What's the point of education? A view from the DfE

The decisions taken by the Department for Education are felt by all those working across the state sector. We all remember the introduction of particular initiatives (or feel the loss of them when they’re ditched) as the politicians come and go. I think Michael Gove will go down as having made the most impact in recent years. He moved the focus onto more academic instruction with the Ebacc and SATs, away from vocational training, removing the points associated with NVQs.

This is a good starting point for this series: the DfE has the final say in why children and young people do what they do in schools. What drives the DfE’s initiatives? This has been taken from the DfE’s website: 

At our heart, we are the department for realising potential. We enable children and learners to thrive, by protecting the vulnerable and ensuring the delivery of excellent standards of education, training and care. This helps realise everyone’s potential – and that powers our economy, strengthens society and increases fairness.

Let’s look at how they want to do this. They have published a list of priorities, essentially creating a workforce to contribute to the economy.  

This plan sets out what we will do to drive economic recovery, improve educational standards across our country, give children the best start in life and level up opportunity for all. 

Priorities

Drive economic growth through improving the skills pipeline, levelling up productivity and supporting people to work (cross-cutting outcome).

Outcome delivery plan

Drive economic growth through improving the skills pipeline, levelling up productivity and supporting people to work.

The DfE are taking a neoliberal position from which to base education policy. This is understandable in the political climate we’ve seen since the 1980s when Thatcher / Regan first came into power. Since then, we’ve seen the focus for all government policy being placed on the success of the market. 

The principles of neoliberalism is at odds with the notion education itself. 

They view the learners in a “human capital” way of the value of education. Training the learners in how to become successful market agents.

Other traditional educational values are at odds with this: - an emphasis on personal flourishing, the ability to think critically about society, and having a civic perspective.

For example, you’re taking one metric as your sole competitive advantage: your results. 

I explain more about this conflict of interests in my video below: