Nichola Kennedy examines reforms in Britain from which the local sector can learn.
Education reform is a bit like waiting for a bus: you stand around for what seem like years and then along comes a convoy.
In the course of a single week, Michael Gove launched a plan to abandon English GCSEs in favour of a new, tougher test called the English Baccalaureate, or Ebacc, intended to, “restore rigour” into the exam process.
Then David Hanson, chief executive of the Independent Association of Prep Schools, pointed to an “obsession” with literacy and numeracy amongst state primary schools was actually damaging pupils’ education, particularly amongst boys.
Finally Sir Michael Wilshaw, the head of Ofsted, urged teachers to, "go the extra mile" and work longer hours for their next pay rise.
These latest reform proposals come on the back of a raft of initiatives in England intended to improve educational outcomes and pupil prospects. And while some of these are remarkably successful, virtually none have made the transition across to Northern Ireland.
Academies, Higher Apprenticeships, Employer Ownership of Skills, and Achievement for All are just some of the initiatives intended to address structural change in a 21st century internet-enabled world where youth unemployment began rising well before the recent recession and where over a fifth of Northern Ireland’s 16-24 year olds are currently not in education, employment or training – defined by the unfortunate acronym, NEET.
There are two millennia of theories as to the purpose of education and learning, but one of its generally acknowledged goals is to equip young people to fulfil their potential in the world of work. A report from the UK Commission for Employment and Skills found that an awareness and understanding of the world of work is integral to the delivery of this goal is best achieved through business and schools working in partnership.
The business/education relationship is symbiotic. Where businesses can recruit staff with the educational and work-ready skills they need, productivity is enhanced, competitiveness increased and the partnership further cemented. Competitive businesses export more, are more profitable and pay higher wages and taxes, all of which serve to regenerate the economy and reinforce investment in educations and learning.
A further benefit of collaborative partnership is the provision of real employment opportunities. For the majority of businesses, the number of young people they have recruited over the past two years has decreased, with businesses recruiting and training young people, including apprentices, as the business need arises.
In 2011, the Government’s Plan for Growth established its Higher Apprenticeships scheme, with initially, 30 partnerships to develop Higher Apprenticeships in a number of occupational areas and in 2011-2012 some 250 employers created over 19,000 Higher Apprenticeship places in Great Britain.
PwC was one of those partners, with our Higher Apprenticeship in Professional Services, attracting over 2,300 applications for the first 100 vacancies. And while the Higher Apprenticeship programme is not currently recognised in Northern Ireland, PwC has launched the scheme here regardless. The first 12 recruits to PwC in Belfast are now embarked on a programme that will deliver an internationally recognised professional qualification in around the same time as a degree, but without the burden of student debt.
Similarly absent from Northern Ireland, the Employer Ownership of Skills pilot offers all employers in England direct access to up to £250 million of public investment over the next two years to design and deliver their own training solutions to find more effective and sustainable ways to improve skills in the workforce and to use these improved skills to drive up productivity and growth.
In helping to build new business models with schools across Great Britain, PwC has had a unique opportunity to evaluate some of the most successful educational outcomes experienced by schools and their teaching staff, as well as some of the challenges.
There are now more than 1,500 Academies, publicly-funded and potentially sponsored independent schools free of local authority control and with considerable flexibility to set pay and conditions for staff and challenge cultures of low aspiration and achievement. Academies range from already outstanding schools converted to Academy status to Academies established to transform previously underperforming schools to special and referral Academies.
But while Academies are intended to bring a new dimension to learning and development, often with business sponsorships, they are also working to eliminate the soaring burden of ‘back office’ administration allowing school management to focus on ensuring the delivery of excellent teaching and improving the life chances of children and young people – not managing back office services and IT contracts.
Yet a recent PwC review of 40 state maintained schools found that, on average, a fifth of the schools’ staff were involved in delivering back office-related work and not frontline teaching. If the loss of educational provision wasn’t enough, the cash cost to the 40 schools was staggering – the average total back-office cost per pupil was over £1,000 – a fifth of the average total revenue budget cost per pupil.
While schools struggle to balance frontline teaching and administration pressures with the expectations of society and the world of work, there are some problems that are unique to Northern Ireland. While the region outperforms the rest of the UK in terms of A-levels and the top end of GCSEs, every year around 600 children leave school with no formal qualifications, and 3,000 leave with very few and currently more than fifth of working age people in Northern Ireland have no qualifications at all; nearly twice the UK average. These negative trends are particularly pronounced for children with special needs, with the incidence of special needs rising in schools and costing around £210 million a year and rising.
In England, the Achievement for All programme is already tackling exactly this underachievement through a unique partnership approach between government, the private sector (where PwC is a key player) and the third sector (a newly established charity, Achievement for All 3As Ltd). Tailored to the specific needs of each school, the AfA pilot delivered remarkable outcomes, including:
• 37 per cent of children achieving or exceeding national levels of progress in English;
• 42 per cent of children achieving or exceeding national levels of progress in maths; and
• a 10 percent decrease in persistent absenteeism.
Across England, partnerships between education and the private and third sectors are gaining ground. However Northern Ireland has been slower to respond to these opportunities, despite the local educational challenges and some spectacular results emerging from these programmes in Great Britain.
A mere 18 years since the internet became publicly accessible, the virtual world has transformed ‘work’ as we know it. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, “ there are things we do not know we don’t know,” and amongst those unknowns where a future generation will work, what skills it needs to do that work and how these are to be taught.
Whilst we recognise and acknowledge that the challenges faced in the Northern Ireland education and skills system are, in some instances, different from elsewhere, at the heart of responding to those challenges is partnership between government, business and the third sector to deliver new, radical approaches to education and training. If we are to address the issues of NEETs and educational underachievement, Northern Ireland needs to embrace these partnerships with equal enthusiasm.
Nichola Kennedy is a Senior Manager with PwC in Northern Ireland.
Nichola can be contacted on 028 9041 5774 or nichola.kennedy@uk.pwc.com
