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England’s move towards an integrated tertiary education system presents an opportunity to radically redesign post-compulsory education. Rather than an elite system of education that is founded on the failure of the many in the meaningless search for ‘the brightest and the best’, it offers the chance to work towards an inclusive system of education in which everyone’s talents are identified, developed, valued and recognised. In this blog post, I argue that this can only happen if England’s integrated tertiary education system is built on a knowledge-rich understanding of skills.

There appears to be no doubt that English tertiary education will be built around skills, in stark contrast to . The current Secretary of State for Education in England, in her introduction to the , writes of building ‘a skills system fit for the future’ (DfE, 2024, p. 4). Throughout the report and other , we are beguiled with the wonders that skills will do for individuals, for employers, for the economy and for the future of the country.

However, if we dig deeper and ask what these skills are, and what evidence there is that they are the answer for tertiary education, then things become much more difficult to understand. The Skills England report urgently demands the development of skills but offers very little specification of what they mean. The only skills actually mentioned in the report are ‘skills such as teamworking, creative thinking, leadership, as well as digital literacy, numeracy and writing’ (DfE, 2024, p. 32).

‘If we dig deeper and ask what these skills are, and what evidence there is that they are the answer for tertiary education, then things become much more difficult to understand.’

This is no surprise. It is entirely in line with the supporting references used in the report to make the case for skills. None of the measures in these sources directly evaluate the skills needed to undertake particular roles. Instead they use a variety of proxies: qualifications, occupations, particular sectors, self-reports of skills by employees and employers, or the completion of tasks on surveys.

While it could be argued that the use of proxies reflects the difficulty of measuring skills, there is a far more troubling reason for their elusiveness. This is that while we can describe skills generically, they are not the only – or even the most important – thing that is at stake in skilful performances. What is completely missing from these accounts of skills are factors such as knowledge about the area of expertise the performance is based in, knowledge of the situation of the performance, and knowledge of the people who are also involved in the performance (Ashwin, 2020). Without such knowledge, these skills are simply empty descriptions of practices. Would we really describe someone as having the skills of a plumber if they did not know how to fix a boiler?

A tertiary education system that is simply focused on skills without providing access to such knowledge will not prepare its participants to adapt their practices to fit with the changing environments that characterise contemporary society. This means, as has long been recognised (see for example Wheelahan, 2015), that an education system focused solely on skills will be bound to fail. Even worse, it is likely to entrench educational inequalities in an already . The socially privileged will continue to engage in elite higher education and gain access to bodies of knowledge that support them to develop ways of engaging with the world and allow them to move between contexts. The poor will be given access to empty skills rooted in the contexts in which they were learned (Wheelan, 2015). To compound the injustice, the poor will be blamed for not making the most of the educational opportunities they were offered, while the privileged continue to thrive.

‘To compound the injustice, the poor will be blamed for not making the most of the educational opportunities they were offered while the privileged continue to thrive.’

We need a tertiary education system founded on a rich understanding of the combinations of knowledge, capabilities and ways of engaging the world that will equip people to flourish in employment and in their wider lives. This is a very different approach to the understanding of . It is about giving people access to structured bodies of knowledge that allow them to see themselves and the world differently. This is essential if education is to be educative. A skills system that is not founded on this kind of knowledge will simply be an engine of inequality.

References

Ashwin, P. (2020). Transforming university education: A manifesto. Bloomsbury.

Department for Education [DfE]. (2024). Skills England: Driving growth and widening opportunities.

Wheelahan, L. (2015). Not just skills: What a focus on knowledge means for vocational education. Journal of Curriculum Studies,Ìý47(6), 750–762. ÌýÌý