The Burnham Blitz of schemes, dreams and grands projects for post-Starmer Britain is dizzying in its pace, befuddling in its detail. Energy and purpose have given Labour a new spring in its tired step.
But which way does the new leader’s vision really face: towards a future which can combine his aims of greater inclusivity and devolution of power with an expansion of growth and opportunity; or a nostalgia-drenched one, peddling solutions that will hit the buffers of a changing job market and ultimately disappoint?
He wants to overhaul state education, revivify apprenticeships linked to local industry for pupils from 14, and aims to “re-industrialise” Britain with scant idea of what the trade-offs of that might look like in terms of cost – making things at home is often more expensive than importing them from countries which can do so cheaper en masse (EVs from China being the most attractive example to cash-strapped motorists).
The aim is to make us “value the hard hat every bit as much as the graduation cap”. His first major pronouncement on the impact of AI was the insistence that it could “make a slide deck”’ but “couldn’t build a train”.
If you are catching the vibe of an earnest uncle with a rose-tinted political memory of the days when “we made things”, you would be spot on. Pledging to “re-industrialise” everything from steel production to weapons systems places emphasis on things being brought back, rather than the “what is next?” instinct which propels the most agile economies.
At a time when AI is set to eliminate thousands of jobs and up-end others this is a risk, and especially so in one area of the new government’s promise to get the UK out of a rut looks patchy: education. As things stand, the schools plan is doused in industrial nostalgia. It combines a diehard lament of the left that there needs to be “parity” between emphasis on academic exam-led excellence and the neglected technical sector.
But parity is earned, not demanded, and a similar quest has bedevilled successive governments, from notions like “T-level” proposals announced by the Tories in 2017 to Keir Starmer’s vaunted “V-levels” (for vocational flexibility). Now Burnham has announced a focus on more skills-based education and an “MBacc” (Manchester Baccalaureate) transformation of the post-16 curriculum.
In fairness, governments can point to places where technical upgrades have yielded results – like the best building skills academies or the Invicta grammar school in Maidstone which excels in teaching skills like 3D printing.
But without aiming for national scale and investment in teachers who are able to deliver a new kind of education, these remain isolated examples and there are some holes in the plan too. If the aim is to bring the curriculum close to the needs of local employers, that is a whole lot more promising for those near a thrumming city like Manchester and Birmingham than in less innovative urban centres – or living in parts of the country new industries will not reach.
We might also wonder, with a new AI minister (Kanishka Narayan) attending Cabinet, why all those Burnham videos and the language of “hard hats” are so focussed on construction and conventional trades – rather than pushing for a skills upgrade which can handle AI and technical-scientific life job areas like sciences, where Britain is genuinely competitive?
Abolishing the Department of Science, Technology and Innovation and shuffling around the responsibilities embroiled officials and advisers in what Whitehall veterans term a “re-disorganisation”. If there is method in this meddling, it is not well explained.
A further stumbling block is that the idea that a technical and vocational education is for “other people’s children” is a hard habit to break. Focussing on technical education de-coupled from academic aspiration – or putting up an implied divide as Burnham’s rhetoric did – is that it understates “revealed preferences” of behaviour; i.e. what people do in practice, rather than politically convenient theory.
So “trad” education routes remain the favoured choice of successful or highly aspirational parents, no matter how many state school reforms they recommend for others. Indeed, the delivery machine of this new era features a ton of beneficiaries of private education at the highest levels – Hamish Falconer as Europe Minister, for instance, while Narayan’s AI expertise is based on a broadly-based education at Eton, Oxford and Stanford, rich in humanities and languages training as well as “tech”. Narayan is one of the few Labour private school alums who can credibly use the “full scholarship” excuse – that their school was chosen by poor but visionary parents, and anyway they did not choose this route in life.
But it does reflect a diehard truth that the “one track for thee, another for me” behavioural tendency underlines that a sizeable number of families did not see state education as equal to their child’s potential.
These days, 22 per cent of a Labour Cabinet were privately educated as well as a steady portion of the key advisers and civil servants in the government penumbra, despite a focus on attacking the sector which continued with a vengeance under the last education secretary.
So the dangers of the “back to the future” aspect of Burnhamism are that projects like the standards-raising overhaul of state schools via the academies programme, which once gained cross-party support, fall by the wayside, either because a lot of Labour MPs and activists never much warmed to this variant on the comprehensive system – or because focus lurches to a new favoured focus on vocational education for more pupils at 14.
Yet, much of the underlying problem here is that numeracy and literacy are lagging at that point – and the roots of why so many young people are not in training or education lie in those basics in secondary education, not easily resolved by a switch of qualifications. What we lose is the consistency to build schooling which has both a general focus on raising standards – and an awareness of what the new world of work will require and the resilience to face that as a young person in a confusing world.
Nostalgia is a soundtrack, not a solution to our prosperity. To cite The Smiths, as we surely must in the Burnham era, we do not want to go “back to the old house”. And at heart, most of us know that, however alluring the song.
Anne McElvoy is co-host of Politics at Sam and Anne’s podcast and presents the across Across the Red Line debate series on Radio 4 in August
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