Last year, McKinsey published an interesting report called The Future of Work. They were not alone in predicting that tomorrow’s economy will bring ever increased automation, robotics and artificial intelligence. The report confirmed that high level skills will be of a premium. Manual, physical and basic cognitive jobs will be in decline. Proficiency in digital technologies, married to strong social-emotional skills and high cognitive functioning will be most valuable.
It is unlikely that the UK will lead the fourth industrial revolution. Over the last 50 years, manufacturing jobs have gradually migrated from our industrial heartlands to low wage jurisdictions overseas. We have not lost the ingenuity that made us world leaders in the eighteen and nineteenth century – and we are still a wealthy nation – but, relatively speaking, our domestic market is small. America and China will take the top spots, but if we can deliver an industrial strategy which faces out to the world, third place is there for the taking.
If we are to meet this challenge and seize the opportunity it brings, it is time to invest more intelligently in our human capital. We need to rethink key aspects of our education system. All government policy to date has concentrated on two main outcomes: knowledge and skills. There is no doubt we can do more to tailor these to emerging economic opportunities, but I would argue we have overlooked a third vital consideration: traits.
It is this aspect of employability which underpins and enables everything else we seek to teach. But too often, learning the behaviours, habits and mind-set which employers need, is considered a hoped-for by-product largely left to chance. Many will – quite rightly – say these aspects of a child’s development are the responsibility of families, claiming teachers have too much to do already, and that this should not be the domain of the state. I understand this argument, but that doesn’t help the children who, through no fault of their own, perhaps don’t enjoy the same peripheral support at home.
We need to look at this problem as complimentary-supplementary spectrum. For those children from secure and prosperous families, an education system which explicitly seeks to imbue highly-employable traits will provide a complimentary offer to that available outside school. But what about those young people who, for a whole range of reasons, aren’t taken to sports clubs, music lessons and cultural events? What happens to those children who don’t enjoy exposure to networks, friends and family who can expand their horizons and stretch their perceptions? For those young people, an educational experience which foregrounds their personal development will supplement that which may not be readily available elsewhere. All students will be somewhere along this axis, so a universal commitment to this aspect of education will lift all boats on a rising tide.
Latent within such reforms is the answer to the UK’s low productivity. If we do not tackle this head-on, with bold and visionary investment, we will be scratching our heads at the same conundrum in 20 years’ time. Until we break the stubborn link between poverty and academic underachievement, we all keep paying through low growth, higher taxes and reactive public services.
Here’s a short summary of what McKinsey had to say.
In order to achieve employment, job satisfaction and higher incomes, citizens will need to meet three fundamental criteria:
· Add value beyond automated systems and intelligent machines
· Ability to operate in a digital environment
· Adapt to new ways of working and new occupations
They identify a range of traits, skills and behaviours which can be largely attributed to one of four categories:
· Digital
· Cognitive
· Self-Leadership
· Interpersonal
Within these groupings, McKinsey seem to suggest there might be specific capabilities which enable citizens to progress from the entry level achievement of ‘employment’ through to ‘job satisfaction’ and onto ‘higher income’. The authors of the report make some interesting observations – based on surveys across multiple developed nations – that the following traits are critical:
· Entry level: adaptability and coping with uncertainty
· Progression: confidence and self-motivation
· Leadership: work plan development and organisational awareness
They cite many other factors and qualities, but these seem to be the areas that are most consistent and influential in terms of positive outcomes. They make the following recommendations:
1. There needs to be a strong focus from government on developing citizens’ self-leadership and interpersonal skills.
2. Governments have done little to research how to develop and assess such skills. Research should:
a. Define progression and proficiency levels at different ages
b. Design and test developmental strategies and assessment models
c. Recognise that different skills sets will require different solutions
3. Government should set up institutions for research and innovation to test and assess solutions and establish which methods work for different soft skills.
4. There should be continuous training available through all stages of adulthood.
5. Already, there are AI start-ups developing algorithms to predict the jobs of the future and the skills required to deliver on roles that do not currently exist. These should be supported.
6. Early Years is the best age at which to develop strong mind-sets and behaviours.
How do we develop these traits? How do we make sure all children are given the opportunity to develop them? In what way does the development of such traits have a positive impact on educational engagement, attainment, progression into employment, future earnings and job satisfaction? As the report states, this is an area which has not been widely researched. It is revealing that no UK government seems to have explored this link in any meaningful way.
Most of us would like to be healthier, more self-confident and creative. Such attributes are their own reward, promoting physical and mental wellbeing and quality of life. Self-confidence can lead to a greater sense of ownership and control. Creativity can manifest itself in many forms, enabling an individual to identify and construct new solutions and possibilities. But beyond intrinsic value to the individual, the maximisation of these traits will bring considerable macroeconomic benefit and cut loose the anchor of low productivity.
How might confidence and creativity improve decision-making in industry and civil society? What happens to the economy when more of us have original ideas and the confidence to put them into action? What happens if more of us are able to take calculated risks as a default behaviour? If ambition, self-belief, social dexterity and resilience were to be more evenly distributed, we could promote new leaders from different backgrounds and diversify our pool of decision-makers.
You may be lucky enough to have never experienced the retarding effects of imposter syndrome, but do not underestimate that, for millions of young people, it is a malignant code almost written into their socioeconomic DNA. Happily, inherited characteristics can be impacted and altered through environmental conditions. If those conditions can be optimised, so too can the life outcomes for our poorest children. We all benefit.
As a thought experiment, let’s try and make a few assumptions. Let’s take a group of young people who qualify for pupil premium, from families which are poorly educated, unskilled and work in the gig economy. Their parents may lack professional confidence and suffer from poor health, their own childhoods not characterised by the power of education. Their life expectancy will be up to ten years lower than average and their future work is likely to be less secure. They will be presented with fewer opportunities and, on every metric, will be more deprived. This is about one in five of us. 21% of the UK population lives in relative poverty. So, on average, what are the chances that those apples will fall far from the tree?
Let’s take ten of those children, on a given street, in one of the UK’s poorest neighbourhoods, and put five of them through a school which has invested significant resource into developing these so-called ‘soft’ skills. These first five students will spend 13 years receiving an education committed to imparting knowledge and building skills, whilst also to providing considerable amounts of time outside of the classroom, promoting good physical and mental health. The staff will be given time, resource and autonomy to design activities which bake in self-belief, create positive team players and instil the confidence to lead. These schools will be staffed by leaders and teachers, steeped in the latest and most innovative pedagogy, empowered to direct over ten hours a week to maximising positive traits, doing everything they can to promote their students’ creativity and sense of discovery. They will be blessed with acres of sports fields, numerous theatres, music and dance studios, a vast array of clubs, dozens of visiting speakers, a huge amount of career advice, and an unrelenting commitment to engaging parents and involving them in the wider educational process. They will be given twice the government funding they currently have, allowing a larger teaching workforce, class sizes no higher than 20, and a greater proportion of their contracted hours outside of the classroom delivering activity which is characterised by choice, enjoyment and ‘learning by doing’.
Let’s leave the other five children from that street in an underfunded school which ‘requires improvement’ and has limited capacity or incentive to deliver anything beyond a crammed curriculum. Staff numbers will be low. Teachers will be overworked, with more than 35 pupils in each class and too much classroom contact time. There will be little available outdoor space. Half of the parents in those schools will not attend parent-teacher evenings. Their children have few choices and fewer chances.
Putting aside the countless intrinsic and extrinsic benefits to the individual children, in one generation from now, which of those students will be better able to guide their own children towards a rewarding career with job satisfaction and a comfortable salary? Who will be contributing to the tax base, thus enabling an expansion of the sort of public sector investment which changed their own lives as well all others to follow? Who will be discovering ways to make all of our lives fairer, more comfortable and more prosperous? Who will make it into the civil service and corporate HR departments and revolutionise the criteria by which school graduates are recruited? Who, when asked to vote, will be able to identify lies, source facts and make informed decisions? Whose children will be presented with opportunities and be taught the awareness and confidence to seize them? Whose children will be more likely to go to university or into a career with a statistically higher income?
If those five fortunate children on that street, were replicated in every street across the UK, within one generation, we could halve the number of citizens in relative poverty to 10%, and reduce the burden to the taxpayer across every facet of government. Those citizens will increase productivity levels in the economy, discover and deliver the high value and sustainable industries of the future, start businesses, take risks, create employment and demand more sophisticated, dynamic and equitable policy responses from government. They will be multipliers.
The political obstacles are easy to see. The electoral rewards for such investment would be a generation away. Today’s policy-makers would be planting trees, only to watch their opponents pick the fruit. Spending would need to be achieved either through taxation or redirected departmental funding. For these reasons, such reforms can only be achieved through cross-party consensus - and that always requires brave, visionary and skilled leadership.
Over time, all parties have made their contribution to sometimes revolutionary public service reform. Under Gladstone, the Liberals introduced the 1870 Education Act. Harold MacMillan’s unmatched housebuilding was borne out a sense of debt to the men and women who endured two world wars. Best known is Attlee’s post war Labour government which created the NHS and built the modern welfare state. These leaders faced towards the future with bold conviction. They built enduring legacies which, in the case of education and health at least, have only grown in scale and sophistication. We know today’s challenges require similar commitments. To tackle climate change, harness the digital revolution, and bring wealth and opportunity back to parts of the UK which lost out to globalisation, we need an ambitious and thoughtful industrial strategy with education at its heart.
Which leader will offer shoulders on which their successors must stand?
Acknowledgement: Some of the language in this blog summarises or directly quotes from McKinsey and Company’s report, dated 25th June 2021: Defining the skills citizens will need in the future world of work
