It’s late Friday afternoon, and heatwave hot in London but Lord Knight, better known as Jim Knight from his days as South Dorset’s MP (2001-10), is dutifully preparing to put on black tie and jacket for the TES School Awards being held at the Grosvenor House Hotel on Park Lane. He’s also a director of an educational consultancy, Suklaa, and is hoping one of his many projects will win an award. He’s no stranger to Tes (he worked there and founded the Tes Institute) and has presented awards at this event too. It looks set to be an evening of good conversation about education and lifelong learning.
Knight became a Labour MP in Tony Blair’s 2001 landslide re-election. Now 61 he’s a former Cabinet minister sitting in the House of Lords, and a member of the Privy Council. As his Linked-in profile puts it, he, “has unrivalled expertise in the inter-relationship between education, skills and employment policy.”
“Most of my work is in schools,” he says over Zoom, “but as a former Employment Minister a lot of my motivation around wanting to change and improve schools has been because I could see the impact of the failures of schooling on adults, particularly young adults, and that’s been highlighted recently by the Milburn Review – over a million of our 16 to 24-year-olds not being in education employment or training.”
Currently he’s very focused on the potential use of digital technology in delivering public services and how to best regulate AI, sitting on the Democracy and Digital Technologies Committee (2019-22) and the Draft Online Safety Bill (2021- 2024).
Early days
“What we’re seeing at the moment is an early impact [from AI] on entry-level employment. And what that then means is, to an extent, graduates struggling a bit more to get employment and ultimately getting employment because they are well-educated. But they might be getting some of the jobs that non-graduates would have had who were relatively skilled. And then that segment of the population then gets the next tier of jobs down, and that’s pulling the rug under from those that need entry-level employment who haven’t got much in the way of school,” says Knight.
Knight points out how September will bring important recommendations from the Milburn Report and how Andy Burnham, speaking in June as an MP prior to becoming PM, wishes to “see education change so that it serves communities and to properly value technical alongside academic qualifications.”
Knight adds: “There’s such a strong sense now from the evidence of the more qualitative research [for giving] young people a proper voice. They feel that schooling has not equipped them for adult life and that’s before we get into the experience of adults – many of whom don’t feel like learning is for them and they’re not getting the advantages of reskilling and developing as learners through their adult lives which is a cause of quite a lot of worklessness, quite a lot of feelings of abandonment and communities feeling stuck and poorly served by the mainstream.”
“London is a remarkable success story, where the education system outperforms the national average. There’s a lot of political rhetoric around trying to spread the wealth out of London to the rest of the country, which I think we all understand. But nevertheless, there are still significant numbers in London who are underemployed, not employed, nor engaged. And if we can release that talent back into the local economy, then that’s better for everyone.”
London challenge
“London has a rich employment base: it’s got all the benefits of being a densely populated city with some large employers, many of whom do want to give back,” says Knight who was educated in south-east London, followed by Cambridge. “But I think many employers have got two conflicting tensions going on in their minds collectively. One is that they know that if their investment in technology – at the expense of human work – results in large numbers of people not being productive, not being employed, and therefore not spending in the economy, then the size of the market shrinks and collectively they don’t do as well because there isn’t as much spending in the economy. But at the same time they’re thinking in a competitive world, ‘I can save money by investing in technology rather than paying out salaries for people and that gives me my individual edge as an employer against my competitors,’ and they need to resolve that,” he says pointing out that one resolution might be by employers “being more sensitive about how they deploy technology so that it is in the service of people rather than at the expense of people so that it increases the productivity of the people that they’ve got rather than replacing the productivity of the people that they’ve got with the productivity of machines.”
Knight is clear that a lifelong learning campaign is important for London.
“London is a remarkable success story, where the education system outperforms the national average. There’s a lot of political rhetoric around trying to spread the wealth out of London to the rest of the country, which I think we all understand. But nevertheless, there are still significant numbers in London who are underemployed, not employed, nor engaged. And if we can release that talent back into the local economy, then that’s better for everyone. Partly because it means there’s a significant mental health effect of working and earnings are a demonstrable value that’s placed upon you as an individual in your contribution. If you’re not earning very well and you feel exploited, the opposite can be true,” he explains. “If we can improve the employment rates and have more people paying in and fewer people taking out of the system, then that benefits London. It means there’s less pressure on public services; communities are more cohesive [and] that people feel that they belong because they’re working and they’re being productive.”
It’s clear that Knight has a wide interest in lifelong learning because it helps communities feel they belong, which is why he’s working in so many ways to help employers and employees (and the people who want to be employed) be productive – and just as importantly, feel productive too.
