The economics of education and the reform of our education systems

There is a large number of interventions that people have tried across the globe in developed countries, some of which have proven to be very effective at improving the quality of teaching. Assessment and formative feedback so that the child knows what they're doing wrong and learns from their mistakes are vital for improving academic achievement. We need a good and rigorous evidence base on which we can ground recommendations to teachers and schools about what makes for effective practice. Yet it's a tricky area because teachers are professionals. They need to use their judgment. What works in one context may not work so well in another, so it's crucial to get that evidence base.

Also, teaching has to be a desirable and attractive profession if we're going to have high-quality teachers and thus, high-quality teaching. Like any other job, you have to ensure that teaching is enjoyable for teachers, that they feel rewarded, not just financially, but in terms of status and other things that a professional expects. If teaching is a second-rate career, if it's low paid, stressful, and undergoes too much regulation and government restriction, it will be quite unattractive to people who might provide high-quality teaching. I believe that is a major issue in some education systems.

For a long time, educators, teachers and practitioners have been very wary of applying economic models to education. In other words, many would reject the whole notion that you are making an investment. They would see education as providing enjoyment and well-being. They're building citizens for the future, and they would perhaps reject the idea of thinking about investment in education for the labour market. Economists don't deny that education has a broad set of aims and purposes. Still, it’s also clear that securing a good job and having economic security throughout their life is a real cornerstone of what individual students are trying to achieve for themselves. In other words, the actual students themselves may not frame it as an economic problem, but they view education and school as a pathway to getting a good job. It's one part of the education experience, if you like.

We need good evidence on which routes and qualifications are valuable in the labour market because that's what students are interested in. Still, I also don't think it negates the other purposes and aims of education in any way. There's evidence, for example, that what economists call “non-cognitive skills”, such as confidence, public speaking and the idea that you feel in control of your own life, are skills that you develop through education and that are valuable in the labour market. Therefore, teachers who focus on building the citizen and building the human are also focusing on the very skills that the labour market wants.

As children move on and go beyond compulsory education, there's evidence that poorer children tend to leave the education system earlier, partly because of their family’s financial constraints. We need to set up funding systems that help them stay in education longer. We may, as some people have suggested, provide incentives for those children to stay longer. Why do we need to incentivise them? Because poorer children come from families without the resources to invest in their education, so spending longer in the education system comes at a high cost since they're not working and adding to their family’s resources. It is a very big investment and decision to make that a child from a richer family doesn't deal with because they have more resources.

Graduate education, master’s degrees and PhDs are inaccessible to poor children who don't have family resources unless we provide financial support for them to access higher education. I see this as a lifetime of support that recognises that children from poorer backgrounds don't have the family investment along the way that children from more advantaged families get. The state is, in a sense, trying to compensate for that lack of investment to improve that poorer child's chances of getting the opportunity to do well in the education system.

Education systems must be tailored for the context in which they've emerged. Of course, if you're talking about a very small, developed state like Singapore, a highly centralised system might be incredibly effective. If you consider countries with a heterogeneous population, a mix of poor and rich, different cultures and different ethnicities, it's obvious that the challenges that you're going to face in one part of the education system are not necessarily going to be the same as the challenges in another.

If schools and teachers aren’t empowered, it's quite challenging to have a high-quality education system. The trick is to have a balance. You need to have enough autonomy at the school and teacher-level that good people who seek a successful, professional career in education feel that these are good jobs where they get to influence things. At the same time, if we left everything at the school level, I'm sure that what you would see is that some schools would fall markedly behind and inequality would increase. Consequently, it's also important that we monitor school systems under common standards. Common standards are important not just so that, for example, pupils can transition smoothly around a national education system if they change locations, but it’s also about setting a minimum expectation for the education system.