Further and higher education: The dividing line

I wrote in a recent blog post about one of the diving lines in Britain being between the 50ish percent of the population who now go on to higher education, and those who don't. I wondered how it must feel to see a rising proportion of your peers go on to academic study and all that entails. And considered the impact this has on our political outlook, as highlighted in Maria Sobolewska and Rob Ford's new book, Brexitland. In short, the big split now is broadly between urban, degree educated voters (Remain) and those in rural and less affluent areas without higher education (Leave).

FE Collapse

What I didn't realise when writing my previous post was just how stark the collapse in further education has been in the last few years since the rise in higher education student numbers. The total number of people studying in further education has fallen by more than two thirds in the last fifteen years. The result is that the total number of people continuing in education beyond school years has not increased, as is widely believed, but fallen by a third.

Data sources: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/ and https://gov.uk

This makes the dividing line between those with and without degrees even more stark. It is no wonder that people feel animosity towards the wealthy centre and cities, populated by those who have benefited most from our national educational infrastructure.

The skills gap

This is a situation that cannot sustain for so many reasons. For a start, the skills that FE colleges equip people with are incredibly important to our economy. And as you can see from the chart above, apprenticeships are not filling the gap. As the economy starts to pick up, employers are complaining about skills shortages in IT and technology, hospitality and events. The construction workforce is ageing fast. According to the 2011 census, more than 30% of those in the key trades were over 50. And we are estimated to have less than half the workforce we need to meet government house-building targets. Brexit is unlikely to improve this situation.These industries don't just need people, they need skilled, trained people. And people are not getting the training they need on the job, according to the CIPD.

Reading the rewards

As well as the macro, there is a more personal impact of the decline of further education. Education is one of the best predictors of overall life outcomes. It is the foundation of both a more secure career and a more secure sense of self.Quite beyond the career value, learning new skills is one of the most rewarding things we can do. It's why I prize hobbies so highly: they are your opportunity to stretch your mind in new and unexpected directions.

Skills for Jobs

I confess that the 'Skills for Jobs' white paper released in January 2021 rather passed me by. I'm not sure if this is a sign of the limited attention I have paid to the FE sector, or whether there was relatively little noise made about the paper outside of the sector itself. But though the paper makes some of the right noises, what investment it does promise has to be put into context: funding per pupil for further education has fallen 12% since 2010, and funding for adult education has halved, according to the IFS.

Education for life

We have an enormous distance to travel to make up for the long term decline of further education, particularly for adults. Imagine if we had a further education sector that was world class, like our universities. Imagine local colleges as community resources where people of all ages could go to learn skills, to advance their career or for pure self-development. Imagine them as a venue for sports and shared hobbies. Imagine high quality teachers sharing their knowledge with learners face to face, and with the world through digital platforms. FE colleges could be the perfect venue to incubate new businesses, and share community resources, like maker spaces.We need more community institutions like this, not just to tackle the economic challenges we face but to address issues of cohesion, loneliness, and mental decline in our ageing population. Delivering on anything like this will require long term investment - much more than has been committed. Not just to finance the resources themselves but to build a true culture of life long learning, to encourage people of all ages and backgrounds to use these resources.That will require a lot of investment, but also a vision that goes well beyond skills for jobs.

Jack of all trades

"Jack of all trades, master of none, though oftentimes better than master of one"This is not, as many have suggested, the original saying. It started with the first couplet, a positive description of a talented generalist. This was then turned into a criticism of those without focus with the addition of the second couplet. Most recently, in a move very appropriate to our times, the last addition of the last couplet turned it into a criticism of experts.Across a series of conversations this week, this phrase kept coming to mind. I think it says a lot about our confusion around what mix of skills is important for the future. And where those skills ought to be learned. Do we need to be Jacks of all trades in the future? Or do we want instead deep expertise. Is there even a conflict between these goals?

Master of one?

On Monday, I recorded a conversation with Carl Wiese, Executive Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer for Poly. I collaborated with Poly recently on a report on the future of work and particularly hybrid working.Carl and I discussed skills for the future. We talked about the relative merits of deep expertise vs what are perceived as more generalist skills, particularly communication. Carl made the point that it is possible to be an expert in communication. And he's right. Even just within the relatively narrow realm of public speaking, there is a lot to learn about the differences between a good after-dinner talk, and a good conference speech. This is a skill that can be endlessly honed, and those that do it well are readily identifiable from those who don't.On Wednesday I had a live-streamed chat with Simon Squibb, who is on a mission to help a million people start their own business. Again, we talked about skills and particularly the critical skills of entrepreneurship. I referred Simon to my idea of the 'Three Cs' - curation, creation, and communication, all of which are highly relevant when starting your own business. But I also realised that being generally good at these things is only going to get you so far. One of my big lessons from my current business is just how powerful it is when you can engage experts whose ability goes well beyond your own. I outsource everything I can now to people who can do it better than I can. Or at least, I usually do...

Competence is a preference

The exception to this rule recently has been the audio version of High Frequency Change. The production of this got held up due to various publishing wrangles, but eventually my publisher and I agreed that I would record and produce it and they would release it. My plan originally had been to record it in a studio, but COVID-19 put paid to all that. So instead I decided to do it at home, converting my wardrobe (clothes are good for sound deadening) into a temporary recording studio. "How hard could it be?" I thought, somewhat naively.The answer is 'hard'. Between finding times to record when the house is quiet and your neighbour isn't having building work done, and learning about the mastering requirements for audible, this process has taken much longer than I hoped or expected. Having started months ago, albeit with a lot of distractions in between, I might finally finish it this week. It has been a painful process. But, the end result I am pretty happy with. And I have learned some new skills.Am I now good at audio editing and mastering? No. Certainly a long, long way from expert. But am I competent enough to produce something that sounds good to the untrained ear? I think so. And while it feels like it has taken a very long time to me, in reality, three months is not a long time to learn a new competency.

Ts, Os, and charms

With the right foundation in learning, it is easy these days to rapidly acquire competencies. The best courses on the online learning platforms like Skillshare are truly brilliant, and there is a wealth of guidance out there on blog posts and forums (on which I am heavily reliant for my EV project). Collect a few of these competencies and it starts to feel like the popular 'T-shaped' model for skills doesn't fit so well anymore.The T-shaped employee is an idea originally from the 1980s, where it was used to describe people (still then 'men') with a single deep expertise but strong supporting skills that made them good collaborators. I wonder if a different shape isn't now a more appropriate model. The O of the 'charm bracelet' is possibly most appropriate.Back when these were all the rage, you would typically buy someone the charm bracelet with a few charms on it that you thought best represented them. Over time they could add more charms.Think of skills in the same way. There are undoubtedly some core competencies that are critical for future success. I would argue those are the Three Cs that I laid out here, and in High Frequency Change. Everyone should leave school with these charms on their skill bracelet. But everyone will have others, based on their own interests and passions or upbringing.Over time we all add more charms. Some of them might be big and expensive. A trade, a degree, or a depth of experience. Some of them might be small and cheap: basic competencies collected through online courses to allow you to complete a particular task, or just because you wanted to learn.The people we want for a particular role or task might need to have collected particular charms, as well as having kept those core charms polished. But perhaps the most important thing we will be looking for is not what charms are on their bracelet, but whether they are keen to add more.

Raging against the invisible machine

Today we use the word Luddite to describe someone who is nonplussed by technology. Someone who just doesn’t like it, understand it, or engage with it. This is not an accurate description of the real luddites though – as a historian friend once pointed out to me. They had no abstract objection to technology, they just didn’t like it taking their jobs.The Luddites could see and touch the machines that they opposed. They could take hammers and break the frames. Not so for any true modern luddite, raging against the cognitive automation that might strip them of work. Today the greatest threats to human work are remote algorithms, spun up on a distant server, perhaps on the other side of the world, to perform a single task. They may only exist for a fraction of a second before they disappear again, back into the giant pools of data and computing power.I raised this at Barclays recent Charities Day to highlight the challenge that automation presents to all of us, but particularly to the third sector. Charities have the challenge of employing automation to maximise their own performance, when they might consider their role as employers and venues for volunteering as a very important secondary goal to their primary mission. But they also have the threat to their fundraising activities. Payroll giving has been a growing component of their income in recent years. What happens when fewer and fewer of us are on a regular payroll?Ephemeral robots aren’t likely to be so generous.