During my years as a civil servant in the Department for Education, I was struck by how often well-intentioned policies turned out to be something our predecessors had already tried. But knowledge departs with personnel. Improving this institutional memory is a key part of Edge’s Learning from the Past series, and a necessary step to halt a seemingly endless education policy merry-go-round. To explore this further, Edge recently hosted On the Shoulders of Giants, a webinar with contributors whose careers, between them, span almost the entire modern history of education and skills in England.
Our panellists were Andy Westwood (Professor of Public Policy, University of Manchester and Skills England board member), who has worked across virtually every iteration of the skills department since the 1990s; and Judith Compton, who spent 35 years in education and skills. Contributors included Josh Patel (Senior Policy Researcher, Edge), who presented original research into the Youth Training Scheme and the Manpower Services Commission; Susan McGrath (Director, Up2Uni), who traced fifty years of BTEC’s history; Trisha Fettes (Former Principal Research Fellow, University of Warwick Centre for Education and Industry), who examined the bodies charged with bringing coherence to England’s qualifications system (having previously worked inside QCA and evaluated 14-to-19 Diplomas); and María José Ventura Alfaro (Research and Evaluation Lead, Ofsted), who examined the Apprenticeship Training Agency model, and what its collapse reveals about apprenticeship policy design. The most persistent theme to emerge from our discussion was the impact of policy churn. Andy Westwood noted that skills policy, alongside industrial strategy and regional policy, is one of the areas of government most characterised by institutional instability.
Since it matters so much to economic growth, every new government feels compelled to fix it, reinforcing the cycle. “Everyone comes to this with the best of intentions. There’s a sense that if we just stick to the changes we’re introducing, those who come after will hold the course. But when the next people come along, they think exactly the same. And so the merry-go-round continues," he said,
Josh’s work on the Youth Training Scheme threw this into relief. YTS put two million young people through work placements in the 1980s, and was expanded in 1986 after just three months of deliberation – without evaluation or cost-benefit analysis. It was then replaced before anyone had properly assessed its impact. The same pattern has repeated many times since. Today’s Youth Guarantee faces similar pressures. Closely related to policy churn is the temptation to introduce new measures every time an existing one falls short. Rather than simplifying matters, this inevitably adds complexity. Trisha’s work showed QCA and QCDA doing serious, technically demanding qualification and assessment work across six changes of Secretary of State. But with each, rather than permitting an iterative approach to improvement, a new wave of reforms would arrive. Susan’s account of BTEC made a similar point from a different perspective – BTEC survived precisely because it was given time to evolve and establish a brand. The Business and Technology Education Council closed doors decades ago, but the BTEC name has never lost its hold on employers, universities or learners. It has simply evolved over time, in response to changing needs.
Another theme was the system’s discomfort with failure. Judith described how Sector Skills Councils – which had a practical remit around occupational standards, apprenticeships and qualification strategies – did good work before being replaced by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, which was also eventually abolished. “It's very hard for civil servants and ministers to accept failure, the visibility of failure, the negative publicity, and to learn lessons from that to create something productive for the future”, she said. María's research on Apprenticeship Training Agencies told a similar story of a model with real promise, in this case acting as intermediary employers to reduce apprentice recruitment risk for small businesses. But because of inconsistent regulation and evaluation, lessons were never learned before it was marked as a failure and phased out.
England’s tendency to prescribe from the centre marks us out from comparable OECD countries, Andy Westwood said, where frontline institutions have considerably more autonomy. Regional inequality has also sharpened since the 1980s, making the case for local flexibility stronger than ever. Yet the instinct to centralise remains. As Judith put it, too much resource gets absorbed at the top by consultations, policy development, regulation and inspection and, therefore, never reaches those who need it.
(See the entire webinar here)
And ultimately, local relationships between young people and trusted adults are what makes all the difference. And you can’t legislate for that. Institutional short-termism – prioritising what's measurable over what matters – underpins much of skills policy today. The question now is whether those designing future reforms can look closer at what has come before, so that together, we can implement truly effective change.
Written by
Olly Newton, Executive Director, Edge Foundation