Education and innovation are at the heart of Labour’s plans for modernising Britain. The government has an ambitious ten-year programme for boosting the nation’s R&D performance, thereby creating a “knowledge economy.” Yet this cannot succeed in the absence of suitably qualified people. A lack of the right sort of human capital is a far bigger constraint on innovation than a lack of cash or laboratories. Microsoft and Google were set up in garages by students with few assets other than their highly numerate brains.
Yet while endlessly stressing the importance of scientific research, ministers have failed to implement the education policies needed to realise their goals. The contrast between rhetoric and reality was illustrated again in November’s stark analysis of the decline of physics in Britain’s state schools by Alan Smithers and Pamela Robinson of the University of Buckingham.
Most recent debate on education has focused on structural and administrative issues. Like its Tory predecessors, the Blair government argues that schools will perform better if they have more autonomy and if parents have more choice. Yet if schools cannot find maths, physics and chemistry teachers, and if students keep on opting for easier subjects, British education will remain sub-standard, regardless of the level of competition or choice.
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