Over the years, I’ve been directly or indirectly involved in many attempts to come up with a simple, but accurate way to define socio-economic background (SEB) for a variety of social mobility and inclusion initiatives. 

Most obviously for me, this has been about university access, wider participation and career opportunities. For many years, the Office of Fair Access & Participation (now part of the Office for Students) has used POLAR quintiles as its headline indicator. This is the rate of progression to higher education from within a postcode. Obviously, this doesn’t equate directly to class and, if the mission to eliminate access gaps were ever successful, POLAR would becoming increasingly meaningless as the differences between quintiles tended to zero.

More recently, OfS introduced TUNDRA, another chilly acronym to identify cold spots of progression. UCAS uses its own Indicators of Multiple Deprivation. Of course, ‘progression’, ‘deprivation’ and ‘class’ are very different things and it’s important not to confuse them, even though the barriers to social mobility may intersect across them.

I could go on listing the zoo of other measures out there, adopting different approaches based on occupational prestige, access to resources (like education or housing), absolute and relative poverty measures, subjective social status, and more marketing-style typologies like, for example, Experian’s colourful Mosaic tool.

Simple or accurate

Last week, this issue of defining background came up in relation to a new project I’m involved in to build more equity, diversity and inclusion into engineering. So I went back to the first work I did on it back in 2010 when the coalition government were first trying to build a Social Mobility Toolkit for employers, providing a comparative way of recording SEB so performance and improved could be measured and tracked.

The assembled experts (which generously included me) compared notes, shook heads, and generally agreed that it is genuinely impossible to come up with a means of classifying individuals that is both simple and accurate. 

Even if a simple measure were ever possible, I’m pretty convinced that an accurate one isn’t. And the simpler it is, the less accurate it gets.

People’s complex individual stories will always be diminished by being put in boxes. That said, aggregated data that approximates at scale to patterns and trends is better than the historic, condescending approach of three classifications of class, based on vague notions about jobs, income, region and accent. (Note the image from the iconic Class Sketch which featured in The Frost Report in 1966, which is copyright, but used under Fair Use.)

How to record and tracking social mobility

So, if you’re an employer, say, who is looking to be more intentionally proactive about social mobility, what data should you gather?

I was inspired to write this by the ever-brilliant Laura McInerney’s blog on Substack in which she mentions coming across the attempt by the Solicitors’ Qualifying Exam, which clearly elevates simplicity over sophistication.

The best practice, I think, is the Government Statistical Service’s recommended series of questions which it has devised to try to harmonise standards. The Government also published this useful guidance for employers (in the financial and professional services sectors, but it applies more generally).

In 2022, the Social Mobility Commission in partnership with The Bridge Group also came up with a new toolkit, which is the gold standard for employers wanting to take social mobility seriously. It includes guidance on what data to gather and how. The Sutton Trust has a similar toolkit too.

Who knows best?

All this data is important and clearly defined terminology is critical if you want to build a solid evidence base. However, when it comes to socio-economic background – or class, as some might call it – there is something to be said for abandoning more scientific approaches and embracing self-identification.

If you’re going to ask questions about someone’s background in order to allot them to a class, why not just ask them – as well or instead – to say where they think they should be placed?

What class you are may well be best defined by where you feel your ‘belong’.

For some people that will never change: former politicians, enrobed in ermine in the Lords, often insist they are still working class. Meanwhile, a titled aristocrat, bankrupt and scraping a living, may never lose their sense of self as upper class. 

For other people, class is mutable. Social mobility, of course, suggests that it is something that can move – or, at least, even if ‘class’ is fixed, everything that gives that word any useful meaning can be changed.

The post Measuring class appeared first on Johnny Rich.

Here are just two recent signs.

Sign 1

New research recently revealed that now more than half of supposedly full-time undergraduates are doing paid work for more than 15 hours a week and nearly a quarter have full-time jobs alongside their studies to make ends meet.

The idea that students whinge about not having enough money is nothing new. (There are even a jokes about it in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale from the fourteenth century.) But we have reach a different order of poverty now. The situation is desperate and it’s damaging to their wellbeing and their outcomes.

Sign 2

In the past few weeks dozens of universities have announced redundancies. Just this morning the number crept to 49 and there are probably more to come. This is because HE funding in the UK has been facing real terms cuts for the past decade. This is the equivalent of anorexia for our world-leading HE sector. With no more fat to shed, the system has started to consume itself.

There is a crisis in the way we fund students and the way we fund the institutions where they study.

What should politicians do about it?

The major political parties would rather not say anything about this. They know the parlous state of the nation’s finances. They know the majority of voters would prioritise any available funding to be directed towards health, crumbling schools, bankrupted local councils, the cost of living, et cetera et cetera et cetera. And the politicians fear that commitments to solve the crises in HE will not come cheap.

They have to say something though. A blank where an HE policy should be will be noticed and challenged. So right now, I suspect drafts are being drawn up with long-grass-kicking promises of a ‘review’. If we’re lucky, they’ll be wondering where to commit to ‘a radical review’.

They shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the opportunities to win votes and do The Right Thing in the process. The rewards of having a successful higher education sector are boundless: a higher skills pipeline leading to greater productivity in the workforce; home-grown talent filling labour market shortages; social mobility opportunities; investment-sparking research; levelling up around HE providers acting as innovation hubs and major regional employers; et cetera et cetera et cetera.

To that end, I want to offer two options for the manifesto of any party that wants a real and practical solution.

The safe option

I was delighted that my Fairer Funding proposal for an Employer Levy has been economically modelled & polled in Higher Education Policy Institute’s latest report published this week.

It wouldn’t cost taxpayers more. In fact it would save a staggering £8 billion a year compared to currently.

Yes, you read that right: £8 billion for each cohort of students. That’s not my estimate, that’s according to the independent economic modelling by London Economics Ltd, who analysed the Employer Levy alongside 3 other proposals for English HE and one for Scotland.

Not only would it save billions of pounds, it would better balance student demand and labour market needs, support access, provide financial headroom for more student maintenance support and better HE funding.

What’s more, student debts would be slashed and – instead of loan repayments of 9% by graduates and, in effect, their employers – grads and employers would pay just 3% each.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that among potential students, polling showed the Employer Levy as easily the most popular with 78% saying they would definitely or probably apply (compared to 41-74% for other proposals and 68% for the current system).

The bold option

The bolder option (which is not necessarily mutually exclusive with the safe one) is for politicians to stop regarding the human capital of the nation as a cost at all and start to recognise that – like building roads, railways and power plants – building a skilled future workforce is an investment in the infrastructure of the country.

As such, all post-compulsory education could be treated as expenditure that will be financed by the additional revenues that will be generated by the investment and by avoiding the costs that would be incurred if the investment were not made.

It would require radical change to fiscal rules, but when the rules get in the way of so much benefit, I suggest they are what’s wrong, not what they prevent.

The post What should party manifestos say about higher education funding? appeared first on Johnny Rich.

He asked me to appear on his podcast My Imaginary University.

If you’re not familiar with it (where have you been?), this is the closest thing the HE sector has to Desert Island Discs. It’s a ingeniously simple format in which Paul interviews someone, invites them to make some seemingly fantastical choices and, in the process, of course, they reveal as much about themselves as they do about the choices they’ve made. 

Rather than picking eight tracks, a book and a luxury, in My Imaginary University the interviewee conjures their fantasy institution using a series of prompt question that Paul emailed me in advance. 

At the start of each show, he explains that he hasn’t a clue what’s coming and, to my surprise, this was literally true. You have to hand it to him: he’s a class act. He conducted the interview slickly, probingly, and genuinely without notice or notes.   

I, on the other hand, did need notes. And I thought, with Paul’s permission, I might share his advance questions with you – as well as some of my own prompts to myself – and the notes that I made since, inevitably, not everything I had thought about made it out of my mouth and into the show. I do hope you’ll also listen to the podcast itself and subscribe (because there are some excellent previous episode by far more worthy and knowledgeable guests than me).

Q: Tell us about your history. Where does your university sit? Are you ancient? Redbrick, plate glass? Post-92? A new challenger? 

I decided to make life easy for myself with my imaginary university, by choosing the well-established and highly prestigious Camford University, which I was delighted to be appointed to lead an unspecified number of years ago. And when I was appointed I was really clear that I wanted to radically change the university so that it meets the priorities of today rather than merely the rather narrow sector of society that it has served so brilliantly for centuries.

Q: Your location: are you a campus uni? Urban? Rural? And what is your specific location? Are you even in the UK or are you perhaps a tiny liberal arts college in New England? Or even a thrusting start-up in Asia.

As you know, Camford is one of the nation’s great and ancient universities, but unlike Oxford and Cambridge, it isn’t in the wealthy southern half of the country. The city of Camford has largely built up around the university over the centuries, but the surrounding region is basically post-industrial and, while traditionally we’ve welcomed some extremely well-heeled students, within 30 miles of the university there some of the country’s most deprived areas. 

So, we’re keeping many of the features that make Camford such a special institution, but we’re turning it into a powerhouse of opportunity for all and a central driver for regional revival. 

There are three parts to this: who studies here, the student experience, and the relationship with the local community and businesses. 

Q: Who studies at your university?

Our access policy is based on potential not attainment. Our admissions policy is based entirely on contextualised offers, with a preference for students from within the region. 

We’re investing heavily in our outreach team and teaming up with some of the excellent third sector organisations working in access. We’re building up these long-term relationships with schools and colleges in the region to play a part in raising attainment, but also to help us recognise which pupils they have who would flourish in the environment we can provide, if only they had the chance. 

We organise teaching days at the university for students from those schools and we bus them in. When they apply here, we send admission staff to them to do what we call ‘interviews’. The point of the interviews though is not solely about us selecting them or them selecting us, it’s about working out with them how best to support their idea of success in life. 

The aim of these – and our whole admissions process – is to search for evidence of the potential to succeed rather than seeing if they can navigate a filtering process that’s designed to exclude. We try to ensure that, even if we can’t accept everyone, we always help them to hone their understanding of what would be the best match for them and also improve their self-presentation. 

Being the best match is really important to us and some of our genius academics from our AI research centre have developed this incredible software that hunts for signals about what kinds of people are most likely to pass various milestones on the path to a good outcome. This is heavily based on comparisons with control data about people with similar backgrounds: we’re not looking to find the people most likely to ‘succeed’ – because that’s likely to be the people with the biggest head start – but rather the people who will go on the longest journey, the people where the kind of education we can offer will add the most value and be most transformative. 

We could take the easy path and simply admit demonstrably brilliant students with loads of social capital, stamp them with a Camford-approved label and send them out into the world. That’s what we’ve been doing for centuries and, to be honest, it’s hard to say that we changed the course of those graduates’ lives greatly. So we’re not doing that any more. Instead, we’re looking at the taxpayers’ investment in higher education and we’re sweating it to maximise the return. Meanwhile we’re doing the same for our students so that their effort and investment gets them the biggest possible return. 

Those returns, by the way, aren’t always financial. Thanks to Camford’s reputation, our graduates do tend to be higher earning on average, but we’ve also seen that our approach tends to turn out graduates who’re very focused on the communities they came from, on lifting others up and on creating things rather than pursuing extrinsic markers of ‘success’. We’re trying to make sure that social mobility in a deprived region doesn’t have to mean geographic mobility.

Q: Tell me about your foundation years

We extended our foundation year programme accordingly and, while most of these courses are integrated into a full degree programme, we’ve also been building up strong partnerships with other universities in the UK and around the world to channel students wherever they feel they’ll be best suited. We’re finding, however, that most do want to stay. 

Q: Are there any novel aspects of the student experience your new recruits should expect?

Our education is radically holistic. On the one hand, you could say it’s based on what makes our graduates employable, but it’s about a lot more than that. It’s about producing rounded people. 

Employability is made up of various ingredients: 

• Firstly, there are skills, both transferable, so-called ‘soft’ skills and more job-specific skills; 
• Then there’s knowledge; 
• Thirdly, there are more character-driven attributes, such as attitudes, values, behaviours and even personality; 

There’s a fourth ingredient that I’ll talk about in a moment. But those first three are what our education is designed to develop. You might call it ’employability’, but back in the 1990s, people used to talk about ‘graduateness’ and it was the same idea. At Camford, we call it ’roundedness’ and we talk about having a unique individual ‘mix’ of these ingredients.

Becoming rounded is something that students hear about from day one… and before. It’s built into everything we say about our courses and the student experience. It runs through our partnerships with schools. We talk about it in interviews as a way of getting applicants to think about whether this is what they want and expect from their student experience. 

Students do self-reflections and appraise themselves at key points to understand what skills, knowledge and attributes they have in their unique mix. Academics are explicit about what different course components are intended to add to students’ mix and students complete reflections afterwards to see if their mix has developed in the way they – and the academics – had hoped and expected. 

This kind of self-appraisal is as important to academic progress as any summative assessments. We do have some exams, but we also have assessment through extended essays, presentations and projects. We have lots of project-based learning, often in teams. These teams are almost always interdisciplinary. As often as we can, they’re driven by practical, real world examples, providing free solutions to business challenges faced by employers, mostly from the region, but sometimes all over the world. They’re assessed by a mix of the external ‘customer’, the academic who facilitates the scheme, and peer assessments by the team. 

Students are also really encouraged to engage in activities that elsewhere would be beyond their studies, but at Camford, through reflection, if you can demonstrate you’ve added to your mix, you can gain credits. So, activities like social action in the community, student representation, sports, even a part-time job can all contribute to academic credits. But you’ve got to be able to demonstrate relevant learning. 

Whenever we can, the university either employs students or sets them projects that support the running of the university. For example, our timetabling every year is a major project undertaken by an interdisciplinary team. And students do most of the work planning and running open days, graduation etc. 

This really helps solve some of the conflicts for students, especially our students from disadvantaged background who might otherwise feel there’s a trade-off between their work, their need to earn money and wanting to make the most of the opportunities of student life. 

I mentioned that there’s a fourth ingredient to employability. That’s social capital, which is often less fair or meritocratic, but we can’t ignore it. Through our fantastic alumni network and the relationships we’re building in employers, we encourage our students to build the connections that help make up for not necessarily having the old school tie networks that Camford used to rely on.

Q: You described the university as a regional hub. Tell me more about what that means.

I’ve already mentioned the way we are partnering with local schools and colleges and the relationships with businesses in project-based learning. In everything we do, as far as possible, the relationship between town and gown – or more particularly county and gown – is less of a divide and more like a constant thoroughfare. 

We have a lot of visiting professors from local businesses and from the public sector in the region. We also regularly do placements or secondment of academics into businesses to help them with specific challenges. There are lots of labour market gaps in the region and we helps to fill those in a flexible way that helps everyone. 

We are of course also one of the great global research institutions and so we can attract funding from all over the world to our corner of the UK. We have specialist research centres in pataphysical genomics and quantum psychology – both very innovative and successful. 

We have a special alumni-backed venture capital fund for research-based spin-outs that set up in the region. 

Q: What’s in your prospectus and and what are some of the more interesting courses you might offer?

Obviously, we’re very lucky that our prospectus and website can show off lots of beautiful pictures of our stunning architecture, but the key messages are about our openness. There are no minimum requirements for any course at Camford, except being able to show the potential to thrive in our environment.

The prospectus also explains our philosophy of roundedness and the huge range of opportunities every student has to develop it. It explains about interdisciplinary ways of working, so may find themselves working on a project with others doing engineering, English, sociology or psychology. We have a fairly traditional and recognisable range of courses, but we do also offer an Interdisciplinary Degree where you can move around different courses and non-course activities collecting credits. 

Q: Where do you sit in the rankings and what you are going to do about it or perhaps you don’t care?

Traditionally, Camford has always done very well in the rankings and when I was appointed I was very clear that we might slip with our new approach, but that it was never going to be a metric for us.

We don’t co-operate with any rankings and we actively use our position to speak out against their misleading and heuristic approach. The fact is that if a university like Camford starts to slide down in a ranking, it will undermine the ranking more than it undermines us. So I think it’s really important that institutions like ours use our position of privilege.  

I’m very fortunate that my governing body are 100% bought in to this approach. 

Q: What kind of VC are you in this university?

My main role is to help keep all my brilliant team together and heading in the same direction. There are always practical challenges, brickbats, and people who don’t get it. It’s my job to take any flak and turn it around by going out and spelling out our vision. I’m the one responsible for helping everyone else stick to our sense of purpose. 

Of course, that means I’m often a spokesperson, a negotiator or a motivator. Most importantly, it’s my role to bring in brilliant people who share the vision. For me VC stands for ‘Vision Captain’ at least as much as ‘Vice Chancellor’.

We have a proctor who is our academic lead and a chief executive who manages the operations side. 

Q: What about the students’ union?

The relationship is so close sometimes it doesn’t feel like the SU is all that separate from the university. As I mentioned, students are employed or involved wherever and whenever possible. Student reps sit on all committees and are partners in designing courses. If we have a major build project, students often represent the university in meetings with architects or contractors. They often earn both money and course credits doing this work.

Q: What is the regulatory regime? Do you even care?

We work quite closely and amicably with the OfS. The advantage of being a university like Camford is that we can have quite a lot of sway with the regulator and support them in being better at their job. 

Q: Do you have a voice on the national stage? Do you have politicians queuing up to speak or open new labs?

We’re in the powerful position of having excellent relationships with politicians and civil servants because, of course, many of them are Camford alumni themselves. That’s a privilege that we use to support colleagues across the sector. We’re trying to offer something unique here that’s appropriate for where we are and who we serve, but we fully recognise that diversity is a key strength of the sector.

Q: Are there any other distinctive features we need to know about your imaginary uni? You might have a great sports team, a notable Chancellor, your own brand of gin or a colourful mascot.

We’ve got many ancient buildings, including the largest castle hall in England – where we stage graduation ceremonies. And being ancient most of our buildings are haunted. In fact, Camford boasts the most haunted university building in the world, which now houses our Centre for Rational Research which debunks superstitious nonsense like the idea of ghosts. In recent years though it’s also become a really important centre for investigating and disproving conspiracy theories. Trump absolutely hates it. 

We’ve got other unique research centres in cutting edge areas, some of which are a little way from the rest of the university. For example the Pataphysical Genomics centre took over the buildings of an old Tate and Lyle factory and is creating new jobs in what had become a run-down small town.

The Chancellor is a student elected by both the students and staff. 

Q: Given that it’s an imaginary university, what are you not allowing?

We’re not in the habit of banning anything that’s within the law and we certainly don’t believe we should treat students like children. Instead we try to give them responsibility and support. That said, we do strongly discourage fixed mindsets. If something seems too difficult, it’s about turning to others for help to learn how to do it. 

Q: Finally, and this is a compulsory question, we need to know what your university song would be?

It was ‘I vow to thee my country’, but we put it to the students and staff and they voted for ‘change’, literally. So now it’s ‘Change’ by Taylor Swift from the Fearless album, which seemed appropriate enough. Personally I voted for ‘Heroes’ by David Bowie, partly because that also seemed appropriate, but also because it’s just about the best song ever written and I thought if I’ve got to listen to it endlessly, I’d rather it’s not something I get bored of.

Thanks again to Paul Greatrix (and Sophie Marshall). Do read his blog at Wonderful Higher Ed, where you can not only find links to the My Imaginary University podcast, but also to his other podcasts and blogs about True Crime on Campus, wacky rankings, and all manner of wonderful and occasionally important HE matters.

The post My imaginary university appeared first on Johnny Rich.

Let’s crunch some numbers. In each cohort of just under 1.5 million 16-year olds, the choices are A levels, BTECs or apprenticeships (accounting for about half the cohort between them), jobs, unemployment or ‘other’. For T levels to grow to even a quarter of those in education or training and, let’s say, a tenth of the rest would mean nearly 275,000 T level work experience opportunities per year. Are there really that placements many out there to be had? 

Each T Level requires 45 days of work experience. For 275,000 T levels, that equates to just under 100 million hours. Let’s suppose each placement takes just one hour of administrative work to arrange and each experience hour that they provide takes up just 10 minutes of oversight by a paid employee. I suspect both those estimates are generously on the low side, but even that is nearly 17 million hours of employer time.

At a median hourly rate of £18.50 for those employees doing the administration or oversight (again, I’m being generous), that’s well over £300 million of direct cost to the employers. That’s before you account for any of the other costs in providing work experience (the space, utilities, equipment, insurance, etc).

A fund of £12Mn looks pretty paltry by comparison.

But let us not be churlish. It’s better than nothing and presumably the DfE hopes the £12Mn will help to fund tens of thousands T levels next year, not yet the hundreds of thousands which it may hope may be realised in the future.

Besides, it’s not as if employers engage in T levels to add to their bottom line anyway. This is an investment in the future of their workforce, creating a skills pipeline and contributing to wider society, surely?

So let’s think like a business. How else could they invest and achieve a similar outcome? Well, instead of the new-fangled T levels that as yet have no track record, one alternative for an employer would be to offer apprenticeships to young people instead.

Would it be cheaper and more cost effective for the employer?

Cheaper? Yes. Larger employers can offset the cost of apprenticeships against their levy. Smaller employers can claim (most of) the cost back.

More cost effective? Probably. Apprentices are employees whereas T level students aren’t. That gives employers have more control over what they can expect from apprentices’ productivity. And when they finish their apprenticeship, the employer can chose to (continue to) employ them, rather than, with T level students, hoping that, when they finish, they apply for a job with them rather than perhaps with their competitor, going to uni or doing something else.

If an employer is looking to invest in their future skills pipeline, they may well decide apprenticeships are a more attractive option than engaging in T levels and even the prospect of a share of a £12 million fund doesn’t come close to tipping that calculation.

That is perhaps why when the DfE tried setting up a similar fund in 2019, they managed to allocate only £500k out of a total available of £7Mn, funding about 2.5% of the intended number of T level placements.

The £1,000 per placement incentive simply didn’t sweeten the deal sufficiently. Even DfE’s own research told them as much: just 7% of employers said it would make a difference. (My back-of-an-envelope calculation above of £300 million costs for 275,000 placements – which works out at an optimistic £1,090 each – perhaps explains why.)

If at first you don’t succeed… right?

Or there is another way of looking at it: the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.

When you have a bold and ambitious policy, you don’t get it to fly by giving it half a feather instead of a full set of wings

This may all sound like nay-saying about T levels as if I don’t approve of the concept. Nothing could be further from the truth. I would love to see them succeed. The problem is that when you have a bold and ambitious policy, you don’t get it to fly by giving it half a feather instead of a full set of wings.

Rather than recognising that a change this big needs real investment of money and effort – especially to overcome the real challenges of delivering T levels at scale at a regional level – the Government’s approach appears to be to defund other options, even when its own targets for T level expansion won’t replace what’s being lost.

Realistically, T levels won’t ever be the vocational silver bullet qualification that the Government longs for. The problems of employer engagement and regional disparities in provision can be tackled, but never fully overcome, and the fact will remain that for some young people, commitment to a single T level at 16 will simply be less suitable than a mix of BTECs or other options (which usually require a less academic approach to learning and can help a young people keep their options open for longer). 

I do hope, however, that T levels find a place in the choice of provision and do not suffer the fate of so many of the other well-intentioned efforts to create new vocational qualifications. The only vocational qualification that can really be said to have stood the test of time – six decades and counting – are BTECs, which, ironically, the Government wants to scale back. 

A shorter version of this blog was first published as a thread on Twitter on 17th February 2023.

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Among the many points I made, there were two that I thought might be worth blogging about. Firstly what do we actually mean by CEIAG? Secondly, what does that tell us about professional careers practitioners?

What is CEIAG?

It’s worth drawing a distinction between the components of CEIAG and why it is necessary to consider them separately as well as together. 

Careers education is education about careers, ie. learning about the different ways people make a living, what those different careers involve and some of the pathways that people take into and through careers. Ideally, careers education also involves learning about employability (those attributes that mean an employee can add value to an employer), how to acquire it and how to demonstrate it to a potential employer. 

Careers information is factual. It may be data (for example, labour market information) or it may be other factual information, but generally, it is largely uncontentious (if soundly derived) and lacks context. One analogy I often use is to say that if I say “beer in this pub is £2 a pint”, I am providing you with information. In isolation, information is not very helpful to the person at the receiving end.

Careers advice puts information into context, making it potentially useful to any person who happens to receive it. To use the same analogy, it would be advice to say that “the average price of beer is £2.40/pint, so this pub is relatively cheap”. Good advice is true in a general sense, even though it is insensitive to any individual’s perspective. 

Careers guidance, however, is personalised and starts with the individual and their hopes, opportunities and needs. For example, it is guidance to ask, “Are you thirsty? Do you like beer? How much can you afford? What are your alternatives?” 

I find this a useful distinction because it helps us understand how best to deliver the component parts of CEIAG. Careers support should not stop at CEIAG though. Beyond those components we should not overlook the potential role of mentoring, behavioural/mindset support and practical help (such as funding for trips and open days or clothes appropriate for work experience, etc).

Careers physicians

Of the four components of CEIAG, guidance is the most useful to the individual, but the hardest to deliver and largely redundant without the other three. Guidance requires knowledge, skills and contact (albeit sometimes virtually) with the person being guided. A careers guidance practitioner bears enormous responsibility because it is their role to draw aspirations out of their client and frame them in the context of opportunities.

I often find myself drawing comparisons between professional careers practitioners and doctors.

A doctor uses their training, experience and expertise to diagnose someone’s needs and prescribe treatment with the selfless aim of relieving suffering and improving the patient’s quality of life.

A careers practitioner uses their training, experience and expertise to diagnose someone’s needs and provide guidance with the selfless aim of giving their client self-agency and improving their quality of life.

Like medicine, careers guidance has become an evidence-based, theory-driven profession equipped with sophisticated tools and, given the almost Hippocratic responsibility, careers guidance should never be entrusted to anyone who is not adequately trained to do it responsibly, knowledgeably and professionally. The Government should require anyone working in a publicly funded role as a careers practitioner to be on the CDI Professional Register.

Speaking plainly

Another parallel with medicine is that careers policy seems to get bogged down in jargon easily. Many professions do this – law, academia, the armed forces – develop a jargon to signal to those on the outside that there is a guarded gateway through which only the cognoscenti may pass. 

In the case of careers practitioners, it may be something to do with a defensiveness against the kind of dismissive attitude that they often face and which I’ve written about before.

So, in my submission to the Select Committee, I made a point of writing plainly.

The problem of inadequate CEIAG contributes to huge policy issues: low productivity, social and regional inequality, and the opportunities of individuals to live fulfilled lives. Yet the solutions – or at least the principles behind them are not that complex and don’t need to be wrapped in gate-keeping language.

After all, the MPs on the Committee – boundless in their wisdom though I’m sure they are – are not inside the gateway.

Nor am I. I have no qualifications in careers practice and, by my own strictures, I should definitely not be allowed to deliver careers guidance. However, I have worked in awe alongside careers professionals; I have delivered careers education, information and advice for many years; and I have read and researched widely.

Some of the most useful research – for me – has not been the research on careers itself, but the wealth of behavioural science research that has been published in recent decades. This developing understanding gives us a fresh perspective on how humans do that difficult thing of making decisions. By understanding that, we get a whole new window on how to improve CEIAG to promote informed choices.

If anything I’ve written here has piqued your interest, I do hope you’ll feel it’s worth reading my submission in full – I will post it here when the Committee has reviewed it. (Until then, I am not supposed to put it in the public domain.)

UPDATE 30/6/2022

The Select Committee has now published the evidence it received and so, I can now share my submission.

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In a recent speech the Further and Higher Education Minister Michelle Donelan described the Government’s planned changes in post-16 education as the greatest political endeavour since the creation of the NHS. She may have been overstating the case, but it is fair to say that the creation of the Lifelong Loan Entitlement (LLE) does have game-changing potential.

The idea is to give everyone – whether they go to university or not – roughly the same access to government-backed loans to pay for education or professional development after they’ve left school. This will, it is hoped, herald a wave of upskilling and reskilling that the economy will need for the multiple challenges of post-Pandemic and Brexit recovery, ‘levelling up’ disadvantaged areas, embracing the so-called Fourth Industrial Age and reaching Net Zero.

Certainly, access to funding is a major obstacle for many who might otherwise make the sacrifices – albeit temporary – in their career and family commitments so they can invest time and effort in learning or training. However, being entitled to plunge oneself into lifelong debt may not be the temptation the Government imagines. Providing access to funding may be a necessary step to change the game, but not a sufficient one.

Some of the other challenges are spelled out in the first report of the Lifelong Education Commission (of which I am proud to serve as a member). Lifelong learning needs to be less like the set menu offered by a traditional three-year residential degree, and more like a finger buffet, where the learner can choose what they want and keep going back for more.

Lifelong learners, it is assumed, are more likely to want shorter courses, perhaps with a bite-size qualification – a ‘microcredential’ – attached. Perhaps they will return to take further modules at different times in their lives at different institutions, sometimes studying full-time, sometimes alongside a job. Sometimes on a campus, sometimes at a night-school, sometimes online.

An advantage of the set menu is that it’s designed the ensure that the learner enjoys a full and nourishing meal – a starter, main and dessert. However, there’s no such guarantee with the buffet. In education terms, traditional degrees move through levels 4 and 5, building to a level 6 qualification, whereas a more piecemeal approach that the learner puts together may be exactly that: pieces of a meal. An abundance of level 4 without ever amounting to more or a disconnected smorgasbord of incoherent bits of learning.

Although we do want to encourage LLEs to be used in a piecemeal way, we must also nudge students towards incremental learning. To make this possible, we need a credit transfer framework – a system of recognising the value of each module of learning and having a common agreement of how much it contributes to achieving a higher qualification, such as a full degree.

Such credit frameworks exist, but they’re a long way off achieving true transferability. Some institutions don’t recognise the equivalence of credits gained at another institution (after all, in these days of marketised education, they would be trading away competitive advantage). But, as often as not, it’s about the type of credit as much as value: universities teaching even the same degree might tackle different concepts at different points in the course. Rightly, they don’t want a student who’s done preliminary learning elsewhere to miss out on something that, on their course, they would have covered in first year.

A game-changing LLE will need to solve this problem. It’s not easy. More than half a century of education policy is strewn with the corpses of previous attempts. What’s more, allowing an ever-more piecemeal approach may make it harder as the bureaucracy involved in granular credit decisions will become exponentially more complex.

On the other hand, greater granularity could help. If many modules can be worth tiny amounts of credit, each ‘microcredential’ becomes less critical to the integrity of a whole qualification. There’s an obvious risk here though: if the availability of funds through the LLE prompts a gold rush of poor-quality, badly regulated mini-courses across the country, they’ll add up to nothing other than a waste of learners’ time and taxpayers’ money.

Someone needs to decide whether courses – long or short, large or small – meet the standard to qualify for LLE funding. There are many candidates: the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, the Office for Students, or perhaps a special new body. Whoever ends up with this task will necessarily be involved in an exercise that assesses the value of courses. While they’re at it, I suggest they might as well award a credit score as part of the assessment and assume regulatory control of the credit transfer framework.

That way learners can build a portfolio of credentials stored and certified by the regulator, with a view to perhaps one day, bundling them as a level 6 qualification or even higher.

It is important that learners should be able to bundle. Apart from being a motivational goal (vital for lifelong learners), a portfolio of credentials doesn’t have the same portability as a degree when it comes to getting a job – even if they amount to the same set of skills and knowledge. Recent research has highlighted the extent to which degrees act as a signal of a level reached rather than merely an accumulation of learning.

But bundling should not be routine: not all credits are equal. The buffet plate may be full, but it may still not be a square meal. As a learner’s credits approach 360 credits (the usual value of a bachelors degree), they should be able to opt for a ‘capstone’ module, available only from institutions that have their own degree-awarding powers. Like the capstone lintels at Stonehenge, a capstone module connects, completes and consolidates the student’s learning. They should assess prior learning, encourage reflection and support application of the learning – basically, wrap up prior learning into the parcel of a recognised qualification.

But what if the modules are too scattered to be packaged as a degree in any particular subject? That may not bother employers. For most graduate roles, the subject studied is largely irrelevant. I propose that credits could be bundled as a General Degree – again with a capstone module to draw the disparate parts into a coherent whole of varied knowledge and transferrable and specific skills. 

If we’re serious about game-changing lifelong learning, we need to apply Fourth Industrial Age thinking to education. We need to hand over control to individuals to shape the product they want and access it at their convenience. And the government’s role is to ensure the interests of learners and of wider society are protected.

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With just cause, Mike Grey of Gradconsult took issue with this on Twitter and I recommend his thread below that got me thinking more widely about the credit that careers advisers get – or fail to get – for their work not only in universities, but in schools, colleges and local services.

We’ve all heard – or told – tales about how some careers advisor “told me to be a [insert laughably inappropriate career]”, but people who are helped by careers advice tend never to mention it. Why? Can it be true that careers advice is so wide of the mark? Of course not.

There are multiple cognitive biases here.

For starters, as Mike’s thread shows, there’s a tendency to credit the outcome of a chain of events to the last link, even when the first link is usually more important.

Also, for the sake of our sense of self, we take more personal credit for the choices we make that we consider to have had good outcomes, and we outsource our agency to others when we aren’t so happy about how it turned out.

It’s therefore easy to retrospectively underplay the influence of careers advisers, as Mike describes, even when they have been instrumental in the process.

This effect is exaggerated by the fact that the idea that careers advisers tell anyone what to be is desperately outdated (if indeed it was ever true). Advisers help people explore what they have to offer and want they might want to do in life. They help map pathways that open up opportunities (or that stop them from closing). They help connect people with opportunities that they show an interest in.

What they do not do is puppetry.

The agency – the choice and control – always stays with the ‘client’.

Ensuring that the client feels ownership of their choices and that they came from themselves is an important part of the careers adviser doing their job well. However, in the process, it also means their good work is likely to go unrecognised.

So why the stories about advisers telling people to be secretaries, vicars or podiatrists? My theory is that it may be down to one of four reasons, some cobination of them or even all four together:

1. The memory may not actually be a faithful record of what happened, but rather during the (often frequent) retelling, the myth has taken over the true events.
2. These were mere suggestions on the part of the careers adviser in response to actual interests that the client did mention.
3. Rather than even suggestions, they were part of a wider conversation about avenues that could be explored.
4. The adviser may have been deliberately exploring unlikely options in order to help the client stretch their horizons, consider new possibilities or mark out areas that were of no interest.

Modern careers advice is driven by well established and well evidenced theoretical approaches. It is delivered by excellent practitioners using sophisticated digital tools. The professionals who deliver careers guidance help people to make their lives just as doctors help to save them.

If we want better careers advice, we should back it more and rely on the expertise of professional practitioners. Relatively meagre public investment in careers education, information, advice and guidance will yield huge returns in helping match employers with employees who will be more productive and fulfilled, and it will lower society’s waste of our shared human capital.

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Vocational qualifications have long been regarded as the low road of post-16 education compared to the more academic pathway of A levels and university. Too often they’re seen as what you do if you’re ‘not clever enough’, rather than being a positive choice. The most prominent, BTECs, suffer from this self-fulfilling depiction, but are nevertheless an important route into work and/or higher education for many, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

We all desperately want vocational qualifications to be regarded as a different and equally valid route, but replacing the tried, tested, popular, but admittedly flawed BTECs with untried, untested, and clearly flawed T-levels is like burning all your clothes because you’ve heard Primark is having a sale next month. What’s going to come along probably won’t be all that great and, in the meantime, you’re naked.

T-levels have been designed with the best of intentions, but many issues surrounding them remain far from solved. We’ve been here before. BTECs, vocational A levels, GNVQs, National Diplomas, and so on and so on – these were all valiant initiatives that didn’t live up to the high hopes when tested by realities. Finding a gold standard for vocational qualifications is a path strewn with bodies. It’s not as if A-levels are a robust gold standard for academic qualifications, so it’s not surprising how much harder it is for a field with an even more battle-worn past.  

The iceberg

For me, the iceberg right in the path of T-levels, whose existence DfE seems reluctant even to acknowledge, is that there just won’t be enough employers willing to provide the necessary 45 days of work experience – even if the government were willing and able to throw money at the issue.

To employers the current offer is this: take on an untrained learner who will soak up management time, but not contribute significantly to your business’s productivity (unless they’re employed in something so menial it gives them no real experiential learning). You’ll get no money or tax breaks for helping out, but it may mean that, at some point in the future, there may be someone better qualified to work for you – or who you have helped train to work for your competitors. This point in the future may be within a couple of years (a long time in business) or, since T-levels are intended to be a better pathway to higher training and education than BTECs, if your contribution works as it should, it may not be until many years from now.

Even the most socially minded employer is likely to prefer to spend their limited resource of time and money supporting the far more attractive proposition of providing apprenticeships instead which provide a faster, more targeted way of plugging their gaps, where they actually employ the learner and dictate many of the terms of their training.

To scale up T-levels to even 10% of post-16 learners (let alone half) will mean employers investing in the additional provision of around 3.5 million days of work experience every year. It’s simply unrealistic to imagine this is going to happen without significant bribery – sorry, I mean financial incentives.

Even if I’m wrong (let’s hope I am) and employers don’t act as they always have in the past, then the provision of T-levels will depend critically on what employers exist within a small radius of where the learner is based and whether they operate in a sector appropriate to the 24 T-level subject areas.

In some areas – big metropolitan centres – there may be plenty of choice, but in the areas where the skills needs are most needed, almost by definition there isn’t an excess of employer capacity to get involved in training. Almost nowhere will be able to offer anything like a full range of T-level choices.  

Even if the government were proposing to throw money at the problem of incentivising existing employers (which they’re not), the problem of incentivising nonexistent ones is not resolved simply with investment.

Without this work experience component, learners can’t pass the T-level so schools and colleges can’t offer the courses without those relationships in pace. Of course, DfE (and the T-level regulator IfATE) could relax or rewrite the rules on whether work experience is strictly necessary and how much, but then T-levels will lose their key point of differentiation. We’d be better off keeping BTECs.

A stormy T-cup

I do understand why DfE thinks that if it allows the continued availability of alternatives to T-levels, then they’re not giving the new qualification every bit of backing that they can. However, I would argue that, if T-levels can’t rise above the competition as attractive and valuable qualifications because they’re genuinely a better choice, then making them the only choice will make them weaker not stronger.

This government is genuinely engaged in trying to solve the problems of ‘the other 50%’ (those who don’t follow academic pathways) and ‘the Cinderella sector’ (further education and technical colleges), but they won’t make vocational education right by making the same mistakes that got us here in the first place. Indeed, the danger – the brick wall towards which they are steering deliberately and at speed – is to undermine the very thing they hope to improve. 

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The proposed changes are contained in the OfS’s Phase 1 Report of its NSS Review which was sparked by a somewhat untoward statement by the DfE last year that the NSS was responsible for “dumbing down standards“. No evidence for this claim was offered and it was exactly the opposite of… well, everything that they and predecessor governments had ever previously said about NSS’s role in enhancing the quality of higher education.

Indeed, the credibility afforded to the NSS previously meant that it was a key metric used in the TEF (the Teaching Excellence Framework, as it then was, now called ‘the Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework’).  Its weighing as part of TEF was downgraded, however, when student opposition to the exercise led to widespread boycotting of the survey.

The main reason the government has gone sour on the NSS though seems to me to be that it doesn’t endorse their political narrative about higher education – or, even if it does, the signal is too noisy, too nuancy. For example, NSS doesn’t say that the only good education is one that results in a job. It doesn’t say that our universities are all world-beating while at the same time managing also to say that they’re full of woke academics and snowflake students. And it fails woefully to confirm that traditional redbrick and Russell Group unis are better than jumped-up polys. 

Indeed, the university with the strongest record of performance in the NSS since its inception is – wait for it – the Open University. What should we make of that? There are multiple explanations for its NSS success, not least the fact that the survey is taken as students approach graduation and for OU students, that’s likely to have been a long, hard slog of many years, involving considerable commitment and sacrifice. Anyone who wasn’t going to give a good report will probably have fallen by the wayside by that point or at the very least will be convincing themselves that it was all worth it after all. Another explanation is that the OU does an amazing job for its students far exceeding their expectations and therefore yielding high satisfaction. 

What it doesn’t tell us is anything absolute. No wonder the government has lost interest in the NSS – it doesn’t tell them anything clearly or that’s politically helpful and even what it does tell them is not what they wanted to hear.

By chance, the DfE does happen to be right that the NSS needs reforming. It’s just it’s not for the reasons they imagine. As my HEPI article explains, the problems lie in (i) imagining that NSS can ever be about informing prospective students helpfully, (ii) the snapshot data dip process of a survey and (iii) the over-emphasis on satisfaction as a measure of quality when it is in fact a function of expectation compared to delivery. 

The reform needed is to shift to a longitudinal national survey of student engagement that tracks shifting patterns throughout a student’s time at university. Engagement has been shown to be an indicative precursor of positive learning outcomes. If you can show that a student has been effectively engaged throughout their studies, you’ve got a good indicator of effective education.

Satisfaction measures are poor proxies that will never tell you much and will always be too easily gamed or misinterpreted. They do not, however, dumb down anything that wasn’t dumb already. 

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It brilliantly captures the fact that the world around us is largely manufactured and that the genius of engineers comes not only in the process of fabrication, but in hiding the genius involved.

That said, the idea that everything not of the natural world (let’s leave God out of it for now) is the work of engineers is patent nonsense. On my wall is a painting. On my shelves, there are novels. Certainly, engineers are responsible for paints, for paper, for inks, for the printing presses, for computers and for so much else involved in delivering these products to me. But the artworks themselves are surely also something not of the natural world and yet invented? 

Any writer who has had to invent characters, a plot or an elegant turn of phrase knows that ‘invention’ is not the sole preserve of God and engineers.

However, I think this leads us to a better understanding of what engineers really do. Engineers – like God* and artists – are creators.

To me, Philip’s comment belittles artists – albeit unintentionally. Instead of seeing engineering as applied science – or, worse still, fixing broken stuff – we should see engineering as an act of creation akin to the arts.

It was seen that way once upon a time. The relationship between the pure artist, the skilled craftsperson, the experienced artisan and the inventor was regarded as a continuum. We all know that Leonardo da Vinci was all these things, but so too were William Morris and Alec Issigonis. And today, the likes of Grayson Perry or Rachel Whiteread require the skills of their craft as much as James Dyson and Jonathan Ives need artistic vision.

The Duke of Edinburgh was a staunch champion for engineering, but his support failed to abate a crisis in the UK’s engineering skills pipeline. We have an estimated shortfall of 124,000 skilled engineers and technicians every year. The only way that this situation can be resolved is if the perception of engineering among young people – and young women in particular – is radically shifted. 

Children and teens love to create – to build sandcastles, to paint, to play Minecraft or to express themselves through performance. They don’t see a distinction between drawing as ‘artistic’ invention and creating a Lego house as ‘engineering’ invention. Somehow, though, as a society, we beat this out of them, creating the idea that engineering is more about physics and maths than ingenuity and design. 

Young people also care passionately about the problems we face – social challenges, environmental emergencies, sustainability. These are problems that – if humans can ever fix them – it will be through the efforts of, among others, engineers. Engineering offers young people an opportunity not only to be creators, but also to be world-saving superheroes. 

Other countries tend to be better than the UK at never letting their young people lose sight of the creativity in engineering. We must learn to do better too. It is perhaps unfair to say the Duke’s comment inadvertently depicts the world as a place of opposition between humans engineers and natural wonders, but certainly we need to regard our human power to create – both beauty and design – as something that is not only in harmony with nature, but an active part of it.  

* Or natural processes, depending on your religious perspective. I reference God because the Duke did. 

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