain a decent selection of the brightest and best MPs. This is as it should be. Even if they sometimes disappoint us, we expect our ministers and those who shadow them to have the intellectual capacity that effective government demands.
Now take a closer look. On both benches, one job stands out for the especially large talents it has attracted – Ed Balls is Minister for the Department of Children, Schools and Families, where he is shadowed by Michael Gove. Both men are central creators of their parties’ guiding philosophies, and their appointment to these positions is an indication of the significance that Labour and the Tories give to education.
An investigation into why education is so important to our political parties might be considered superfluous. After all, promising (and delivering) decent schools is a sure-fire way to win votes. But as electorally popular as Tony Blair’s call for ‘education, education, education’ was, it should also be taken as an early New Labour acknowledgement of the vital role played by schooling in the establishment of sustainable social justice.
To find out why we need to look at ideas that go to the very heart of European welfare states. We can learn much from our European counterparts, and they can learn from the UK. Such a dialogue may well prove crucial in informing the structure of welfare provision the world over in an era threatened by looming environmental, financial and demographic crises.
A starting point will be the Lisbon agenda. Distinct from the Lisbon Treaty, this is an economic reform programme that was launched by the EU in 2000. Lisbon’s worthy aim was to transform the EU by 2010 into the ‘most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world’. One of its facets was to liberalise economic structures in continental European states that were notorious for lacking economic dynamism and suffering from high unemployment. But, in keeping with the traditional social focus of the EU, any restructuring was required to conform to ‘European conceptions of society’ – namely, strong welfare provision and an abhorrence of social and economic inequalities. It was to be a grand experiment in combining so-called Anglo-Saxon flexibility with the security of European welfare models.
One of the reasons behind the last wave of rejections of the EU reform process (the 2005 ‘non’ and ‘nee’) was a belief that this marriage was too one-sided – that the social aspect was being irreparably subordinated to the market. Critics argued that welfare goals had been abandoned in favour of ‘neo-liberal’ reforms. Others suggested that the marriage was doomed before it had even begun – that social protection and economic reform were fundamentally incompatible.
Proponents of this stronger view like to compare social outcomes in the UK, which has open markets and flexible labour rules, with France and Germany, whose markets are more regulated. As is well known, income inequality is much higher in the UK than in these two other major European countries. And a much higher proportion of Britain’s population is threatened by poverty.
For rejectionists who see liberalised markets as the root of all societal evils, the British example confirms what they have been saying all along. But this view is myopic, and ignores countervailing evidence. The EU countries with the highest levels of poverty, inequality and structural unemployment are Greece, Italy and Portugal. All of these countries have stringently regulated markets. On the other hand, the most equal EU countries are the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries, which have competitive markets and, in Denmark’s case, low degrees of labour regulation.
Anti-liberalisers, therefore, are looking to the wrong part of Europe. Instead of damning Lisbon for its putative embrace of Anglo-Saxon (for which, read British) ‘neo-liberalism’, they should ask themselves just how the Nordics and Dutch manage to do so well. Those who try often take high levels of redistribution to be the answer. But again, evidence speaks to the contrary. Far from being the penny-pinching minimalist state of many European imaginations, it turns out that the UK puts more into social expenditure than do the egalitarian Dutch and Finnish, and not much less than the other Scandinavians. In fact, redistribution by Nordic governments is no higher than in France or Germany, which have greater inequality and unemployment levels.
If none of the received wisdom stands up to empirical scrutiny, what, then, is the answer? Why do the Nordics and Dutch have such equal societies? The reason for this is the same reason that Gove and Balls are in the jobs they’re currently doing, the reason that Tony Blair needed to repeat the same word three times. The reason for their high levels of equality is their high standard of education.
Across the EU, the link between education and social outcomes is stark. The better educated you are, the more likely you are to be in work. The employment rate for Europeans who go through tertiary education is eighty per cent; whereas it’s just fifty per cent for those who don’t complete secondary school. So if you do badly at school, you’re more likely to fall into poverty.
There are two key aspects to Nordic education that make it so successful. First of all, its quality – pupils leaving school in Northern Europe have better literacy and numeracy skills than those in the South. Secondly, its quantity – the length of time people spend in school has a huge bearing on their life chances. Consider this: in Portugal, 43 per cent of 25-34 year-olds completed their secondary education, and 19 per cent went on to university; in Greece, the numbers are 57 per cent and 25 per cent. But in Denmark, Finland and Sweden, 90 per cent of 25-34 year-olds completed secondary school, and 40 per cent went on to do degrees or equivalent. We should bear this statistic in mind before jumping to populist criticisms of the British government’s plan to get half of school leavers to university.
And we should not be too harsh on the record of the government and its predecessors when it comes to funding for education. Investment is currently roughly the same as the EU average: just under 6% of GDP. Students leaving British schools are about as literate as those in Germany and more so than those in France. The high standard of British universities is well established – not only are they the best in Europe, but the UK’s top institutions rank among the best in the world.
So what is the problem? Why is the UK so unequal? Again it comes down to the length of time spent in full-time education. Fully one-quarter of British students leave education before they have finished secondary school, well above the EU average. The government needs to effect a cultural shift in citizens’ understanding of the value of education if the UK is to be the knowledge economy that the Lisbon agenda promotes and that globalisation will demand. Raising the school leaving age to 18, as Ed Balls recently proposed, is a start.
The problem is emphatically not down to a fatal embrace of neoliberalism by the UK, or the uncaring outlook of a minimal state. It is because too many people have too small a skill set to cope in today’s competitive labour market. They are either unemployable or can only do badly paid jobs. Britain’s freer markets allow for the economic dynamism that has given it low unemployment, but on their own they cannot provide British people with the ability to avoid poverty. This is where the government – be it Labour or Tory – must step in. Efficient educational provision is one of the most important things government can do.
The UK is in a unique position to pioneer sustainable economic growth on the back of, and feeding into, the sustainable eradication of inequalities. This will be a steep learning curve, and since Britain has a far larger and more diverse welfare state than any of the successful European countries, it will be a foray into largely unknown territory. But if the UK can provide a viable model for the rest of the world as we enter uncertain times, the tough lessons it has to learn will be worth it.
Tristan Stubbs is the Henry Jackson Society's Environment and Economy Section Director.