Lucy Powell is totally wrong to blame Michael Gove for youth unemployment: Jayne Dowle

Dear new Education Secretary Lucy Powell, my children were at school when Michael Gove revolutionised the state school curriculum.

You are wrong to assert that your predecessor’s rigorous overhaul of the basics - English, maths and sciences - has led directly to the rise in NEETs, young people aged 16-25 not in education, employment or training, now passing one million for the first time since 2013. That’s 13.5 per cent of this age group idle, basically.

Ms Powell, you are 51, so you surely must remember that NEETs have always been with us. Or at least since Tony Blair’s determination to push young people towards university led to much hand-wringing over what was going to happen to the non-academic kids left behind. This was during Labour’s previous tenure, from 1997 to 2010.

What happened was that following 2008’s economic crash, by 2013, the number of NEETs grew to hover around the million mark. By 2014, official figures show, a downward trend had begun; this actually coincided neatly with the roll-out of Gove’s reforms.

The proportion of NEETs fell to a record low of 10.9 per cent in 2018 before gradually beginning to climb again after 2020 and the pandemic years. There are simple lessons to be learned here; the clue is in the acronym. The NEETs issue is not only about education - it’s about employment, and training, and an economy robust enough to invest in giving young people opportunities.

Your degree is in chemistry, I understand, not history or politics, or indeed statistics. I would argue that some historical and political context, and basic statistical analysis, smashes to bits your assertion that it’s all Gove’s fault.

NEETs then, are not a new phenomenon; in fact, we could even say that Blair’s commitment to “education, education, education” provided that first impetus to set the phenomenon in motion.

I’m not saying that Gove’s reforms did not come without serious caveats. We parents quaked as we learned he was bringing back rote-learning, times tables and reciting poetry off by heart. I remember raising my concerns on these very pages. Teaching friends were shocked, horrified, worried, arguing that he was turning back the clock.

However, I also knew that Gove - my contemporary at Oxford University, with the same degree in English literature and language and experience of both state and independent schooling behind him - totally understood the transformative power of a decent education.

And as you asserted yourself in a recent newspaper article, “Standards have risen, literacy and numeracy are hugely improved and a large majority of state schools are good or outstanding.”

That you add the rejoinder, “but we can no longer ignore that too many get left behind or are turned off by an education system that’s become too single-minded,” makes a valid point.

But the bigger point is that children should go to school to learn; that is the point of the place. The education system is “single-minded” that’s true. It exists to educate children in a range of useful subjects, then aims to support them to pass exams to prove to further and higher education and employers that they have achieved competency.

If pupils are “left behind” or “turned off”, then surely we should be looking further for where the fault lies, rather than laying the blame entirely at the feet of one man?

Also, you argue that children from poorer backgrounds with “stubborn and entrenched disadvantage”, and those with special educational needs have been particularly let down.

I’d like to ask what’s happening to Labour’s review of the latter, which proposes sending children with special needs to mainstream schools and restricting Education, Health and Care Plans (EHCPs) to the most complex cases? Many campaigners for SEND children would say that Labour is hardly helping reverse this let down.

As for “stubborn and entrenched disadvantage”, my children went to primary school and a secondary academy in one of the most deprived wards in Barnsley. Many of their classmates came from poverty-scarred backgrounds, with parents who had left school with no qualifications and didn’t work.

Some of these young people - not all, I’ll grant you, but enough to prove that academic qualifications make significant impact - have gone on to prestigious universities and good jobs, supported by the “straitjacket” GCSEs they earned at school.

You’re also worried about, “those whose talents and skills lie beyond academia, in creative subjects, technical or skilled work or more practical application”.

Whilst it’s true that we do need more vocational subjects such as metalwork and technical drawing to be reinvented for 21st century industry, many, many state schools already utilise every resource to ensure they meet the talents and abilities of all their pupils. My own son, not remotely academic and struggling with literacy, passed GCSE Childcare, and now works as a community sports coach and young people’s mentor.

Instead of scoring political points, look beneath the surface, ask questions, visit schools, talk to teachers, and pupils. And if/when you’ve been in the job as long as Gove was - four years, the longest serving Education Secretary this century - you’ll perhaps be qualified to comment.