by Paul Collier
The issue of streaming is beset by ideological disputes, and is an issue desperately in need of pragmatism. A credible psychological theory is that children seek peer esteem, and are willing to put in some effort to get it (or avoid losing it). The most potent peer group is likely to be the other students in the class. If the year group is streamed, so that the ability gap between stronger and weaker students in the class is narrow, then it becomes worthwhile for weaker students to put in the effort; similarly, the strongest students have to try harder to stay ahead. But if the gap is very wide, as it will be if the year is divided randomly into classes rather than streamed, then effort by the weaker students is pointless and by the stronger students unnecessary. There is some empirical support for this idea, but it needs more thorough testing than I have yet seen. What we most need in schools is not dogma, but experimental variations that are rigorously and independently evaluated.
Finally, there is the issue of money. The differences in public spending per pupil currently tend to amplify other differences in attainment. The most substantial differences are geographic: the metropolis has a booming tax base and vocal lobbies; broken cities have neither. In Britain, the differences are predictably extreme. London has by far the highest spending of public money per pupil, while my own home region of Yorkshire and Humberside has among the lowest. Yet London already has the best exam results in the country, while my home region has the worst: the gap is recent, large and widening. Expect motivated reasoning: the vested interests currently defending this gross misallocation of funds should be shamed into decisive defeat.
Beyond the school: activities and mentoring
Most activities outside the school are for teenagers, but most of the divergence in attainment and life chances occurs earlier. For pre-teens, the key differentiating behaviour is pitifully simple: reading. The children of the educated class read; the children of the less-educated class don’t. Reading opens doors and the children of the elite go through them. School is supposed to fix this problem; children are taught the mechanics of how to read, but this is very different from acquiring a habit of reading. We now know how to encourage these habits in the children of non-reading parents, we just haven’t yet got round to doing much about it. But any concerned group of citizens with some gumption can make a difference: here is what works.
Rotherham is a much-stigmatized town that in Britain has become emblematic of marginalization. Like nearby Sheffield, it is a steel and mining town where the jobs have disappeared.* Amidst this tragedy and the associated demoralization, a small group of citizens determined to raise literacy standards among the children of the most marginalized families. They searched for an example they could use, and chose one that seemed to have worked in an American town. Adapting it to their own context, they partnered with one of the universities in Sheffield to conduct a quantitative evaluation in parallel with their efforts. That’s why we know it works: it came through on the test scores in the schools. They set up a charity, found a disused site in the town centre – there were plenty of them – and persuaded local firms to adapt it from a bar into something quite magical. I use the word ‘magical’ both figuratively and literally: this was a centre where children could go to learn magic. The name over the door, ‘Grimm and Co’, the sign on the door, ‘no grown-ups’, and the blacked-out windows all tempt children in, usually either dragging their hesitant parents after them, or coming for a pre-booked visit with their classmates. Once inside, they encounter a giant beanstalk, a further sign saying ‘please do not eat the staff’, and a myriad of other stimuli to enchantment. All this is a prelude to being lured through a concealed door to mount the book staircase, past the office of the momentarily absent Mr Grimm, to the room where the loose pages of his new story are read to them. And then disaster! The last page is missing! The completed story is urgently needed: please can someone help? Here are a few pencils if you can finish it.
Invariably, the reaction is a stampede. Teachers have broken down in tears as children who have never willingly picked up a pencil write as if their lives depended on it. And everything gets followed up: Rotherham classes have published collections of poems distributed around the world; the Royal Shakespeare Theatre Company has come and performed for them; Bob Geldof has written a story for them. Appetites can be ignited; habits can be changed. This brilliant initiative – the creation of one impassioned woman – can be scaled up and modified to fit different local contexts. Already it has attracted delegations from China and South Korea. Yes, this is Rotherham that East Asians are learning from, not Hampstead. If they can do it, so perhaps can you.12
There are many other such actions that can help children outside school. The non-cognitive skills are formed not by study, but by people who become trusted mentors, and by group activities such as sports where children can learn co-operation and leadership. Finding a mentor who is both usefully knowledgeable and trusted depends upon the breadth of the child’s social network, which in turn will reflect that of the family. The single most important decision in my own career was taken in the month before going to college: having been accepted for law, I wrote asking to switch to economics. In reaching that decision I was desperate for advice, as I realized that it would chart two different lives.* But my family network included nobody with pertinent experience: in desperation, I asked my dentist (unsurprisingly, he was useless). Nowadays, children from the two divergent classes face huge differences in their span of social networks. The Pew Research Center measures nine types of people that a family might have as part of its network. On eight of them, educated households have more connections than less-educated ones: the ninth is janitors, where the less educated have an advantage. Of the eight, the largest divergence of all is in what I lacked for that decision: ‘do you know a professor?’ For the family in which I grew up, such a question would have been tantamount to ‘do you know the Queen?’, but my children are awash with them: when Daniel, my seventeen-year-old, got interested in nanotechnology, his first port of call was next door.
But mentoring by someone whom a teenager has chosen to listen to is not just useful for information: it is a source of the narratives that people use to guide their lives. Teenagers going wrong can be redirected by the gentle influence of healthy narratives delivered outside the context of parental rewards and punishments: paternalist power impedes the willingness to listen.13
Diverging skills, diverging firms, diverging pensions
School is not really a preparation for life: it is a preparation for training. At its best, it will have equipped some people with cognitive abilities that can be honed into skills that are highly productive in some occupations. But the non-cognitive abilities will not have received the same attention. Many productive occupations depend less upon good cognitive abilities, and more upon well-honed non-cognitive abilities such as perseverance. In the changeover from school to training, those who are going to remain on the cognitive track have a less-demanding passage than those who will be jumping from cognitive to non-cognitive skills.
Post-school skills
We know what works, and we know what doesn’t work. Most high-income countries get some aspects of post-school skills development right, but the parts they get right differ, and there has been little willingness to learn from each other.
For those with the best cognitive abilities and an interest in developing them, America and Britain provide the finest skill development that the world has ever had: good universities. Each country has many of them, including five American universities and three British ones in the world’s top-ten. In contrast, the twenty-seven countries of the post-Brexit European Union have not a single top-ten university between them, and this is symptomatic of more widespread failings in their university systems. The reason for the difference is how universities are run. High standards are achieved by competition and decentralized management: the same ingredients that have made modern capitalism so productive. In France, by way of contrast, the same centralized control of
education that has worked so brilliantly in the standardized, low-complexity setting of its pre-primary schooling has been dismal at the university level.
However, for those other than the elite-educated minority, America and Britain are poor environments for skills development. Recall that the majority of young people should be switching tracks from the sort of training that merely deepens cognitive skills to the sort that develops the neglected non-cognitive skills. Since this is a more demanding transition, it should be the primary focus of post-school policy. From the perspective of the young student, being a leap into the unknown, it is more demanding psychologically. From the perspective of the government, since the required skills are so different from those that it manages through the rest of the education system, it is more demanding organizationally. Per student, it should have a larger budget than studying for a university degree.
The professionals know what is needed: high quality technical vocational education and training (TVET) that young people choose to do in preference to plodding on down the familiar track of cognitive-focused training. Fortunately, they even know how it can be achieved, because Germany has been doing it for a long time and the result has been a highly productive and well-paid workforce. So, what does Germany do? How do they organize such training, and how have they induced millions of young people to make the implied psychological leap? More importantly, why have others not copied them?14
The key organizational components in Germany are local partnerships between firms and colleges within a specific industry. The college designs its courses around these skills, and the firms provide on-site work experience and mentoring from its skilled workforce, with the student’s time being split between the college and the firm. The student typically undertakes this training for three years, after which she takes a job in the firm. The training has several aims, none trivial and some quite subtle; indeed, the list of how to be an employable young worker sounds almost as demanding as Kipling’s famous list of how to be a man. One is to build routine expertise: skills developed through practice and honed through feedback. Another is to be able to think for yourself when necessary: the knowledge and confidence to be resourceful. Craftsmanship brings an ethic of excellence, and a sense of pride in a job well done. It is learned through working with someone who becomes a role model. Then come the functional capabilities: numeracy, literacy, communications technology and graphics. Since most jobs are in the private sector, young people need businesslike attitudes, including recognition that jobs depend upon customers being willing to pay for what is produced. Similarly, the young worker needs the life skills of self-presentation and to complete a task in a timely and respectful way. Finally, the ability to adapt: inquisitive and resilient attitudes such as self-belief, empathy, self-control, perseverance, collaboration and creativity. Reading that, the average student at Oxford might be daunted, yet this is what is needed to make the half of the population less gifted with cognitive skills productive in twenty-first-century work.
Building those skills is both a local and a national undertaking. To be effective, public policy needs to be complemented by a sense of purpose among firms. We are back to the concept of the ethical firm, a team of people who have internalized a mission larger than their individual enrichment. An ethical firm recognizes its responsibilities to its young recruits and devotes time and money to training them properly, not just in the narrow skills of the trade, but in the wider panoply of capabilities covered by those German TVET. In Britain, the contrasting attitudes of firms to their workforce has been exemplified by two giant retailers – John Lewis and BHS; in America, the equivalent has been Toyota and GM. Recall that ethical need not mean stupid; it was BHS and GM that went bankrupt, not John Lewis and Toyota.
We also know what is ineffective: training that is detached from the real world of work. Two common public policies that ostensibly address the skill problem fall foul of this requirement.
In response to concerns about a lack of skills, some governments have encouraged courses that are ostensibly vocational, but last only a few months, are not linked to a future job in a specific firm, and do not go beyond the technical rudiments of a vocation. These miss all the broader skills necessary for technical competence to become really useful to a firm.
More grandiosely, and certainly more wastefully, there has been a huge expansion in low quality vocational courses in universities. In both America and Britain, half of young people now go to university – a response to the excessive prestige of a degree. In Britain, a third of these students end up in jobs that used to be filled by non-graduates, and whose skill requirements have not changed. Their degrees have not made them more productive.15 At school, many children dream of the glamour professions they see on social media. There is a massive mismatch between the exposure of various professions and their frequency among the workforce. Children should indeed dream and plan and aspire, but in aggregate these aspirations have to mesh with reality. The adjustment of dreams to jobs is part of the pain of becoming an adult. As the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgård has so beautifully expressed, the passage from sixteen to forty, ‘that which is now so vast and so all-embracing, will inexorably dwindle and shrink until it is a manageable entity which doesn’t hurt so much, but nor is it as good.’16
Adults should not connive to exploit this passage. People working in the glamour professions – forensics being an example – have painfully explained to me that university courses ostensibly training for their profession are recruiting on false promises. Students graduate from these programmes with large debts: in America, their debts are often larger than those of students taking valuable academic courses at top universities. They have been lured into an expensive cul-de-sac by the word ‘degree’ attached to a dream profession, when what they needed was a launch pad into a productive, albeit less seductive, career.
In both America and Britain, the huge pool of under-trained people looking for jobs have found them in firms designed to run profitably on modest productivity and correspondingly modest pay. Such firms economize by laying workers off as soon as demand dips; by skimping on training; by excluding unions. They learn to cope with the high staff turnover resulting from disaffection, relying on the desperate and the gullible to replace those who quit. In some sectors, this low-productivity–low-cost business model will be more profitable than the high-productivity–high-cost model in which firms invest in their workers. Where it is more profitable, low-cost firms will drive out high-cost firms from the market. But although in their role as consumers people are better off, in their role as workers they are worse off; their incomes are lower because they are less productive. More formally expressed, there is a market failure in the process of skill formation. People would be better off if they paid a little more for what they buy, but earned a lot more from their work, but there is no mechanism that induces the chain of commitments to transactions that would in aggregate result in this superior outcome. Expressing the problem in such language does not make it go away: society needs to do something about it. Minimum wage laws, compulsory training levies and union rights all have a role constraining the scope for firms to drive labour costs down at the expense of productivity. To take a simple example of regulation and its consequences, a restaurant chain operating in Paris and London faces a substantial difference in the minimum wage laws. In Paris, where the minimum wage is much higher, it organizes its menus and its staff, training them in more complex service routines, so that each waiter can serve more people than in London. As a result, the productivity of its waiters in Paris is higher than of those in London. Meal prices are no different, though a diner in Paris receives less attention than one in London. But the crucial social difference is that the waiters in Paris earn more. Yes, London has a lot of jobs, but they are lousy ones.
Having set out what good non-cognitive training looks like, and the alternative track down which many young people are currently lured, we can finally turn to the psychology: what determines whether
young people prefer this option? The crude psychology of The Wealth of Nations suggests that people only care about money. The more accurate psychology of The Theory of Moral Sentiments tells us that people also care about their position in society: they give and receive esteem. The evidence on regrets supports our intuition that esteem trumps money. But even on the criterion of money, many young people in America and Britain are being lured down cognitive culs-de-sac. They are doing so because that, currently, is the choice that generates the most peer esteem. When they tell their friends that they are going to university, those who are not look sheepish. When they tell their friends that they are studying forensics, their friends recognize the role model from Netflix. The nub of the problem is the mis-ranking of esteem between cognitive and non-cognitive training. It runs deep through the Anglo-Saxon societies; young people learn it from the narratives related to them by the rest of us. It is so deep that you may well be thinking that it is inevitable. But it isn’t; again, Germany has shown that rankings can be different.
I could give you the data, but the way that I learned about this was more personal. For a year we had a highly capable German au pair living with us, who was at precisely the stage in her life at which she was facing the choice between continuing on to university, or switching to vocation-specific training. Should she have wanted, she had sufficient cognitive aptitude to continue her academic education: she had offers from universities. But her aspiration was a vocational course run jointly by a company and a college in her home town.* The training programme on which she embarked was so impressive as to be daunting. Her chosen vocation was in marketing: the product that the firm produced, and which she would need to be able to market, was a technically sophisticated piece of equipment. For week one of her first year she worked on a lathe, alongside the workers making it. By year three she was in Latin America learning Spanish. She is now an employee, well paid and secure. Perhaps she will compete head to head with a British salesman whose post-school training was a degree. In making that crucial choice our au pair was surprised by our surprise. The track she took was not just more challenging than staying in the classroom, it was more prestigious. Esteem and material rewards steered her in the same direction.