Ensuring all pupils reach basic levels of achievement 'could boost economy'
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Loading... - CRISTIAN CASTILLO
- 14 May 2020
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The UK economy could grow by billions of pounds a year if underachieving youngsters all obtained basic skills at school and boys and girls achieved similar levels of educational attainment, according to a new report commissioned by the OECD.
Currently 20% of pupils in England, Scotland and Wales leave school lacking basic skills in areas such as numeracy, while boys and girls achieve uneven results in subjects such as maths and science. But efforts to reduce those gaps over the next 15 years would more than pay for themselves, according to the OECD’s analysis.
The figures were compiled by two economists, Eric Hanushek of Stanford’s Hoover Institution and Ludger Woessmann of the University of Munich, and based on the international rankings of 15-year-olds using the OECD’s triennialPisa tests across 76 countries.
Spread over the working lifetime of students in school by 2030, the economists project that bringing all pupils up to the same minimum level of achievement would increase the UK’s national output by more than £2tn by 2095, spread over 65 years.
The additional costs would be more than covered by the expanding economy and income, the authors argued.
“The economic output that is lost because of poor education policies and practices leaves many countries in what amounts to a permanent state of economic recession – and one that can be larger and deeper than the one that resulted from the financial crisis,” the report’s commentary said.
John Nash, reappointed as an education minister by David Cameron, said in response: “We still have children brought up in communities on the coast or mining towns who just live in a world of unemployment: their parents are unemployed, their grandparents are unemployed.
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“It’s shocking that for generations we’ve allowed that to happen. We have to break that cycle, partly by welfare reform but mainly through education.”
The report put the UK 20th in its rankings of 76 countries by percentage of national workforce lacking basic academic abilities and problem-solving skills, such being able to accurately convert currencies.
Singapore, Hong Kong, Estonia and South Korea topped the charts with fewer than 10% of pupils lacking such skills, while in Ghana, Honduras, South Africa, Morocco and Indonesia more than two-thirds of students fell below the measure of basic skills.
The report found that reducing the gap in performance by gender would also add billions to national income, although at a slower rate than ending the long tail of underperformance among the bottom 20%.
A report by Ofsted published on Tuesday found that girls were far less likely than boys to take physics at A-level and much more likely to drop the subject after their first year.
Just three girls for every 10 boys took physics at AS-level in the first year of sixth form in 2013 and only 57% went on to take a full A-level compared with 71% of boys.
In biology, more girls than boys took the subject at AS-level but more girls then gave it up in their final year of A-level.
However, girls outnumbered boys in subjects such as English, history and law. There was a wide gender imbalance in favour of girls in modern languages such as French, while there were three girls to every boy taking art or sociology at AS-level.
