7 hours ago
10
What is it about ex-ministers that they suddenly know how to run the country? Tony Blair hurls thunderbolts at his successor, Keir Starmer. His former colleague, Alan Milburn, is shocked that a million young people aged 16-24 are not in education, training or a job – one in seven of them with degrees: a rate double that in Ireland and three times that in the Netherlands. Meanwhile the former prime minister, Rishi Sunak, complains that pupils are never taught “financial literacy”. They are left unprepared for life outside the school gates.
Sunak is clearly right, though we might wonder what he did about it when he was in Downing Street. His proposed numeracy project aims to teach children how to handle money, a skill at which he sees Britons in the dark ages compared with Germany and elsewhere. His only obsession is to believe this requires mathematics taught to the age of 18.
For the vast majority of people, numeracy begins and ends with arithmetic. I remember an army education officer saying that school maths was so useless he had to teach soldiers addition and subtraction through darts and carpentry. Arithmetic is indeed needed in learning how to handle money. It is the foundation on which are built percentages, proportions and rates of interest. Children should learn how to measure inflation and judge risk, how to detect a scam and a fiddle. But algebra, calculus and quadratic equations are for the birds – and boffins.
Where Sunak should be firm is in demanding that such study be compulsory. Handling money – which means handling the world of work – should not be an “extracurricular” subject, somehow beneath the dignity of professional teachers. Today’s schools cannot continue in the monastic tradition of elite academies, taking pride in their detachment from the world outside their walls.
GCSEs and A-levels, degrees and doctorates, are still the arks of the covenant, to be handed down from generation to generation like sacred texts. They are dished out over three “terms”, covering little more than half a year. Their custodians are obsessed with “examinations” designed to measure little beyond memory. To question their utility is to insult their noble prestige.
Something is clearly adrift in the content of British education. Both Milburn and Sunak point out that schools and universities are turning out leavers hopelessly unready to face the world of work. The Starmer government’s fiscal and regulatory barriers to startup and temporary jobs have clearly not helped, albeit relieved by recent moves to expand apprenticeships. But the overall lack of transitional assistance is long-standing. Prisoners get more help in trying to find a job than do school leavers. Beyond the school gates, all is “Here be dragons”.
What Sunak wants should not be “extracurricular”. It should be core and compulsory, like other equally crucial subjects. Clearly schools should teach the “primary” skills described as the “three Rs”: reading, writing and arithmetic. There are also specialist skills that a minority of occupations call for as pupils progress through a gradually selective school system. But there are three other fundamental areas in which young people must be taught so as to survive and prosper in a modern society.
One is how to look after their bodies and their minds, how to handle their health and how to react to social media. A second is how to behave as members of the community, work in groups, respect the environment, vote and obey the law. A third is found in Sunak’s insistence that they learn how to handle money and work. Financial ignorance is the fastest route to poverty. It is not about maths but about the glue that binds individuals to the economy generally, about incomes, taxes, insurance and pensions.
These should be the three pillars of a liberal education that attempts to start young people out in life, whether or not they go on to college or university. And they need constant updating. When I started my career as an education correspondent, I attended school conferences galore. Yet I cannot recall one at which the reform of the national curriculum was ever discussed. It was taken as given, handed down from antiquity.
There have been reforms. There is now, at least, a GCSE in health and social care. But the primacy of an essentially academic education remains entrenched. The time spent drilling maths into children to whom it is of no conceivable use is mindless and cruel. The same used to apply to Latin and foreign languages. Utility, a preparedness for life, should be the essence of education. The sciences and humanities may constitute a “rounded” education, but over them should tower the three pillars of utility.
I wonder how many of today’s education politicians will live to regret what they should have done, back then in 2026.
-
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
