In 2015, it became compulsory in England to remain in full-time education or training until the age of 18 – not a new school leaving but a new ‘participation age’.
At 16, young people must remain in school, start an apprenticeship or combine part-time work and study. Fines can be imposed for non-compliance.
Stormont’s Department of Education, which has just announced it wants to introduce a similar policy, can thus look back at almost a decade of evidence on its effectiveness across the water.
Better still, it could ask Wales. England introduced its policy using a 2008 law that gave the same powers to the Welsh government. Various reviews in Wales have concluded the English system is worth following but not worth making compulsory.
Few young people under 18 are not in education, employment or training (the so-called ‘neets’). The best way to reach them might be through highly-targeted assistance, rather than blanket rules that are almost impossible to enforce.
Workers under 18 are also relatively rare. The best way to reach them might be through improved opportunities for education or training, rather than by imposing a complex regime on young people and employers. Problems with the apprenticeship scheme introduced across the UK over the past decade bear this out.
The debate in Wales is far from settled. Proponents of compulsion say it is essential to raise expectations and standards. The likeliest end-point is a more flexible system than in England, although with some form of mandatory participation until 18.
At Stormont, DUP education minister Paul Givan says he wants to “start a wide-ranging conversation” – but that does not have to start from scratch.
A figure of 14,000 neets in Northern Ireland is widely quoted, equivalent to 7 per cent of their age cohort. This is the total for all young people aged 16 to 24, so there must only be a few thousand under 18, which would appear to make targeted help the priority.
England has a ruthless approach to fining parents of children under 16 who miss school, yet it has been unable to make the post-16 fines system work. Its neet rate for under-18s, while down a few points, is still over 6 per cent. There is little chance of making such compulsion any more effective here.
Givan’s announcement is part of a complete review of education required under the 2020 New Decade, New Approach deal. In 2021, his DUP predecessor Michelle McIlveen appointed a five-person expert panel to conduct the review. Its report was published last December and Givan has now produced his response, accepting most of the report’s 25 key recommendations, of which raising the participation age is only the first. That should give some idea of the scale of the task ahead.
Schools, further education and training are not even under one department – the latter two are covered by the Department for the Economy, as are universities. Merging this into a single department is another key recommendation.
Major reform of the curriculum is another; Givan has announced this will have its own review. One fundamental question it will face is whether GCSEs are redundant.
The direct cost of creating enough new school and training places is less than might be expected because there are so few neets under 18. Instead, large costs are identified in the report to bring the whole system up to scratch.
Further education and vocational training are often Cinderella services. Stormont receives its share of the UK apprenticeships levy but does not spend it on apprenticeships. The Education Authority has lost control of special needs provision – it is “not functioning as expected”, as the review diplomatically puts it. Handing special needs over to a separate new agency, integrated with health services, is another key recommendation.
The entire executive has to come together to deliver these plans. Precedent suggests Stormont will dither forever and Givan has already supplied a bad omen.
The report recommends giving pupils a “right to remain” in their school after 16, or in a local sixth form if their current school lacks one. This should be central to Givan’s plans but it would annoy grammars in particular, who weed pupils out after GCSE to game the league tables.
Unwisely, the panel put this recommendation in the report’s section on tackling academic selection, so Givan has ruled it out as too contentious.
What chance is there of system-wide reform when there is such reluctance to cause controversy or upset a vested interest?