Education must be at the heart of the levelling-up agenda

Talent, Boris Johnson has said, is equally distributed across the country, but opportunity is not. If you live in St Albans, you are nearly three times more likely to have a degree than if you live in Barrow-in-Furness. If you’re male and live in Westminster, your life expectancy is ten years higher than a bloke in Glasgow. Life in Britain, states Michael Gove, has become a postcode lottery. GDP per capita is lower in the north-east, Yorkshire, the East Midlands, Wales and Northern Ireland than in the former East Germany. Reunified Germany has done better at levelling up than we have.

This productivity gap is primarily the result of a vast difference in skills between regions. A worker in Blackburn takes five days to produce what it takes someone in Milton Keynes just three. In Brighton, 54 per cent of adults have degrees; in Doncaster, only 15 per cent. So businesses invest in Brighton and Milton Keynes rather than Doncaster or Blackburn. It’s a vicious cycle: areas that generate higher productivity can pay higher wages, thereby attracting better skilled workers, and further compounding left-behind areas.

Education – and particularly technical education – is key to fixing this discrepancy. A deep-seated cultural bias against technical education has long existed. Both Johnson and his predecessor Theresa May have sought to reverse it. Four years ago, May declared ‘the most significant’ shake-up of technical education in decades by introducing T Levels. Developed in collaboration with employers, these provide a mixture of classroom learning with practical experience. T Level students are required to obtain both a technical qualification in areas such as accounting, engineering and land management, as well as an industrial placement.

In 2020, Johnson announced a ‘lifetime skills guarantee’. Around 11 million adults will be able to gain new qualifications such as diplomas in engineering technology and electrical installation, or qualifications in adult care, with no course fees. This is to be delivered by a £2.5 billion National Skills Fund. From 2025, every young person will have a lifelong loan entitlement to four years of post-18 education, with the funding model being reformed to end the artificial distinction between further and higher education. It will become just as easy for a student to secure a loan to study electrical engineering at a technical college as history at a university.

It’s a welcome start in the struggle to alter cultural attitudes. But it’s not enough – real change depends on schools. It’s no use providing technical courses or apprenticeships for those who have not mastered basic literacy and numeracy, and employers cannot themselves be expected to teach these skills. Our record is appalling. We are fifth from bottom in OECD tables of literacy and numeracy, with the National Literacy Trust estimating that 16 per cent of school-leavers in the UK are functionally illiterate, meaning that they could not fully understand a job advertisement. In Scotland, the situation is particularly dire: illiteracy rates were 33 per cent in 2020/1.

Something is radically wrong when the £53 billion spent annually on schools in England produces such terrible results. The government proposes that underperforming schools be handed over to multi-academy trusts so that, by 2030, 90 per cent of primary school-leavers will reach the expected standards in reading, writing and maths. This means that in the worst performing areas, the percentage reaching this standard must be increased by more than a third if illiteracy and innumeracy are to be virtually eliminated. But there is so far no detail as to how this ambitious aim is to be achieved.

Improving skills requires changes in attitudes as well as money. Too many of the indigenous white working class retain a mindset from the early post-war years of full employment when one could secure a job for life, even with minimal qualification. That world has gone. Ministers should proclaim this in the Red-Wall seats loud and clear. Tony Benn once told me that Margaret Thatcher’s achievement was less as a legislator than as a teacher. Ministers focus too much on legislation, not enough on teaching.

Required skills vary from area to area. Tourism would be a valuable skill for Cornwall, but not for Hartlepool. So further and adult education institutions need much more freedom to develop courses suited to their needs. A one-size-fits-all policy will not work. Greater devolution is the key to the success of levelling up skills. That’s why last year’s Skills for Jobs White Paper rightly envisages a radical alteration in the constitutional balance between central and local government.

Devolution in England was launched by the 2016 Cities and Local Government Devolution Act. It has taken the form of combined local authorities based on city regions with directly elected metro mayors and powers devolved from central government. Around 40 per cent of people in England now live under mayoral regimes. Gove has proposed such a regime be available for any part of England that wants it.

But devolution is not without its issues. It is hardly compatible with a fragmented system of local government. Nottinghamshire, for example, which is to be offered a devolution deal, has no fewer than seven local authorities: five district councils responsible for housing and commercial development, a county council responsible for infrastructure and transport, and in the city a unitary authority where the county has no remit. Should devolution be accompanied by a shift to a unitary system of local government everywhere in England to match those in Scotland and Wales?

Devolution, moreover, could lead, as in Scotland, to a confusion of accountability. The SNP takes the credit when things go well, even when that’s a consequence of money voted for by Westminster, but it blames the English when things go badly. The mayor of London tends to do the same. Gove must establish precise lines of accountability so voters can be clear as to who is responsible for what.

Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, has rightly insisted that levelling up cannot be done from an office in Whitehall. Nevertheless, only the central government can determine the right balance between different parts of the country. Otherwise territorial equality will depend on the political clout and leverage of local leaders. It would be a happy accident if that leverage were to coincide with regional inequalities. It is also a fundamental principle of the welfare state that benefits and burdens should reflect need rather than local leaders’ clout. Only central government can secure that principle.

Above all, the government should avoid the mistake of devolving and forgetting as they did with Northern Ireland between 1921 and 1972. A skills shortage in Scotland is of as much concern to the rest of us as it is to the Scots. Even in federal states, the government cannot abdicate responsibility for sub-national areas. Sections 50 and 51 of the 2020 Internal Market Act confirm that the government can spend directly in devolved areas to promote economic development, provide infrastructure and support education and training. This is a hopeful indicator that the policy of devolving and forgetting will not be repeated in Scotland.

With the White Paper, the government has, for the first time, put the narrowing of territorial disparities at the heart of its domestic agenda. It is an imaginative response to a deep-seated problem. But much more remains to be done. Gove has played himself in. It is now time for him to score some more runs.