"Does Education Matter?" is the title of a book by Prof. Alison Wolf of Kings College, London. It is a wonderful book.
Oddly enough I just read this profile of Marcus Ospel, chairman and previously CEO of UBS. He left school at 17 and this didn't prevent him from rising to the top and hanging on there for a very long time.
A lot of the book is concerned with the business of vocational training in the UK and the baleful influence of the CBI on government policy. The internal contradictions in the system that lead to uncountable NVQs ('No Value Qualifications') the training courses of many of which were developed at large cost never to be gained by a single employer.
Alison Wolf what seems to be a unique combination of an economist's outlook and an education professional's deep understanding of how the education industry is structured. She points out the existence of tradeoffs that politicians seem compelled to turn a blind eye to, such as the impossibility of having a nationalised higher education industry with soviet tractor factory style targets which is nevertheless expected to deliver excellence.
Her survey of the international scene is very good, and even better is her analysis of why aspects of an education policy that is successful in one country cannot be easily imported into the UK. Not least is her explanation of why the German system of apprenticeships, which has been so successful, cannot be transferred successfully to the UK. As usual the point is that there is competition to get an apprenticeship in Germany, and therefore employers accept apprentices, not because of the skills they have acquired (e.g. BMW employs a lot of qualified bakers) but because the qualification has value as a positional good.
Unfortunately the book is not recent enough to talk about the Swedish system, the great white hope for UK primary and secondary schools. The book is eloquent in explaining why bureaucrats react to personal incentives, just like the rest of us, and not purely to achieve the goals of their organisations. I learned that there is a whole discipline dedicated to understanding this divergence (between public and private incentives) called public choice theory.
I have failed to do justice to this book. It is full of insights. You should read it, and not partial and distorted summaries, such as this.
