Is early specialisation the worst feature of English education?

Once upon a time, the traditional way to start a public debate in Britain was to write a letter to the Editor of The Times. At the time when this tradition began, in the 19th century, that newspaper had the largest daily circulation in the world. It was immortalised as “The Jupiter” in the novels of Trollope, who suggested quite seriously that its Editor was one of the two most powerful men (there has never been a woman) in the country. True or not, writing an open letter to the Editor, who was then a household name, ensured that everyone who was anyone, or could afford a newspaper, would read it.

This is one tradition, however, that has had its day. As this column has had occasion to observe before, the “legacy media” have survived only by erecting paywalls. The Letters page of The Times is inaccessible to the vast majority of the public, who do not subscribe to what is no longer a “paper”, but a website. There are, however, still a few online platforms, such as TheArticle, which have preserved open access to all readers. Anyone who wants his or her ideas discussed should publish them there, where everyone can read them. In a genuinely democratic age, you should not have to pay to participate in the public square.

Nonetheless, some important people still think that The Times remains the noticeboard of the Establishment. A good example is today’s letter by David Willetts on educational reform after Covid. As a former minister for higher education, Lord Willetts knows a great deal about the subject; one might even call him a specialist on it. Yet he is strongly opposed to specialisation, at any rate at the early age of 16. He calls it “the worst single feature of English education” and holds it responsible for various evils. Specifically, he makes three claims: that many adults have not done any maths since they were 16; that we have a “particularly bad gender balance in science” because girls can opt out at 16; and that “many of our leading scientists and technologists do not have a second language”.

On the first point: it is indeed unfortunate that many adults are semi-innumerate. When maths comes up on University Challenge, most of us are unable to understand the questions, much less the answers. Yet this helpless incomprehension surely has less to do with dropping maths at 16 than with the inherent difficulty of a subject that, like others, does not stand still. The lethal impact of ill-informed criticism of statistical modelling during the pandemic has shown how a little mathematical knowledge can be a dangerous thing. The truth is that few of us have need of more than basic arithmetic at work. In maths, generalists generally have a special reason to trust the specialists: it is just too hard.

Willetts’s second point, about the gender gap in science, may be worse in the UK than elsewhere but he cites no evidence. Even if it is, this has less to do with early specialisation than to a culture in which girls lack incentives to choose careers in science or technology. Role models are especially important here. The fact that the leader of the Oxford team that developed the vaccine made by AstraZeneca was a woman, Sarah Gilbert, and that the leader of the vaccination programme was another woman, Kate Bingham, means that many teenage girls have seen women triumph in a specialised field of supreme national importance. With the right kind of encouragement, many girls of 16 might now decide to take one or more science A-levels. Telling them that they are too young to make such decisions is not the way to empower them.

This is connected to the third point that Willetts makes. Of course a second language is always desirable, not only for “leading scientists and technologists” but for everyone. The reality, though, is that the predominance of English has long been so great that most schools find it hard even to recruit good modern language teachers. The days when scientists needed to read German or Russian to keep up with their subjects are long gone. The time may come when Mandarin will challenge English as a lingua franca, but at present it is the Chinese who are under pressure to master English, not the other way round. In any case, forcing pupils to struggle through another two years of a language (usually French) that they will probably never be able to use because their contemporaries all speak English, is hardly the way to encourage us to become polyglots. Many learn languages in later life when the need or motive arises — and lifelong learning has done away with the “all-or-nothing” problem of sixth-form specialisation.

Willetts attributes what he sees as the evil of this early specialisation to a “very peculiar” historical curiosity: “It goes back to the days when the only way a child from a low-income family could get to university was by an Oxbridge scholarship, and those exams were subject-based, so grammar schools pushed their most promising students into early specialisation to maximise their chances.” There may be some truth in this account — though Oxbridge scholarships were insufficient to live on even a century ago. Yet Willetts (like me) is old enough to recall the virtues as well as vices of a meritocratic system that paved the way for British universities to broaden their intakes and to overtake their European counterparts in the process.

In the 1970s the Oxford entrance examination included a compulsory language and rewarded general as well as specialised knowledge. A typical essay question might have been: “Is early specialisation the worst feature of English education? Discuss.” The exam was abolished on account of its alleged “elitism”. That was a mistake; abolition of A-levels would be a mistake for the same reason. Intellectually ambitious students see early specialistation not as a “narrowing” experience, but as a liberation. Spending a term at a German Gymnasium (grammar school) aged 16 felt like going backwards: the Abitur (leaving exam) requires a broad curriculum. I enjoyed the exotic experience of studying philosophy at school, but was glad to return to A-levels, which at their best could be an introduction to scholarship and hence a good preparation for university.

Lord Willetts has made his case; it is for others now to make theirs. As Ruth Kelly argued here recently, the end of the pandemic is an opportunity for new and more flexible thinking in schools. The interests of the brightest students, though, should not be sacrificed for the sake of the less academic ones. Just because specialisation is not for everybody does not mean that it should be denied to those who benefit from it. A more democratic society need not demote expertise. It might, however, be a society in which one no longer needed to pay a subscription to follow the lucubrations of the Establishment.

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