Earlier this week, the Labour party’s Council of Skills Advisers, led by former secretary of state Lord Blunkett, unveiled a report setting out various proposals they believe should inform Labour’s manifesto at the next election.

Given the events of the past few months, Labour is looking a lot closer to taking power than they have in many years, so what they set out requires careful scrutiny.

What’s more, while Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and the incarnation of the party he leads have often been accused of a lack of vision and ambition, that cannot be said of this week’s review.

The report as a whole is bold and ambitious, providing a roadmap towards a society where education is no longer a one-shot game.

Unfortunately, though, although it’s billed as a Skills Report, it’s hard to write about skills without touching on schools and the sections relating to schools’ policy - which are disappointingly underpowered.

Nonetheless, with the report advocating a cradle-to-grave culture of lifelong learning, it’s worth going through each section to see what’s being proposed and whether it deserves to become official Labour policy.

Early years

Funding arrangements in the early years are a mess according to the review, which argues the system fails on two key counts: nurturing children and freeing parents to pursue a career.

The report includes a case study of Quebec, where major investment in the early years secured a significant increase in women’s labour market participation. Drawing on this example, the review recommends funding reforms and a comprehensive system that stretches all the way from maternity to the end of primary school.

This would include restoring the Sure Start programme, which sought to improve parenting and build social capital, as well as nurture children’s development. The programme was severely cut back by the Conservatives, with a third of centres closing between 2010 and 2017.

But there’s a dilemma. With preschool provision, there’s always a tension between prioritising education and child-care aims.

This is historically where policies fall short as if they aim to offer additional hours so parents can work, more capacity is needed, for example by increasing child-to-adult ratios and drawing in more low-skilled workers.

Or if educational outcomes are prioritised, it generally requires a more skilled, better-paid workforce with a focus on quality, not quantity. Doing both is hard. The review is upfront about this tension, though, hinting that some sort of dual-track approach could be pursued.

Schools

Next comes schools and the review’s proposals on schools fall into four broad areas: curriculum, assessment, the workforce and tutoring. 

Curriculum

The review’s first recommendation on schools echoes many teachers’ calls for a reduction in politicians’ influence, or, as they see it, “interference” in the curriculum.

As such, the review advocates a “broad-based” authority or agency that would reshape the curriculum.

The problem is, which experts would be involved? During the last curriculum review, former education secretary Michael Gove had to contend with high-profile resignations from the expert group he had assembled, making it clear that the relationship between experts and politicians isn’t always plain sailing and that expertise itself is usually political in some way.

There’s also a difficult balance to strike between political independence on one hand, and accountability and democratic responsiveness on the other.

Indeed, the review itself makes the difficulties of insulating the curriculum from party politics clear, by stating a few paragraphs later that Labour itself should “design an inclusive, inspiring, creative and future broadening curriculum”.

The party politics continues in a scathing verdict on the Conservative’s curriculum reforms.

This raises the prospect of a scorched earth policy on curriculum, alongside all the upheaval and workload this would entail for teachers.

Hopefully, when Labour debate the review’s recommendations they will opt for refinement rather than revolution, tackling the current curriculum’s unintended consequences while bedding in some of the progress made to date.

I also hope they will steer clear of some of the review’s dubious ideas about adding essential skills like problem solving to the curriculum, given that research suggests these are domain-specific skills best developed through subject teaching.

References to the importance of vocabulary and oracy are good to see, since there is a growing evidence base around how to teach these and the benefits they can unlock.

This includes the importance of vocabulary during the primary to secondary school transition, rather than just in the early years.

This needn’t involve a new curriculum though; plenty of schools are already showing how these can be prioritised through effective teaching.

Furthermore, the report’s authors don’t seem to have given adequate thought to what needs to be achieved through a national curriculum and what can be left to the schools. 

The review highlights two other areas as curriculum priorities: citizenship and digital skills. Unsurprisingly, as a former citizenship teacher, I’m particularly supportive of the former.

Most other developed countries teach some form of civics education up to the age of 16 and, as the review points out, citizenship education can help build a coherent, politically literate society - one of Blunkett’s long-running preoccupations.

Doing this well requires specialists trained to deliver rigorous subject content and to navigate the minefield of teaching controversial political issues without indoctrination. 

Meanwhile, in relation to digital skills and computing, the review calls for more sophisticated content to be taught in primary schools and for a new syllabus.

But here the biggest barrier is a lack of appropriately skilled teachers. Jack Worth from the National Foundation for Education Research found that only 39 per cent of the required number of computing teachers were recruited to initial teaching training (ITT) in 2022.

A new syllabus will do nothing to resolve that.

Assessment

Next, the report moves on to assessment - and it really shouldn’t have bothered, managing just half a page of confusing ideas, compared to three whole pages just on procurement later in the report.

First comes a call for “multimodal assessments”. 

While there are clearly problems with an “exams only” system, there are no suggestions as to what approach is being recommended and how to ensure that coursework and teacher assessment doesn’t stack the odds against disadvantaged pupils.

There’s then a frankly bizarre reference to the “anachronism of grade boundaries and norm-referencing”.

The real anachronism here is forgetting the existence of a national reference test that is used to set grade boundaries, or the well-documented issues with the alternative approach known as “criterion referencing”.

I’m also not sure what “gradeless” assessment means: the alternatives would appear to be either a “pass” “fail” assessment, equivalent to a two-grade system with a giant cliff edge; or a numerical score, which, whether it’s a score out of a hundred or a total number of marks, is nothing but a very granular - and unreliable - grade.

Finally comes a call to use long-term destinations data, purportedly “to assist” in achieving these goals.

This data is already published in school performance tables and makes sense as part of school accountability but doesn’t fit in a section that’s otherwise focused on qualifications. 

Workforce - recruitment and retention

When it comes to teaching, the review’s ideas should be seen in the context of Labour’s proposed National Excellence Programme for schools, which will include a focus on recruitment, Ofsted reforms, and CPD.

The review’s main new idea on retention is for all teachers to get a sabbatical every five years.

Although many teachers will welcome this, there’s a question mark over whether Labour has landed on the right idea, since it could result in the opposite of its intended purpose if it creates a natural break-point from which teachers don’t return.

On teacher training, meanwhile, the authors take an unnecessary dig at what they call “chalk and talk” teaching. One can only assume the authors reviewed the evidence on direct instruction and found it lacking.

This is accompanied by a suggestion that teachers should receive training in how to deliver “high-quality team-based learning which will lead students to understand how to approach the delivery of projects in the workplace”. 

Evidence in education will always be contested and there’s certainly scope to improve the government’s ITT core content framework.

However, these statements look pretty ropey set against the current, fully referenced frameworks. Given that ITT providers are already unhappy about being told what to teach, Labour would be well advised to steer clear of new diktat until it’s got a better grasp of the evidence.

Tutoring

Finally, the review’s vision becomes grander and stretches far beyond everyday classroom teaching when it turns to an ideal of offering an enhanced National Tutoring Programme (NTP) that would become a permanent feature of the education landscape.

For them, this is partly about equity, arguing that all young people should have access to private tutoring on equal terms, and that there should be a clear line of sight between the NTP and family learning.

Given that the NFER’s latest evaluation shows that only around 100,000 pupil-premium-eligible pupils accessed the tuition partners scheme, compared to an overall population of 1.9 million free school meal-eligible children, there is a long way to go here.  

Support for the NTP programme is one example of continuity with Conservative policy. In contrast, the review’s support for careers education is starkly at odds with Govian ideology.

In line with existing evidence, the report argues that careers education should start early, adding that each school should have a trained careers leader.

These proposals build a bridge to the far more ambitious, and perhaps better thought-through, sections of the report on lifelong learning and apprenticeships.

Apprenticeships and lifelong learning

For too many people, leaving school or college means leaving education for the rest of their life.

The Skills Report confronts this reality head on by trying to set out a more equitable and sustainable path towards the same goal.

First comes a commitment to a “right to retrain”, backed up by individual learning accounts. Many will raise their eyebrows at the scheme’s name given its association with a New Labour policy that was abandoned in 2001 due to uncontrolled fraud.

However, technological progress and better scrutiny of training providers mean a similar fate could now be avoided.

By proposing that the accounts could be topped up by employers, local government and individuals, the policy also encapsulates the review’s underlying vision of a sort of social corporatism where employers, workers and the state partner to generate growth built on learning and skills.

Learning accounts would be accompanied by a Learning and Skills Passport to which different qualifications can be added over time.

This would include a version for young people with disabilities, linking up education, health and care plans, Disabled Students’ Allowance and the Department for Work and Pensions’ “Access to Work” programme, potentially easing transitions.

The review’s authors also want young people to receive a restored Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA), a policy abolished by the coalition government in 2010.

Based on estimates for a similar proposal in Labour’s 2019 manifesto, Luke Sibieta, a research fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, estimates that this would cost £800-900 million a year.

That’s equivalent to around 1.7 per cent of the total core school budget and some school leaders will baulk at that money going into students’ pockets. This week’s announcement that the borough of Tower Hamlets will reintroduce the allowance for its students could provide a useful pilot.

Finally, the section on apprenticeships is one of the most detailed parts of the report.

It includes a proposal to shift the current apprenticeships levy into an “apprenticeships and learning levy” that would also be easier to transfer between different employers and providers.

One of the tricky issues here is that although the levy was intended to go towards training low-skilled workers, a lot is being syphoned off into master’s programmes and MBAs for highly educated professionals. It’s not clear what position Labour will adopt on this.

The overall sentiment seems to be we should encourage training in all its forms, but the report also argues the levy should be more targeted towards lower-skilled learners and the gig economy, since an extra 1.2 million people would receive training each year if workers with lower-level qualifications accessed workplace training at the same rate as graduates. 

Now for the tough choices

Good strategy is as much about what not to do, as it is about what to do. Labour shouldn’t wait until it achieves power to take tough decisions about which policies and approaches to prioritise, particularly with a limited budget.

It’s making those tough calls that will be the true test of whether a Labour government is ready to provide the leadership that the sector needs.

Loic Menzies is a former chief executive of The Centre for Education and Youth and a visiting fellow at Sheffield Institute of Education and a senior research associate at Jesus College Cambridge Intellectual Forum