'Teach risk' says business boss

By Gary Eason
Education editor, BBC News website, at the NAHT conference

'I want to see exams you can fail', Mr Jones told delegates

UK business has appealed to schools to make children understand that life is full of risks as well as rights.

Sir Digby Jones, the CBI chief, told school leaders that if pupils did not embrace risk, the UK would lose out to countries such as China and India.

It was vital to increase the skill level of people coming into the workforce, he said.

But teachers told him educational reform was needed so that less academic pupils did not feel alienated.

We need the next generation and product of the education system to be able to read, write and count Sir Digby Jones CBI director general

Sir Digby told the National Association of Head Teachers conference in Telford, Shropshire, that society was guilty of teaching the next generation that risk did not exist.

"We are saying to them, 'You can have rights till they are coming out of your pores but responsibility? - that's for somebody else'," he said.

When they left school they were going to get the shock of a lifetime - "because out there, in the big nasty world, risk exists every day".

He listed some of Britain's economic successes, and reminded the heads that successful companies and their employees paid the taxes that funded schools and hospitals.

But he said the country was "crying out" for skilled people.

"We, in British business, actually are very, very worried because we haven't got enough of them and you, ladies and gentlemen, aren't producing enough of them."

Tomlinson reforms

There were 3.5 million in the workforce who were functionally illiterate.

"We need the next generation and product of the education system to be able to read, write and count."

But half of students who took GCSE maths last year had not got a grade C or above.

That was why businesses almost universally had opposed the reforms to 14 to 19 learning in England proposed by the government working party led by former chief schools inspector Sir Mike Tomlinson, he said.

They agreed there should be more vocational training, but did not agree with overhauling GCSEs and A-levels, which the Tomlinson review proposed as part of an overarching diploma.

On Sunday the heads' conference said it was "profoundly disappointed" that the government's response to the Tomlinson proposals "failed to engage in the vital reform of 14 to 19 education", and urged a rethink.

Failure

Part of Sir Digby's argument about risk-taking was: "I want exams you can fail."

But delegates told him such an approach could mean some youngsters being "confronted with their failure" and alienated from the system.

"That's why we were in favour of Tomlinson - to give them a rich curriculum so they acquired those skills," said David Pratt from the association's national council.

Sir Digby said businesses simply did not trust schools.

But Peter Greenwood from West Sussex urged the CBI to take a risk itself and look again at Tomlinson.

"Because if you don't take a risk the system that currently exists will perpetuate the problem," he said.

Later NAHT leader David Hart agreed with Sir Digby about risk.

"We are in danger of wrapping our children in cotton wool to such an extent that eventually they will suffocate," he said.