Former prime minister Tony Blair and one-time chancellor George Osborne have both said that education is not to blame for Brexit.
Blair also said that he would be “even more revolutionary” with education if he were prime minister today, during a wide-ranging session at the Global Education and Skills Forum in Dubai.
When asked by Tes if Brexit was a symptom of the failure of education, as some have suggested, Blair said: “Look, there are perfectly educated people who voted for Brexit. Now I don’t agree with them [but] I don’t think education per se is the problem.”
He added that, on “education in the broad sense”, he believes “strangely, in these past two years, as a result of all the debate around Brexit, people are learning a lot more about Europe”. He hopes that “maybe this will make a difference” in determining whether there will be a vote once the public sees the alternative to the European Union.
Blair said: “But I don’t personally think you can point to our education system per se as the problem.”
Osborne said: “It’s statistically the case that if you had a university degree you were more likely to vote remain in the referendum, but I don’t think you therefore should say the education system failed and led to a bunch of sort of ignorant voters who voted for Brexit.”
Blair also said that, despite having made “a lot of changes” in education while prime minister, he would go further now.
“If I was back in power today, I think I’d be taking an even more revolutionary approach to the whole question of teaching and education,” he said, adding that reforming education is “the single most transformative thing you can do for a country today”.
Internationally, governments tended to talk up education but not give it enough priority in practice, he argued. Blair wants to see a “transformation of the teaching profession and its status and standing in society”. He praised the million-dollar Global Teacher Prize, whose 2018 winner will be announced in Dubai later today, which he said was overdue in a world where global prizes for other areas, such as physics and peace, were long established.
He said: “Most governments do say that education is a big priority, but I think we’ve got a massive distance to go before that vision is translated into a reality, which is translated into what the children actually learn in the classroom.”
Osborne said that the status of the education secretary job had “definitely gone up” in the past 20 years and was now one of the “plum jobs” in the British government, adding that Blair had done a “very good job of elevating the status of education in government policy”.
Osborne also declared himself an optimist about how technology would change education, but he added: “The area which in a way is the least-changed in our society over the last 100 years is education. I think if you went into a classroom of teenage children, although they’d have an interactive whiteboard and all of that, it would still look very similar to a classroom 100 years ago. All this incredible change has not really hit the education sector yet.”
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