Education and economics are decoupling in England
Why the US and England are moving in opposite directions
I became a teacher in 2011, just after the financial crisis, because I wanted to improve my pupils’ lives. My reasoning went something like this:
Too many children are having a poor quality of education
Better education leads to a better quality of life
Therefore, improving education will improve quality of life
Over Christmas I’ve been thinking a lot about gaps between the US and the UK (specifically England, as education is devolved). And what strikes me is that in England the link between education and quality of life is uncoupling.
US vs UK in two charts
If we look at education and economics over the post-crash period there are two clear trends.
The first is that England is pulling steadily ahead of the US in terms of educational outcomes. The chart below plots the gap between the US and England (measured as US score minus England score) in the PISA mathematics test. In 2009 the US was behind, but only just. By 2022 the gap was ~five times bigger.
The second is that the US is pulling steadily ahead of the UK in terms of GDP per capita. The chart below plots the gap between the US and the UK (measured as US GDP/capita minus UK GDP/capita). In 2009 the US was $12,000 per person better off. By 2022 the gap was $17,000.
Children growing up in England are getting a better education, but a worse quality of life.
Of course this is a simplistic analysis. GDP per capita is not everything and masks all sorts of nuances (lower US life expectancy, longer US working hours, etc). But this is not a mere statistical quirk. Children growing up in the US are on track for a better quality of life, despite being less well educated.
Why is this happening?
My hypothesis is that the US is importing education, whilst the UK is capping the potential of its educated population.
The US has a lot of economic advantages (large domestic market, global reserve currency) but the big reason it is pulling ahead is a boom in tech. This is happening in the US and rewards are accruing to the US, but it’s because of global talent.
Take, for example, the team that authored “Attention is all you need” (the paper that introduced the transformer architecture and made large language models possible). Six of its eight authors were first generation immigrants and the other two were second generation immigrants.
The UK doesn’t have these economic advantages, but instead of compensating for this is making things worse. The workforce is becoming better educated at the same time as GDP is stagnating because we have made other decisions that cap what our well-educated population can achieve.
Young people can’t afford to live in productive agglomerations like London. If they want to start a business, say in biotech or computing, there’s no space to rent in the best places like Cambridge. If they want to bring a business partner from overseas to work with them the immigration system is impossible to navigate. And unlike the US, where federalism means states compete to solve these problems, the UK is over-centralised.
What the US has done well is to create an environment that ambitious well-educated people want to move into. What the UK has done well is to create an environment that ambitious well-educated people want to move out of.
This is as true in skilled trades as in professions and highly-skilled industries. We have a raft of well-motivated and well-educated young people who want to go into industries like construction, but we rely on immigration to fill construction vacancies because a combination of over-regulation in apprenticeships and under-funding in FE mean our young people can’t get the skills they need.
What does this mean?
We made a promise to a generation of children. We told them that if they worked hard and learned then they would improve their lot in life. In the UK, this is veering dangerously close to no longer being true.
I fear this will leave us with an angry generation, who did what they were told but didn’t receive what they were promised. What happens then? Maybe those who can choose to leave Britain. Maybe we face an angry political revolution.
I’d rather we did something about it. We’ve got the fundamentals right - crafting a successful education system is no trivial feat. Now we need to stop holding back our kids, and create a country they don’t want to leave.