This paper was commissioned as part of a series of reviews for the Working and Employment Challenge of the Beyond Current Horizons project on the future of education.  The reviews all focus on particular issues relating to work and employment.  This paper provides a series of ‘quick reviews’

The six topics are:

1. The importance of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM)
2. Children’s work
3. Entrepreneurial activity and practices
4. Innovation and intellectual property rights
5. Emerging economies in virtual worlds
6. Possible negative effects of technological developments

For each topic any relevant and necessary definitions of key terms are set out alongside an overview of the importance and relevance of each topic to the UK economy and society. This is then followed by some contextual information regarding each topic. Appropriate recent statistics are given where possible. The main issues and areas of concern for each topic are discussed. Finally, for each topic, possible future directions and outcomes are presented.

Keywords: science, technology, engineering, maths, children, innovation, economics
1.       The importance of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM)

1.1      Skills and qualifications STEM

It is well acknowledged that Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) skills and work are important in all societies and economies. According to the Council for Industry and Higher Education (CIHE), the UK’s capabilities in STEM underpin the economy. The importance of STEM skills is likely to grow in the future in response to technological enhancements, the need for action related to environmental concerns, and as the UK’s knowledge economy expands. There are a number of concerns related to the future supply of people with STEM skills as well as the quality of these skills. Such concerns need to be addressed so that there will be sufficient, high quality STEM skills available in the labour market in the future to meet society’s needs and to maintain the UK’s position as a leading economy.

As the UK continues to develop as a knowledge economy, STEM education and employment opportunities are important issues to consider. The CIHE report, International Competitiveness and the Role of Universities, highlighted the relatively high proportion of employees in knowledge intensive service businesses that have science and engineering degrees (24%) STEM skills enhance people’s ability to generate new knowledge and to identify, adapt and use knowledge that is generated elsewhere and apply it for the benefit of businesses. It is not only the sectors that have been traditionally associated with “science” skills that rely upon the benefits of employing people with STEM skills. The Roberts Review (HM Treasury, 2002) highlighted the importance of having people qualified in STEM subjects for the UK economy as a key element for the R&D, innovation, education triangle.

STEM skills are particularly important in high added value sectors. The UK software development industry, for example, employs 1 million people and produces an annual GVA of £30bn (BCS, 2006). Software development is one sector where the importance of STEM skills is obvious. However, STEM skills are relevant in most, if not all, industries. As discussed below, STEM graduates work in various sectors.

1.2      Supply and quality of STEM skills

According to the Roberts Review (HM Treasury, 2002) and similar reviews, the most important issue related to STEM in the UK is the supply of STEM skills and the quality of these skills. A strong supply of individuals with qualifications in STEM subjects is necessary to realise Government’s ambitions for the UK. In guaranteeing this supply, all parts of the education system have a role to play – from the Key Stages of compulsory education, through to post-16/further and higher education. Various assessments suggest that the future supply of STEM graduates/postgraduates may fall short of demand, not only in the UK but also in the US and other world-leading economies. Various explanations for the problems related to the supply of graduates and postgraduates include:

• The number of students studying STEM subjects at lower levels of education greatly influences participation later on. Only 7% of pupils study triple science at GCSE[1], which restricts the likely number of students who will be interested in (or capable of) pursuing further studies in such areas
• STEM subject degree programmes are seen as harder to get into than many of the alternatives. Many require maths A-level, which is under pressure in uptake at secondary level with too few students in the opinion of many
• STEM department closures resulting from declining student interest makes studying such subjects even more unattractive
• Universities promoting STEM subjects less vigorously than others (in part due to higher costs such as expensive labs)
• High rates of growth in the number studying medicine – attracting higher quality applicants who would otherwise go for other STEM subjects.

1.2.1   STEM at compulsory education level

One of the sources of the decline in the number of STEM students is simply lack of interest of young people, at school level, in studying such subjects and working in related careers. Given school students’ lack of interest and therefore decreasing numbers of students undertaking study in STEM subjects at A-level, the number of suitably qualified STEM teachers is also a concern. With fewer teachers specialising in and teaching STEM subjects, there is further risk of less interest by students at school level. Furthermore, there is evidence that suggests that teachers are not interested in teaching these subjects and there is concern that teachers are not suitably qualified in STEM subjects to effectively teach the subject and to create interest in the subject areas amongst students.

According to CIHE, finding qualified teachers to teach STEM subjects is vital. The quantity and quality of STEM teachers will have impacts not only on the supply of future STEM graduates but also on the quality of these students’ skills. The Science and Innovation Framework 2004-2014 (HMT/DTI/DfES, 2004) suggests that a range of measures is necessary in order to enhance the teaching and learning of STEM subjects and to enhance the recruitment and retention of science teachers and researchers, in order to encourage more students to follow such course of study, and to thereby support the future needs of the science base and the economy for people qualified in such areas.

The Government is attempting to increase the number and quality of teachers in order to increase the number of young people choosing STEM subjects and subsequently follow a STEM-related career path.  All this is seen as helping the UK compete in the global economy. With the aim of achieving this, a £140 million strategy to educate the next generation of scientists and mathematicians and help recruit and train more science and maths teachers was announced in January 2008.[2]

1.2.2   STEM in Post-16, Higher and Further Education

The future supply of people with STEM qualifications will be determined mainly by the number of students who study such subjects after compulsory education. Of particular importance are the numbers educated to degree level and above. A great concern in the UK today is the relatively low uptake of STEM subjects at university.

There was an increase of 10% in the total number of university applications between 2002/3 and 2006/7. Over the same period, STEM applications increased by 12%.  However, the balance of students studying particular STEM subjects is also a concern. There are concerns about the mix of STEM graduates being produced, with worries that there is insufficient emphasis on core science and engineering subjects.  There was a fall of 15% in the numbers of engineering and technology graduates (23,300 to 19,700) over the decade to 2008.[3]

The number of undergraduate students who were studying physical science (Physics and Chemistry) as a proportion of all undergraduates fell from 5.5% in 1996 to 4.1% in 2000. The share studying engineering and technology fell from 9.3% to 6.3% from 1996 to 2000. However there has been encouraging increases in the numbers of applicants to STEM programmes more recently. The share of all university applications that were for maths places rose by 10% between 2006 and 2007. This share increased by 8% for mechanical engineering, 11% for chemistry and 12% for physics. There is concern though that these increases will not be sustained and that they may represent only temporary increases that will do little to guarantee a future supply of qualified STEM people.

According to NESTA, the total number of STEM graduates has increased by 10% since 1995. However, these graduates have been unevenly distributed across the STEM subjects. The number of graduates fell in engineering and technology and in the physical sciences while numbers increased in biological sciences, computer science and mathematical science.

The number of STEM graduates (excluding psychology and sports science graduates) at UK higher education institutions increased by 5% from 2002/3 to 2006/7.  The number of postdoctoral graduates increased by 18% over the same period. While the UK has a relatively large number of students studying STEM subjects, it has been argued that this is due to increases in those studying IT and biological sciences rather than mathematics, engineering, and the physical sciences. This is a source of concern. The DTI (2006) have highlighted the rapid growth in supply numbers, which have increased at a rate slightly higher than the average for all subjects. However, the DTI report notes that recent increases have been concentrated in computer sciences and subjects related to medicine and biological science, rather than in engineering and technology, physical sciences and architecture.

Beyond compulsory education and A-levels, a diminished interest in studying STEM subjects is shown by students. The Sainsbury Report (HM Treasury, 2001) referred to low numbers of students taking science subjects following compulsory education. There have been marked decreases in the numbers of applications to STEM-related post-secondary programmes. According to the British Computing Society (BCS, 2006), there was a 50% drop in the number of applications for computer science related courses between 2001 and 2006. Problems experienced by university STEM departments, in terms of student numbers, are worst in physical and chemical sciences, engineering and maths. Biological science departments have tended to experience less difficulty on the whole but within biological sciences numbers are uneven.

CIHE has argued that in all employment sectors where STEM graduates are at a premium, there are shortages of quality graduates and postgraduates with relevant IT and general STEM skills and experiences. Since 2002, the numbers of STEM graduates, excluding Engineering graduates, has increased significantly; however, the number of these students taking STEM A-levels has declined with noticeable drops in the numbers studying mathematics, computer sciences and physics. This will have implications for the numbers of graduates to come in these subject areas.

Another significant issue related to STEM at higher levels is the gender balance of those who study such subjects. This issue has been acknowledged as a problem at all levels for a significant period. Female participation levels are much lower in some fields than in others. In 2005[4], 15% of engineering and technology students were female. In the same year, females accounted for 24% of students in computer science, 38% studying maths, 41% in physical science and 64% studying biological sciences. There have been a range of initiatives launched to tackle this imbalance, with a great deal of work being put in by such groups as the UK Resource Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology and Women into Science, Engineering and Construction (WISE). A number of websites have also been created to stimulate girls’ interest in STEM subjects and to provide valuable information.[5] However, CIHE points out that these figures have remained relatively stable over a number of years, perhaps indicating that the initiatives and policies aimed at improving female participation in STEM subjects should be reconsidered.

A shortage of graduates with numerical abilities is considered to be critical by CIHE business leaders (CIHE, 2009). This shortage will only worsen in the light of the current age profile of their workforce. UK businesses and the UK in general are vulnerable to competition from other countries due to such shortages. There is also a fear that businesses and universities rely too heavily on overseas expertise rather than growing UK-based expertise. There are skill shortages across a range of STEM disciplines and in particular specialisms (such as electrical and power systems engineering, pharmacologists with particular experience). CIHE also highlights the need to address the gender balance of people in STEM.

However, it is not all bad news. The annual report, Education at a Glance 2008 (OECD, 2008) indicates that the UK is doing better than average in supplying STEM graduates to the workforce. Amongst the OECD countries, the UK ranks 7^th in terms of its supply of STEM graduates – ahead of Germany (11^th), Italy (12^th), USA (15^th) and Spain (17^th) and better than the EU and OECD averages. DfES (2006) also concludes that the UK’s stock of science and engineering graduates fares well internationally, and that the quality of STEM graduates, as indicated by prior qualifications of entrants, is rising. It is important to note that without ensuring that a sufficient supply of STEM graduates is in the pipeline, the UK’s relative performance on this will not improve, and may indeed slip as other countries improve.

In 2007, just under 1 million people in the working age population in the UK had STEM qualifications at NQF level 5 and just over 2½ million had STEM qualifications at NQF level 4. Of such graduates and postgraduates, the vast majority were economically active and in employment, with only very small numbers unemployed. This reflects the patterns for those qualified in other subjects as well. A much greater percentage of people with qualifications lower than NQF level 4 are found to be economically inactive and/or unemployed. Qualifications in STEM subjects are associated with marginally greater likelihood of being economically active and in employment than is found for graduates in other disciplines, but the differences are small.

In A Degree of Concern (2006) and A Higher Degree of Concern (2008), the Royal Society provides a statistical review of trends relating to the supply of graduates with STEM qualifications. They highlight the importance of the Higher Education system in relation to the UK’s economic performance, particularly in the context of an increasingly competitive and inter-connected global economy. The UK’s HE system needs to equip students with the knowledge, skills and aptitudes to compete with the best in the world, while at the same time supporting much of the nation’s R&D activity.  The Royal Society reports recognise that the demand for and supply of STEM graduates are closely linked and that there is a need to encourage virtuous circles, where supply encourages demand and demand stimulates supply. Links between industry and universities are also a key area where more emphasis is needed to enhance collaboration and strengthen ties.

1.3      STEM Employment and Recruitment

With the exception of medicine, STEM graduates go on to work in a wide variety of industries. STEM graduates and postgraduates hold just over 3 in 10 jobs across all sectors, but this ranges from over 5 in 10 in non-marketed services (including education, health and public administration and defence), to not much more than 1 in 10 for the Construction sector.

The shares of firms that employ STEM graduates are significant across most sectors. Overall, 92% of all UK firms employ people with qualifications in STEM subjects. This varies amongst sectors with the share of firms employing STEM people varying from 89% of energy and water companies, 59% of construction firms, and 48% of manufacturers. Employers in the finance and insurance and professional services sectors also have relatively high demand for STEM skills. Highly numerate, analytical and problem-solving skills are particularly valuable in such sectors. About 61% of professional service companies and 94% of banking firms employ STEM-skilled people. Large numbers of STEM graduates have been drawn to the financial services sector owing to relatively high salaries paid out by companies in this sector for the top talent.

STEM skills play an important role in business and they are vital for research and development and innovation activity. Some 40% of employers across all sectors indicated that they require STEM skilled people to design and innovate new products and services. Value is also place on STEM skills in sales and marketing, as well as general management roles. STEM graduates are far from limited in their career options and studying such subjects does not close doors on their future prospects.

The CBI/Edexcel Education and Skills Survey 2008 indicated gaps in the workplace, with 59% of employers reporting difficulty recruiting STEM-skilled individuals. Some sectors reported suffering acute shortages. Experienced hires, graduates and technicians are shown to be in particularly short supply. In response to these recruitment difficulties, large firms in particular have been looking outside the UK for candidates with STEM skills. Of the large employers in the survey, 36% have looked to India and 24% to China in order to fulfil their STEM-skilled labour needs.

With firms recruiting STEM graduates from Asia there is a concern about the quality of these graduates’ qualifications. According to CBI/Edexcel there is concern over the “loose definition of ‘graduate’ in China” and differences in language, communication skills and problem solving styles may be key barriers to getting the most out of recruiting from abroad. However, as universities in China and India develop their courses and improve the quality of their graduates, the UK recruitment of STEM-skilled candidates from these countries is likely to increase.

The quality of STEM graduates is not only a concern about those coming from abroad but is also a significant issue related to UK graduates. It is not only shortages in supply that cause recruitment difficulties for employers. There is a perception held by many employers (42% in the CBI/Edexcel survey) that those graduates that do apply for jobs do not have the right skills. This is not thought to be as great an issue for employers in the financial services sector as it is for other sectors, as finance employers tend to offer high salaries to attract the top talent.  The HE system needs to ensure not only that there are sufficient numbers of STEM graduates to meet demand but also that the quality of these graduates is world-class. As the Royal Society (2006, 2008) has pointed out, the UK’s HE system needs to equip students with the knowledge, skills and aptitudes to compete with the best in the world, while at the same time supporting much of the nation’s R&D activity.

1.4      STEM-related policies, programmes and initiatives

A number of Government policies and initiatives have been introduced over the past decade to address the possibility of a future shortage of STEM skills in the UK labour force. The Annual Innovation Report 2008 (DIUS) has set out HEFCE’s commitment of £160 million to increase the demand for and supply of students studying strategic and vulnerable subjects. The majority of these funds is to be spent on STEM subjects. Very recently, the University of Birmingham has recently received £20 million to help fill the national skills shortage gap in science, technology and maths by hosting the National Higher Education STEM programme[6]. The programme is funded by HEFCE, with the aim of increasing the number of graduates with skills in STEM disciplines, in order to meet the needs of employers and to boost the UK economy.  It will aim to raise the aspirations of young people to entice them to study science at university level. The programme will develop innovative and transferable programmes and initiatives for expanding participation in STEM subjects in HE. The delivery phase of the programme is the three years from 2009 to 2012.

As discussed in Section 1.2 various groups and programmes have also been implemented to attempt to stimulate female interest in STEM and to address the gender imbalance that has been observed in these subjects for many years.

1.5      Future issues

The value of STEM skills in the UK economy is undeniable. Innovation is considered to be one of the key drivers of productivity and economic performance and STEM skills are thought by many to be key in enabling innovation activity. The innovation gap between the EU and the US is in part (23%) attributed to the lower share of people with tertiary education in Europe’s workforce.[7] The UK has set a target for R&D investment to reach 2.5% of GDP by 2014[8]. Meeting this target would require around 50,000 additional research staff. There is a danger that unless the number of graduates qualified in STEM subjects increases, this innovation gap will widen.

It is considered essential that the UK gets the supply of STEM skills right, otherwise the damage to the economy could be substantial.[9] According to NIESR, the UK lagging in terms of skills levels of engineers and scientists impacts negatively on the innovative activity associated with such skills. This translates further into a loss of competitiveness in terms of a loss of domestic market share, a loss of international trade share and lower levels of productivity (Mason and Wagner, 2002).

A number of developing and emerging economies, such as India and China, are adding to the level of international competition faced by the UK. In order to keep pace with the activities in such countries, the UK must increase its skill base. Globalisation, demographic change and the rapid pace of advancement in technologies exert pressure on the UK that requires immediate action in terms of ensuring the country has the capacity, including the skills base, to compete, and to avoid being left behind.

Demand for STEM skills is expected to rise. Based on Working Futures 2004-2014 (Wilson et al, 2006), CBI (2008) suggest that by 2014, 730,000 extra jobs will require candidates with STEM skills. Growth in employment is projected to be fastest for those with the highest level qualifications. The number of those in employment with no or few formal qualifications is projected to decline. The Working Futures 2004-2014 results generally suggest, with the exception of Medicine, that the “demand” for those qualified in most STEM subjects will grow significantly faster than the average for all subject groups.[10]

The age profile of the STEM workforce implies that there will be a significant need to replace those leaving the STEM workforce (as older workers reach retirement age in the coming decade). This replacement demand is at least equally important as so called expansion demands arising from projected increases in employment levels for such workers.

CIHE (2009) business leaders have identified a number of concerns relating to STEM. The leaders and managers of the future must be numerate. The UK is considered vulnerable as a nation due to over-reliance of businesses and university departments on STEM expertise from overseas. There are skill shortages across the range of STEM disciplines, as well as in particular specialisms (from electrical and power systems engineers to pharmacologists with in vivo animal experience). There is a particular need to persuade more girls to study STEM subjects. Businesses have been recruiting maths graduates from India and other Asian nations.

According to NESTA (2007), the UK’s R&D expenditure lags behind international competitors, STEM graduates are increasing but demand is likely to outstrip supply and links between businesses and universities are still challenged by university funding streams and cultural differences. Science policy needs to become more prominent, but more importantly it needs to become more sophisticated (NESTA, 2007).

Possible futures

Worst case scenario

• The supply and quality of STEM graduates and postgraduates in the UK declines further
• Initiatives to improve situation do not work
• UK slips as one of world leaders in STEM graduate supply
• The innovation gap with other countries widen
• STEM related employment goes offshore, especially as STEM graduates in other countries (India, China, EU) improve, and as there is a huge supply
• Jobs that cannot be offshored that require STEM skills are awarded to foreign graduates/STEM-skilled employees
• The UK’s R&D base declines
• The UK’s universities slip down international rankings because of the relatively poor quality of scientific research and output in terms of STEM studies.

Best case scenario

• More students gain interest in STEM subjects
• Supply issues are appropriately addressed
• Expansion of employment for those with STEM skills due to continuing trends towards innovation and green jobs
• The UK becomes a world leader in STEM skills – world leader in R&D – world leader in innovation
• More use of UK universities for international projects relevant to STEM.

Most probable scenario

• number of jobs requiring STEM skills to expand due to continuation of recent trend
• financial services continue to attract STEM graduates but no longer promising sky-high salaries after the recent financial crisis
• some STEM supply issues are addressed
• industry facelift to attract more students to STEM subjects
• use of international STEM qualifications.

2.      Children’s work

The majority of research on children’s work and child labour focuses on the negative side of this issue. There is much commentary concerned with the inappropriateness of child labour and how child labour often arises in response to impoverished living conditions.

In the UK context however, ‘children’s work’ does not typically refer to the sinister exploitation of children but instead refers to children’s willing participation in part-time or vacation time employment. That is not to say that exploitive child labour does not take place in this country nor that children who willingly work are not exploited in some cases, but it is not the large problem here that it is in developing countries, or in the UK in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

Child labour and youth employment are two very different things. While child labour has very definite negative connotations, youth employment is typically viewed as a positive experience for children while growing up. In UNICEF publications, ‘child labour’ conventionally refers to children working before they reach the minimum ages for employment in their country (16 in the UK). It has been redefined to refer to all young people engaged in harmful employment, whether they are school-age or older.

Youth employment, in contrast, is considered a more positive activity in which young people are consensually employed in jobs that adhere to particular laws and regulations and pose no danger or risk to the health and safety of the young person. However, even when employed in more acceptable forms of work, the employment situations of many young people and children do not always abide by all regulations.

2.1      ‘Acceptable’ children’s work

In the UK, many young people (under the age of 18 or 16) are engaged in various types of employment outside of their normal schooling. Survey research has consistently shown that between one-third and one-half of school age children are in paid employment at any given time. Before they leave school, between two-thirds and three-quarters of children will have held a paid job (Mizen et al, 1999). Pinpointing the actual numbers of children in paid employment in the UK however, is not straightforward due to large discrepancies in the definitions of what constitutes legal child labour and because of the degree of unseen child work. Hobbs and McKechnie (1997) reviewed various estimates of the numbers of children undertaking paid work in Britain. Their findings are summarised in Table 1

Table 1: Best estimates of children working in the UK

Source: Hobbs, S. and J. McKechnie (1997) Child Employment in Britain: A Social and Psychological Analysis. Table 2.4, p33.

There is evidence that employment of children (or youth), especially school students, is on the rise in the UK and the USA. Between 1968 and 1991 there was a marked increase in the rates of part-time working amongst 16 to 18 year olds in full time education in the US (Dustman et al 1996) according to data from the Family Expenditure Survey. In the Republic of Ireland in 1994, one-quarter of lower secondary students and 31% of upper secondary students were engaged in regular part-time work. The types of jobs performed vary from part-time work in shops and restaurants, to paper rounds, to babysitting. Jobs undertaken by children often comprise unskilled, manual work with unusual working arrangements which may leave children vulnerable to exploitation.

Regulations and legislation regarding children’s work in the UK

UK law specifies the types of work and conditions under which children or youths may be legally employed. Employers wishing to employ children under school leaving age must get a permit from the local authority. This permit must be signed by the employer and one parent of the child. Some of the key features of children and employment regulations in England and Wales are:

• Types of work – no one under the minimum school leaving age (16 years) is permitted to do anything more than light work. They are not allowed to do work that is likely to cause harm to the child or to do work that will affect attendance at school or participation in work experience. Children are prohibited from working in factories, construction, transport, mines and on registered merchant ships. Local authorities may impose further restrictions on the types of work children are permitted to perform.
• Younger children – children under the age of 13 can only work under special circumstances. Once aged 13 years, children can undertake light work. At age 16 years, a person will be classed as a young worker with different rules.
• Hours – For those children who are legally permitted to work, they are not allowed to work:
  • during school hours on any school day
  • for more than 2 hours on any school day or for more than 12 hours in any week in which required to attend school
  • for more than 2 hours on a Sunday
  • for more than 8 hours (5 if under 15) on any day which is not a school day or a Sunday
  • before 7am or after 7pm
  • for more than 35 hours (25 if under 15) in any week in which not required to attend school
  • for more than 4 hours in any day without a break of one hour.
  • The law does not make any prescription about the wages to be paid to children who work. Minimum wage legislation does not apply to workers under the age of 16.

Children’s reasons for working and possible benefits and negative effects

The motivations of children for undertaking work vary. Children are not necessarily driven to employment by poverty, although this is the reason in some cases. In the context of youth employment, children have jobs for a number of reasons that are more matters of choice than circumstance. In some cases, the work may be in an area that interests the child or they may undertake work in order to have a learning experience. Many children take jobs because of the extra money that they can earn to spend on leisure interests. A number of children who have jobs report that they enjoy their work and appreciate it because it gives them a sense of independence and also teaches them about the value of money.

The UNICEF Working Children Survey (Spring 2004) questioned students between the ages of 12 and 16 about their attitudes toward work and the involvement in employment. They found a number of children who indicated that they worked outside the hours permitted by law and a number worked longer hours than allowed. More than 40% of the young people surveyed indicated that their parents had helped them find their job. The majority of students questioned felt that work was valuable both socially and financially. Some respondents indicated that working did add pressure to them for performance at school. For young people, over the age of 18, Mizen et al (1999) found that students are not interested in full-time work or in acquiring long-term or secure employment due to the constraints of University coursework.

In the US, it has been generally accepted for the past 30 years or so that youth employment is a standard feature of adolescent development (Mortimer and Finch 1996). There seems to be a consensus in the US that moderate levels of work, in relatively benign jobs, is beneficial for children through increasing self-reliance and independence (Mizen et al 1999). Working more than 20 hours per week however, has been correlated with a range of adolescent problems. Similarly, a study from Ireland found that working part-time was associated with underperformance at upper secondary level and was also found to be associated with increased drop-out (McCoy and Smyth, 2007).  In 1999, Mizen et al noted that it was then a reliably accepted idea that “paid employment is an extensive feature of contemporary British childhood … that extends beyond the realms of traditional ‘children’s work’, into a range of jobs characteristic of the service sector more generally.”

A MORI Poll, Class Struggles, carried out for TUC[11] found that more than 100,000 school children had played truant in order to work in 2001. Boys were more likely than girls to take such actions. The survey indicated that 1 in 4 children under 13 years of age undertook paid work. Extrapolated to the entire UK population in this age group results in a total of 289,000 working. A significant proportion of the survey’s sample reported that they had worked outside legal working hours for their age group. The survey also found that most working children (31.5%) earned less than £2.50 per hour.

2.2      The more negative aspects of children’s work

Child labour is often considered a problem of only developing nations. However, UNICEF indicates that it is a problem in the industrialised world as well, with some children doing work that is hazardous or otherwise unacceptable. This is often the case for children who have been trafficked into the country. The EU Directive on the Protection of Young People at Work was established in 1994.  This aimed to reduce discrepancies regarding youth employment in the member states. The Directive sets out minimum standards for all EU countries regarding the employment of children and young people. The UK was slower than a number of other EU countries to modify its laws in accordance with this Directive.

The fact that workers under the age of 16 are not covered by minimum wage regulations, leaves children who work open to exploitation by employers looking to cut costs. Children under school leaving age are not legally entitled to paid holiday from work. As a subset of the labour force, the child workforce has little or no bargaining power or weight in the labour market. There have been 38 prosecutions in the UK for the improper employment of children since records began in 2000 (UNICEF).

Walsh (1990) observed that one main advantage to employers of hiring students is a reduction in labour costs. Employers are able to pay students (under the age of 16) lower rates than they are required to pay workers over the minimum school leaving age. Employers may also be able to use student workers more flexibly than other segments of the labour force as these students may not accrue the necessary qualifications for some legal entitlements (Curtis and Lucas, 2000). The TUC’s survey (2000) found that students were paid £4.37 per hour on average and that 3% of student workers were being paid rates below minimum wage.

The Commission on Vulnerable Employment has indicated that young workers, who are not entitled to the same rates of minimum wage as other workers are more likely to face exploitation. They also cite evidence that young people are more likely to face exploitation at work than are older workers. The MORI survey’s findings support the notion that younger workers face exploitation. 75% of children aged 11 to 15 years were reported to work and 30% of those with term time jobs reported working for more than the maximum numbers each day. Almost a third of the sample were paid £2.50 per hour or less. Nearly 20% working during term time were paid less than £2 per hour. While illegal, 25% of children under the age of 13 indicated that they worked during the term or during summer holidays.

Despite there being a number of regulations in place to protect young workers, the vast majority (79%) of children who work in the UK do so without a permit (UNICEF). There is also evidence that a proportion of these working children are exploited by the people they work for or face hazardous working situations. Taylor (1998) found that despite having initially agreed to hours of work that would not interfere with their academic studies, many working students later found themselves feeling pressured to work less convenient hours.

Children who are trafficked into the UK face even greater risks and are more prone to being exploited than those who are more visible and ‘protected’ by child employment regulations. Some trafficked children are smuggled into the country for the sole purpose of employment. For others, their vulnerable position leaves them open to being exploited in work (or worse). Some work extremely long hours in poor or dangerous conditions. Some children, most notably those from China, are bonded and must work in order to pay back their bonds. In a number of cases traffickers and employers of trafficked children threaten the safety of the child or his family in his home country in order to force the child to work. Children who have been trafficked into the country to work have been found working in restaurants, on farms and factories, in criminal activities, providing domestic labour and working in the sex industry. A UNICEF study (2003) found that 250 child trafficking cases had been uncovered in the UK since 1998.

2.3      The future of children’s work

Focusing on the more ‘acceptable’ types of children’s work (as discussed in Section 2.1), the numbers of children in such employment is likely to increase in the future if current and recent trends continue. Even greater increases may be seen as children seek their own financial independence, so they can fund ever increasing costs of leisure (e.g. video game consoles typically cost over £100 and games can cost anything from £20 to £80 each). Increasing competition for entry into post-secondary education and for employment opportunities later in life may also motivate children to undertake employment earlier in order to build up their learning and work experiences and to indicate their drives and ambitions.

As mentioned in Section 2.2, laws covering the employment of children in this country are not overly stringent and according to many are fragmented. The Better Regulation Task Force (2004) notes that the laws regarding child employment in the UK are relatively old, with piecemeal adaptations and local by-laws that often compound the problems that exist in interpreting and enforcing these laws. This leaves room for breaches of regulations to occur. In the future, either the laws regarding children and employment will be enhanced and greater enforcement of these laws exercised or children’s employment will continue to pose potential hazards and injustices for children. If unscrupulous employers see that they can cut costs by employing young people in jobs that are suitable only for adults, then children may be exploited for the monetary gains of these people. Educating children on the protection that the law offers them in work is also necessary to empower these children in employment matters.

More positively, if employers were to engage with children’s agencies, schools and government bodies, jobs could be designed that would be age-appropriate and provide good learning/work experiences for children while enhancing the performance of businesses. With the development of new technologies and the dissemination of such technologies, children may also be provided with greater opportunities to exercise their creativity and fulfil their own interests while at the same time capitalising on these things for monetary gains. One example could be that young people may work part-time, independently, to design or manage websites for other people or companies, or design or get involved in other aspects of game design and ‘virtual’ worlds (for further discussion see Section 5). Such ‘jobs’ may lead onto business opportunities or career directions for these young people in adult life.

Possible futures

Worst case scenario

• Children are forced to take on more paid work, even if they do not wish to do so for their own interests, in order to help support family
• children work in inappropriate jobs that are not of interest to them and pose dangers to their health, safety, development and welfare
• employers opt for cheap child workers in order to cut costs, particularly in the absence of tighter enforcement of child labour laws
• trafficked child workers continue to fly below the radar and are an unseen part of the labour force
• more use of child labour in foreign countries in order to cut costs of manufacturing and to provide cheap products to the UK.

Best case scenario

• employers engage with schools to create work opportunities that enhance the well-being and development of children
• children choose whether to work or not, without the stress of having to work out of financial necessity
• through work, children’s entrepreneurial skills are developed and they acquire skills that help them in later life and ultimately contribute to the country’s economic performance
• trafficking and exploitation of children in work is drastically reduced due to improved regulation and enforcement.

Most probable scenario

• reorganisation of laws relating to children’s work
• more public awareness of child trafficking and the use of these children in work which should pressure authorities to further clamp down on such activity
• the dissemination of information through the internet may result in children being more aware of their rights which would empower them in the labour market
• children may become more aware of the potential benefits of work and may seek out opportunities that meet their own interests, while giving them some financial independence.

3.      Entrepreneurial activity and practices

3.1      Importance of entrepreneurial activity in the UK

Enterprise is noted as one of the five key drivers behind productivity growth in the UK. Entrepreneurial activity takes many forms and makes a substantial contribution to the country’s economy.  Stel et al (2005) found that nascent entrepreneurship positively impacts GDP in rich countries (see also Davidsson, 2006). The Lisbon Agenda considers raising regional entrepreneurship levels to be one of the main policy instruments to tackle Europe’s problem in keeping up with productivity growth by existing and emerging economic powers.

3.2      The UK’s entrepreneurial performance

Entrepreneurship has become a common notion in today’s British popular culture.  Television programmes like the BBC’s Dragons’ Den, and other reality programmes that follow fledgling companies or show individuals competing for start-up funds, have become more common and gained huge numbers of viewers. The aim of such shows and the media coverage of entrepreneurial activity is to stimulate interest and further activity. However, sometimes this exposure can downplay the real risks and the level of skill and knowledge required to start a successful business.

According to HM Treasury (2008) report, Enterprise: Unlocking the UK’s Talent, there has been considerable progress in promoting a enterprising economy over the past 10 years. Business survival rates are higher than ten years ago (92% of new VAT registered businesses are still registered after one year and 71% after three years). Productivity growth in small firms has been greater than that in large firms since 1998.

In 2005, the number of young people indicating aspirations to start up in business was 200,000 greater than in 2002. There are currently a record number of businesses operating in the UK. There were 4.5 million businesses in the UK at the start of 2006 which was more than 750,000 more than in 1997. There are a number of reasons for the significant increase in business numbers, including:

• the rise in population
• influx of entrepreneurial immigrants
• the development and roll out of modern telecommunications, and
• tax incentives for smaller companies.

It is important to note that more businesses does not necessarily mean that the UK is more ‘entrepreneurial’, as research by the University of Sheffield found that the business start-up rate per 1,000 inhabitants fell between 1997 and 2004.[12] This research also found evidence that some private sector entrepreneurial activity is crowded out by the public sector.

While the World Bank has ranked the UK second in Europe, and in the top ten countries in the world, on measures of ease of doing business, the UK lags behind the US in some indicators. The US has 20% more businesses per head than the UK. A significant part of this gap is explained by considerably lower rates of women’s enterprise activity in the UK. The rate of growth exhibited by new businesses once they are established is also greater in the US than in the UK.  Some 40% more US businesses achieve high growth than do UK businesses. More than a third of established businesses in the UK have no ambition to grow.

The fear of failure is also greater in the UK than in the US. In the US, 23% of people say that such fear would prevent them from starting a business, while 36% of people in the UK indicate fear of failure as a barrier to staring a new business (GEM, 2007). In the early part of the current recession, start-up activity in the UK appeared to have remained resilient in the UK.[13] There was a decline in the Spring of 2008 which resulted in the numbers for the year being only marginally lower than they were in 2007. In the three months to September 2008, the number of new businesses that started up fell by just 4% to around 129,000. Barclays has reported no significant decline in the number of people wanting to start their own ventures going into 2009. Despite this resilience to date, the number of start-ups in 2009 is expected to fall significantly (Barclays).

The UK has a higher proportion of adults starting their own businesses than other European countries, and the UK’s levels of entrepreneurial activity are better than those in continental Europe. The UK also has better sustainability ratios (ratios of established businesses to start-ups) than the US and Canada. In the UK, the proportion of people operating established businesses is 93% of the start-up rate, indicating that the majority of ventures are successful.

The GEM UK 2007 indicates that there are regional differences in the levels of entrepreneurial activity taking place in the UK. In 2006, London, the South East, the South West and the East Midlands had the highest levels of early stage entrepreneurial activity in 2006 but they experienced declines in 2007. While three of these four regions remained the highest activity regions in 2007, the decline in early stage entrepreneurial activity in the East Midlands was sufficient to decrease the regions ranking to 8th place. There were increases in early entrepreneurial activity in Scotland, the North East, Northern Ireland, Yorkshire and the Humber, the North West and the West Midlands. The West Midlands had the 4^th highest level of activity in 2007.

There was an increase in entrepreneurial activity in the Northwest from 4.6 to 4.9% between 2006. This region is observed to have higher levels of entrepreneurial activity amongst 18 to 24 year olds than the UK average (4.7% vs 3.8%).

The GEM UK 2007 report also notes gender differences in early entrepreneurial activity with men more likely to be engaged in such activity than women. In 2007, this difference between the sexes was greatest in Northern Ireland. The South West had the highest level of female entrepreneurial activity in 2007 at 4.6%. Men are also found to have more positive attitudes towards entrepreneurial activity than women.

3.3      The future

According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor United Kingdom 2007 Monitoring Report (GEM UK, 2007), the UK has generally positive attitudes towards entrepreneurial skills and the perception of start-up opportunities compared to the other G8 countries. The monitoring report compares Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) measures of entrepreneurial activity in the UK with participating G7 countries, and the large industrialised or industrialising nations of Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC). It also summarises entrepreneurial activity within Government Office Regions of the UK

The Government has done much to develop awareness, aspirations and motivations regarding enterprise. Amongst young people aged 14 to 30, there as been a 22% increase since 2003 in the number who intend to start a business and a 50% increase in the number taking part in enterprise training activities.

According to CIHE, the competitive capability of the UK will rest more than ever on enterprise and innovation in products, services and management. CIHE emphasises that developing entrepreneurial graduates is essential to future success of the UK economy.

Enterprise: Unlocking the UK’s Talent outlines some of the future challenges and opportunities that the UK may face in terms of optimising the economic and wider benefits of enterprise for the UK. The Government has a vision of a society in which the contribution of entrepreneurs and enterprise is encouraged and valued and therefore wants to encourage a culture of enterprise. The UK needs to improve some people’s perceptions, particularly with reference to the country’s relatively high ‘fear of failure’. Countries with higher rates of fear of failure tend to have lower rates of entrepreneurial activity. In developing a culture of enterprise the Government has made a number of policy proposals including actions regarding insolvency rules, starting a women’s enterprise campaign, and starting a Global Entrepreneurship Week.

In order to position itself in good stead, the UK also needs to ensure that it has sufficient enterprise knowledge and skills to meet future challenges and opportunities. The Government has committed a further £30 million to extend enterprise education from secondary schools into primary and tertiary education. The Government is also taking steps to increase workforce skills training and to improve access to business support.

The availability of finance to people who want to start up businesses is also an important factor which is proving a great challenge given the current economic downturn. At the beginning of 2009, the Business Secretary, Lord Mandelson, has pledged £35m for start-ups in North West with the ambition that “nurturing and protecting start-ups and young businesses through this downturn will lead us into the upturn that will follow”. Barclays increased the amount of lending to small and medium enterprises by 6% to about £15 billion in the past year and has pledge to make at a least a further £1.5 billion available to this group of businesses in 2009.

In the future there are many potential opportunities on which an enterprising nation may capitalise. New business opportunities will come from the development and growth in countries such as China, India and Brazil. The disposable incomes of people in these countries will grow, creating export opportunities for the UK. These new markets have already been proving fruitful. Between 2002 and 2006, UK exports to China and India increased by, on average, 19% and 14% per year, respectively.

The development of the UK as a Knowledge Economy also presents opportunities for entrepreneurial activity. New technologies and services themselves present opportunities for new businesses to develop or for established businesses to grow. New industries will also be created, such as green industries. The environmental goods and services sector in the UK has an estimated turnover of £25 billion and employs 400,000 people.[14] New technologies that will need to be developed for the low-carbon economy will present potentially lucrative opportunities for people wishing to start a business.

Possible futures

Worst case scenario

• the credit crisis and financial downturn worsen, resulting in very limited financial support being available for start-ups, young businesses and SMEs
• the UK fails in its attempts to promote a culture of enterprise and lacks the skills, knowledge and attitudes necessary to take advantage of future opportunities
• growth becomes restricted due to inadequate entrepreneurial performance.
• women’s entrepreneurial activity rates increase substantially and help to close gaps with the US
• the UK’s culture of enterprise attracts more outside investment in UK businesses and increases the number of foreign businesses being set up and operated in the UK
• young people see starting their own businesses as viable options for future careers
• UK start-ups and SMEs increase their ambitions for growth and make strategic decisions to achieve growth.

Best case scenario

Most probable scenario

• women’s involvement likely to increase
• credit and finance moderately constrained in the short to medium term
• after the financial downturn, lenders are likely to be more careful than before in lending criteria used to evaluate start-up business’ and SMEs’ applications for borrowing. This would not necessarily be a negative outcome as suitable criteria may ensure that the majority of businesses that start up are likely to succeed
• enterprise education to take more prominent role in young people’s education, thus enhancing the entrepreneurial skills and knowledge base of the future workforce.

4.      Innovation and intellectual property rights

4.1      The importance of innovation

Like enterprise, innovation is also considered one of the five key drivers of productivity. BERR defines innovation simply as the “successful exploitation of new ideas.” This includes all innovation, including non-technological. According to BERR, innovation is central to better jobs, economic growth and prosperity. Innovation is vital to increasing the UK’s competitiveness, improving the economy and increasing the quality of life. Innovation can also help to meet challenges such as climate change and pollution.

For businesses, innovation can result in sustained or improved growth, through enabling entry into new or different markets, and through improving day to day performance. Businesses may innovate through product innovation, process innovation and strategic innovation. For consumers, innovation is important in creating new or improved products and services, with greater value for money, and in improving the overall standard of living.

Innovation is an increasingly important issue, as companies who do not innovate will not maintain their competitiveness because if they themselves do not innovate than someone else will do so and will gain an advantage. Businesses may need to innovate for a number of reasons (DIUS 2008):

• to gain competitive advantage or to respond to competition
• to create efficiencies
• to improve customer satisfaction
• to reposition the business in the market, and
• to comply with new regulations.

These factors, and a number of others, motivate businesses to innovate and may also influence the level and type of innovation undertaken by businesses.

Those companies that adopt innovations created by others, or who seek to innovate themselves, face a number of potential advantages and opportunities. For innovating companies and individuals, Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) is a vital issue that comprises an important part of their business operation and strategy.

4.2      UK’s innovation performance

The UK is identified as an Innovation Leader in the 2007 edition of the European Innovation Scoreboard, placing the UK in the leading group with Japan, US and several EU countries. The 2005 UK Innovation Survey results indicated that 57% of UK enterprises were involved in innovation activity. The 2007 UK Innovation Survey showed an increase in activity to 64% of firms. Product or process innovations have been implemented by around a quarter of businesses, while around a third of enterprises have undertaken some form of strategic innovations. A positive correlation was found between firm size and innovation activity. Extending the concept of innovation activity to cover enterprises that invest in preparing for future innovation, or amending their organisational structures and strategies, results in 66% of UK businesses being considered innovators over the UK Innovation Survey 2007 survey period (2005-2007).

A much greater share of economic activity and employment was found in businesses that innovate. Almost 45% of employment was found to be in businesses having one or more forms of strategic innovation. The DIUS survey indicates that there are both regional and sectoral differences in the level of innovation taking place in UK businesses. The largest share of innovators with plans for future product or process innovation was found in knowledge intensive services. The ‘other services’ sector was found to have the lowest share of businesses with innovative inclinations (54%). Construction witnessed the greatest increase in innovation activity between the 2005 and 2007 CIS surveys. The lowest share of innovation active businesses was found in the London (55%) while the greatest share was found in Eastern England (69%). Where no innovation activity was indicated, the DIUS surveys in 2005 and 2007 found the most influential factor to be market conditions limiting the need for innovation.

The fourth Community Innovation Survey (2007) ranked the UK 12^th in the EU in terms of the percentage of all enterprises that are innovation active among all enterprises. In 2007, 43% of all businesses in the UK were innovation active. Higher rates were found for Germany (65%) and Ireland (52%) while the EU27 average (42%) was just below the UK figure, as was the rate in France (33%).

The DIUS Annual Innovation Report 2008 overviews the UK’s performance in innovative activity.  In terms of businesses’ investment in research and development (R&D) (a fundamental component of innovation), the UK ranks 5^th in the G7 countries. R&D performed by the largest companies increased by 5% from 2005 and 2006 in real terms. The UK’s number of US patents granted per head is ranked 5^th in the G7. In 2006, the UK spent 1.75% of GDP on R&D, representing a 4% real increase since 2005.

DIUS has set out a number of the strengths and weaknesses of the UK innovation system. These strengths and weaknesses are detailed in Table 2.

Table 2: Summary of strengths and weaknesses of the UK innovation system

Source: DIUS (2008) Innovation Nation – Background analysis: strengths and weakness of the UK innovation system. Table 1.

4.3      Intellectual Property Rights

According to the Gowers Review (HM Treasury, 2006), “in today’s economy, knowledge capital, more than physical capital, will drive the success of the UK economy.”  In light of this, intellectual property (IP) rights are more important than ever before. With technological advances and increased capabilities to freely share information, IP rights are vital to protect the work and competitiveness of companies and Governments. IP rights are bound by the regulations set internationally but they are of significant concern for the UK as a nation as they are essential to ensuring that the benefits from innovation that takes place in the UK are reaped by the country.

The Community Innovation Survey identifies a number of innovation protection methods which, some of which may be considered forms of intellectual property rights. These methods include:

• Registration of design
• Trademarks
• Patents
• Confidentiality agreements
• Copyright.

According to the 2007 survey, confidentiality agreements were considered to be of high importance by 18% of businesses. The proportion of respondents attaching high importance to the measure of innovation protection increased for all methods between the 2005 and 2007 surveys[15]. This may be indicative of a greater need to protect businesses’ innovative and intellectual property or could indicate the increased awareness of this need and of ways to ensure protection.

The Gowers Review set out an intellectual property system meant to be fit for the digital age. The review suggested strengthening IPR enforcement through a number of avenues. The review also suggested ways to support businesses in relation to IPR and how to set out IPR while maintaining a balance between freedoms and protection.  Since the Gowers Review, Trading Standards officers have been given powers of search and seizure in relation to certain kinds of offences which include copyright violations. In 2008, the Government pledged a further £5 million to assist Trading Standards officers to undertake these new duties.

It is important the IP rights regulations and laws are themselves innovative and that they change over time to reflect the risks and security issues associated with IP and new developments. The UK’s Intellectual Property Office has published a consultation regarding IP which was concerned with four main issues: access to works, incentivising investment and creativity, recognising creative output, and authenticating works. The Strategic Advisory Board for IP Policy (SABIP) was launched in effort to consider the strengths and weaknesses of IP in the context of a rapidly changing environment. SABIP recognises that growth rates are higher in the creative sector than in the economy as a whole and that rapid technological change and globalisation have brought into question many aspects of the existing copyright system. SABIP considers the development of a copyright agenda for the 21^st century as timely and necessary. Digital Britain also identified IP as a key issue for the UK’s digital economy.

4.4      The Future

According to BERR “success in the future will come from businesses increasing the added-value of their products, processes and services.” Given this future importance, nine strategic EU priorities for innovation have been set out (see table 5.1).

Table 3: Strategic EU priorities for innovation

Source: BERR (see www.berr.govuk/dius/innovation/page38831.html)

The future of innovation, especially technological innovation, in the UK is closely linked to developments in the supply and quality of STEM workforce[16]. STEM-skilled people are necessary for R&D and for scientific innovation to take place. Should the fears over the supply of STEM graduates not be confronted and allayed, the future of innovation in the UK will be tightly constrained. However, if the UK keeps up its supply and quality of STEM workforce, then the country will be well placed to take advantage of future opportunities that innovation activity may provide.

The future will present numerous opportunities for innovation of which the UK Government and businesses will want to take full advantage. New customers, production patterns, technologies and expectations will provide great opportunities for employment, businesses and even new industries[17]. It is important then that the UK continue to innovate and to increase its capacity to innovate in order to ensure it is ready to take advantage of future opportunities.

The increasing importance of the environmental agenda is one area that will certainly pose further opportunities in the future. As consumers continue to make businesses aware of their concern for the environment and their desire for ‘green’ products and services, businesses will need to come up with new ways of working and new or modified products and services to meet these tastes. Companies whose products/services are not capable of been ‘greened’ will either go out of business or will have to come up with innovative solutions to move into other sectors. The green consumer will also require new, to date unheard-of products that will fit in with greener living. This demand will provide opportunities for existing businesses to enhance their own products/services to fill this requirement or to create new products/services to fit the need.

5.      Emerging economies owing to technological change

This section looks at types of emerging or new economic activities that may constitute significant areas of work and activity in the future. These emerging economies were probably unimaginable for most people 5 to 10 years ago. However, as video games and virtual worlds become more sophisticated and increasingly allow people to interact online, their prominence in everyday life will increase as well. Also, as internet access and people’s interest in technology has increased other opportunities have arisen.

Some of the issues to be discussed here include the opportunities presented by massive multi-player online role-playing game (MMPORG) and the use of virtual or synthetic worlds for business and leisure purposes. These are not yet mainstream activities but by the time that people born since the late 1980s are in work and form the majority of the labour force, these relatively novel opportunities and ways of working may become widely used and accepted and contribute significantly to employment and GDP.

5.1      Virtual/synthetic worlds

Virtual worlds are computer based simulated environments intended for users to inhabit and in which users interact through avatars. Virtual worlds are shared spaces that allow multiple users to take part simultaneously. Things take place immediately in the virtual world once an action has been taken by a user. Virtual worlds are not completely alien concepts as they have much in common with the real world. Forces like gravity and cause and effect are exhibited in both, and things like the economy and market are important features of virtual worlds.

Virtual worlds offer new ways for groups of people to interact, exchange information and conduct business over the internet. There are a number of types of virtual worlds serving various purposes. Some virtual worlds are gaming worlds (eg World of Warcraft and other MMORPG). Other virtual worlds are mainly operated for social networking and online communities (eg There.com). Virtual worlds are sometimes created to facilitate immersive education, or corporate collaboration. Business oriented virtual worlds support a wide range of activities including e-commerce, virtual events, marketing and branding, customer service and interaction, recruitment, advertising, and product demonstration. Virtual worlds may be used to build customer loyalty and to gain valuable feedback through focus groups.

These worlds also create new opportunities for business, providing venues for customers to socialise, collaborate, purchase goods, train and play.  While relatively new, virtual worlds represent a significant opportunity for business and economic benefits to the economy. In the US, there has been significant investment in virtual world-related companies over the past few years. According to Virtual Worlds Management, venture capital and media firms invested more than US$425 million in 15 virtual world-related companies (with US$50 million concentrated in just two acquisitions) in the fourth quarter of 2007. There were investments of US$493 million invested in virtual world-related companies in the first three quarters of 2008 with US$148.5 million in 12 virtual world-related companies in the third quarter. Of these investments, the greatest shares are in companies with entertainment spaces (.e meant for leisure and entertainment use rather than education or business). Over US$1 billion was invested in 35 virtual world operations in the year to October 2007.[18] While these are large sums of money, they are still dwarfed by corresponding investments in the real economy.

Second Life is a relatively common example of a virtual world. Second Life was created by Linden Lab and opened to the public in 2003. Since its launch it has gained more than 2 million members. This three dimensional virtual world is accessed through the internet. Users download a client program and through this they can create avatars (characters) and other items (houses, furnishings, etc). Members of the Second Life world pay membership fees. This virtual world has its own virtual and economy with a currency, Linden dollars ($L), that has traceable exchange rates with money in the real world ($US).

Users interact in many ways in the Second Life virtual world. More savvy users create various items which they can sell/rent to other Second Life inhabitants. Residents can take part in numerous activities, in public or private, in the Second Life world. There are group activities, learning activities and more unsavoury activities taking place in Second Life.

While Second Life is a fairly well-heard of virtual world, it has not been without its problems since its launch in 2003.[19] A number of companies have entered the Second Life environment hoping to capitalise on marketing and advertising opportunities. This has proved relatively unsuccessful. Other problems have been encountered due to the sometimes fuzzy line separating virtual activities from reality. Second Life has shut down casinos due to the prohibition of online gambling in the US. Tax authorities in the US also have difficulty determining the appropriate tax treatment of money generated through such virtual worlds as Second Life. The use of virtual worlds for unlawful or unsavoury activity is also a problem and there have been cases in Second Life where things such as real child pornography have been exchanged between members.

Second Life’s membership is high.  However, there is concern that interest has been waning. The number of active members is believed to be much lower than the total number of members. Restrictions placed on this virtual world because of its notoriety are having effects on its popularity. The availability of other virtual worlds with free membership, such as There.com[20] and yoowalk.com, or with different foci increases the level of competition faced by Second Life.

5.2      Economic and business opportunities presented by virtual worlds

A number of business opportunities have come from the existence of virtual worlds such as Second Life and massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPG) such as World of Warcraft. These new environments present opportunities:

• for real business processes to occur in the virtual world
• for new employment opportunities to be generated in the real world through satisfying demand for various virtual commodities
• for producing and expanding these types of environments and games, and
• for policy proposals to be investigated through virtual ‘experiments’.

Companies such as Intel, Cisco, IBM, Stanford University and Diageo all hold regular internal and occasionally external meetings of their employees avatars in virtual worlds.[21] Military and emergency services have also been using virtual worlds and simulation games that enable training.

Forbes.com set out 10 ways to make real money in virtual worlds. Virtual worlds allow for people to make real-world money as[22]:

1. Gold Farmer – considered an ‘easy’ way to make money, involves spending a lot of time playing games with the sole objective of collecting as much of the game’s currency (typically gold coins) or weapons. The gold, weapons or other items are then sold to other gamers (with less time to play) through onsite trading (eg ebay). This is a popular pursuit in Asia where companies have been found to pay employees to work shifts of eight hours or more and then sell the accumulated wealth to players in Europe or America. According to Edward Castronova, trading of real dollars for gold pieces is more than $1 billion each year. [23]
2. Prostitute – the world’s oldest profession has infiltrated the virtual world, perhaps even more than it is practiced in the real world. In Second Life, prostitutes receive Linden dollars for services rendered online. This game currency can then be exchanged with others for real money. In 2007, a sex business in Second Life sold for US$50,000 on ebay.
3. Power Leveller – this involves playing games to advanced levels on behalf of other players who do not have enough free time to advance in the game as they would like to. EZGamers for example, will log into a game as a person’s character and play on their behalf. Prices charged for this service vary but a full 24 hours of focused play would cost about $25.
4. Merchant – games and environments like Second Life often allow for users to create unique virtual items such as clothing, weapons, home furnishings which they may then sell in game for virtual currency or elsewhere online (eg ebay) for real money.
5. Designer – Second Life users and other similar virtual worlds often desire custom-designed clothes to create beautiful avatars. Manufacturing virtual designer goods is relatively easy and the manufacturing costs are zero. While virtual clothing sells for relatively little virtual currency, bulk selling adds up and can result in real money gains. Listings for clothing and furniture can be found on ebay.
6. Architect – Similar to the idea for designers, people in games like Second Life, particularly those who spend much time in virtual worlds, like having nice virtual things and a home is one of these. Often the residents do not have the ability or want to build/design these things themselves so third parties may create an opportunity through selling such to players. Pre-built buildings in second life are traded on the game’s SL exchange with a castle, for example, selling for the equivalent of $53.
7. Gambler – this operates in pretty much the same way in virtual worlds as in real life. Virtual winnings can be exchanged for real world currency. A number of Las Vegas casinos had set up operations on Second Life but in 2007, gambling was abolished from Second Life as US laws prohibit online gambling and the treatment of virtual world gambling came into question.
8. Beggar – most online games allow players to give others in the game money or goods. While most players would give very little, if one has enough time, one could accumulate enough virtual goods/currency to exchange for a more substantial amount of real money.
9. Selling your character – once players are bored with a game, and if they have advanced sufficiently in that game, they may choose to sell on their virtual character to other players.  A student at the University of Virginia sold his World of Warcraft character on ebay for $1,200.
10. Landlord – property is available on Second Life (and other similar virtual worlds) but the most desirable properties are bought up very quickly. Virtual landlords, with sufficient land, may sell property to new players. In Second Life, this activity has netted relatively large sums of money for a number of individuals. One Second Life property trader reportedly owns virtual property worth US$250,000.

5.3       Open Source technology

Open Source is an approach to design, development and distribution offering practical accessibility to a product’s source (goods and knowledge) (Wikipedia). The most commonly known type of open source product is software. According to the Open Source Initiative, the definition of open source does not just apply to access to software’s source code but also to the distribution terms of which must meet the following criteria[24]:

• Free distribution
• Source code
• Derived works
• Integrity of the Author’s source code
• No discrimination against persons or groups
• No discrimination against fields of endeavour
• Distribution of license
• License must not be specific to a product
• License must not contaminate any other software.

The open source (OS) approach has been empowered by advances in ICTs and the proliferation of internet to homes and businesses. The term is now used with reference to software, hardware and user generated content. The OS approach involves the free sharing of code (in the case of software) which people can use, amend and change for their own purposes. The source code, as set out above, is free for use and redistribution and there is nothing to prohibit people from using it as a basis for the development of a product that they go on to market commercially.

This approach is becoming more and more mainstream, with significant economic impacts. The Standish Group International estimated that open source software (OSS) cost traditional software companies US$60 billion in 2008. The global loss due to use of proprietary software rather than OSS is estimated to be more than US$1 trillion per year with losses in the US thought to be at least US$400 billion.[25]

Perhaps the most well known example of OSS is Linux, an operating system that was first introduced in the early 1990s. The Linux Foundation values the Linux ecosystem at US$25 billion. It is used all over the world in applications such as the New York Stock Exchange, mobile phones, supercomputers and consumer devices. In a White Paper[26], the Linux Foundation (2008) estimated that building the Fedora 9 distribution of Linux would have cost US$10.8 billion had it been a more conventional proprietary development. Developing the Linux kernel alone is valued at US$1.4 billion.

The use of OSS in enterprises is becoming more commonplace, particularly in response to the possible cost savings that such software presents. Government too is moving towards more widespread use of OSS in order to save money. The feasibility of OSS use in schools has also been highlighted by the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta, 2005). However, to date, the Government has not modified its procurement policies in order to capitalise on the use of OSS.

The viability of open source hardware is also coming to the fore. OS hardware, typically computing and electronics hardware, is designed, developed and distributed in a similarly collaborative manner as OSS. Free information is shared on the hardware’s design, schematics, guides, associated software and so on. These details are then free to be developed further by users, and by-products can typically be sold. Arduino is an example of a company based on open source hardware. This company produces the Arduino circuit board, the design of which they have made open source. This allows others to produce copies of the board, redesign it and sell boards which copy the Arduino board design. The only caveat is that subsequent versions/creations based on the Arduino board must be on the board’s original Creative Commons license, so that new versions are equally free and open as the original.

The idea of open source software and hardware implies very different business models than the conventional development of such products. In the case of open source hardware, one way in which companies operate is in producing ‘kits’ that enable consumers to build the product themselves and to make alterations/changes as they require. MAKE magazine is devoted to DIY technology projects and has detailed 60 open source hardware projects in 2008.[27]

Open source inventors/designers may often launch their projects without concern over how to make money from them. The inventors of projects (software or hardware) that become widely used often then become the main point of expertise for users, which may lead to opportunities for consultancy and development services in a more conventional manner. An alternative economic approach regarding open source hardware is that companies may create such hardware and market it. This hardware will then be copied by competitors but the inventor of the open source hardware should have the capacity to stay ahead of competitors, given the feedback and suggestions they receive from the user community. This is particularly true for quality issues as the original quality of such hardware may not be replicated by competitors, thus the inventor can stay ahead on quality grounds.

Related to open source hardware, or at least to users’ capabilities to make changes to and copy new technologies, is the idea of reverse engineering.  Individuals may reverse engineer products to figure out how they work and how they can enhance and change these products to suit their purposes and to use them for other applications. This can be a negative issue for companies as it undoubtedly involves some illegal copying of products, however, for others it may extend the usefulness and thus market life of other products, resulting in greater incomes for some companies.

5.4      Future opportunities

The future opportunities presented by open source technologies are numerous. The newly installed US president has already commissioned Sun Microsystems to assess the implications of open source for Government and to make recommendations on how it can optimise the benefits of OS technologies. The British Government has performed analyses of the feasibility of OSS for schools (see Becta above) and for Government departments and agencies.  However, its use is not yet universal in Government. As individuals, businesses and governments increasingly look to cut costs, open source technologies will become more mainstream, thus reducing profitability of proprietary software companies. Perhaps such companies will become redundant in the future?

Open source technologies also present opportunities to address inequality in society, especially for developing countries. Open source results in software and hardware being cheaper and more widely available thus poorer countries may be able to catch up with the technologies that are used in richer countries as open source is used in more and more applications.

The 10 ways to make money in virtual worlds described above (Section 5.2) are likely to continue, and many may take on more significance in the future as games become more and more popular and as more people in the world increase their levels of disposable income.

According to Zhao et al (2000), virtual worlds present greater opportunities for human-centric work than do the more traditional ways of working and workplaces. Personal motivation and the satisfaction of personal decision-making are common features of online communities. As more human-centric work becomes more valuable to many people and seen as a more productive means of working by many, the organisational forms in online environments may be more commonly used for work than they currently are.

The types of virtual worlds that exist in the future will help to shape the opportunities that may arise from them. Current investment trends in virtual world-related companies shows that more investors are becoming interested in virtual worlds for youth and children. Virtual worlds for these groups, such as Club Penguin (owned by Disney), are popular, with growing memberships. There is a definite market here.  There are even online payment systems such as Ukash being developed for children who usually don’t have credit cards which are the most used type of online payment method. There is also a version of Second Life explicitly meant for teenagers aged 13 to 17[28].

From entrepreneurs to large multinational corporations, interest in virtual worlds is growing quickly. In the future, the corporate use of virtual worlds looks set to grow for activities such as meetings and staff training. Use of virtual worlds for such activities could help businesses to improve their productivity through reducing costs. Virtual activity could also save them time, money and resources. As companies use virtual worlds to generate revenue through marketing, branding and advertising, new and innovative forms of interactive advertising will arise. This could possibly compete with the use of typical real-world advertising media such as posters and billboards. Virtual worlds may also enhance collaboration through flexible application sharing.

In the future, hybrid types of virtual worlds are likely to arise for gaming, social networking, immersive education, corporate collaboration, business activities and focus groups. While no one predicts that virtual worlds will replace real physical interactions, they may enhance such meetings and will enhance the 2-dimensional internet.

With increased use of virtual worlds and increased opportunities to make real money from such worlds, it is inevitable that some people will take advantage of opportunities to commit crime in these virtual worlds. Already, child pornography has been exchanged in virtual worlds. The use of more online trading with real world money may also lead to increased opportunities for identity theft and fraud. Harassment and bullying that takes place online may also have significant real world impact on individuals, particularly vulnerable people such as children. The negative aspects of technological advance are discussed in Section 6.

6.      Possible negative effects of technological development

While technological developments are generally considered to be of great benefit to society and the economy, there are also often negative effects associated with advances in technology and the proliferation of such technologies amongst the population. Almost all technological developments have some negative social and economic effects in today’s world. Whilst the monetary value of some negative social effects may be difficult, near on impossible, to measure, it is possible that the negative side of technology advancement can sometimes outweigh the positive effects. Whatever the impact, the negative implications of advances in technology are important and should not be dismissed.

6.1      Work and the workplace

6.1.1   Telecommunications – remote working and offshoring

Most technological advances impact on the nature, form and content of work, and on the workplace itself. Some of the negative impacts particularly affect how work is performed and the productivity of workers. Developments in telecommunications, such as the widespread use of internet networks and the resulting increase in the ability of employees to work remotely has been hailed largely as a benefit to businesses and workers. In an ideal world, remote working gives employers virtually the same access to their employees they would have if they were working onsite, and employees can produce the same output remotely as they could if in the office. For employees, remote working can help solve problems created by conflicting work and home responsibilities by allowing for more flexibility of the work environment.

However, in some cases, remote working can create problems for both employer and employee. The quality of work may be an issue, as there may be difficulties with some employees working with no supervision, or there may be some things that simply cannot be done as well away from the office as they could be done onsite (eg collaborative work or work requiring physical outputs). For employees, being remotely connected to one’s work sometimes results in increased working hours as workers may be ‘on-call’ and are expected to be reached whenever needed for work purposes. For some people the technologies that allow them to work from home (or wherever) may be frustrating. The division between work and home life may be blurred by such working situations. People who work from home or elsewhere outside their company’s environs may also miss out on the social interaction that occurs with colleagues and clients in the workplace. This interaction can also be beneficial for knowledge sharing and the generation of ideas. Working remotely does not typically permit such informal and/or unplanned interaction to occur.[29]

Developments in telecommunications have also allowed some companies to move particular departments that do not require face-to-face contact with customers/users to remote or overseas locations. This has been a big development for customer service departments, particularly in the banking sector. Customers in the UK who call their bank to speak to someone about customer service issues may speak to a representative who is actually sitting at a desk in India or Canada. There have been many complaints from consumers voicing dissatisfaction with such service. But offshoring these and other services helps companies to cut costs.  If customers are displeased enough to stop doing business with a company then that is a significant negative outcome for the company. From the view point of employees in the UK, offshoring business functions puts some people here out of jobs.

6.1.2   Robotics and automation

Other advances that have impacted on work are robotics and manufacturing machinery that permits much of the manufacturing process to be automated. Automated bank machines and store checkouts have also been important cost-reducing technologies that have grown popular. Such technologies have allowed many companies to improve productivity significantly. On the negative side, however, many people have lost jobs due to automation. From a social perspective, the use of machines for banking (eg ATMs) and retail shopping (eg self-serve kiosks) may also be considered to have a negative impact on people’s day to day social interaction. The use of automated systems for customer services is also considered a negative development in many people’s opinions.

6.1.3   Use of internet at work

While the internet has benefited work and business in a number of ways, the personal use of internet by employees while at work is less beneficial to worker productivity and companies’ bottom lines. The CBI (2008) conducted a survey that indicated  that employees’ personal use of the internet while at work costs employers in the UK as much as £10.6 billion each year. The average UK employee spends 1.5 hours per week, or ten days per year, using the internet at work for personal reasons. Employers estimate that 4.4% of working time is lost in this way, with an average annual cost of £939 per employee. [30]

6.2      Social effects

6.2.1   Cyberbullying/cyber-harassment

Definitions and forms of cyberbullying

The Department for Children Schools and Families (DCSF), in its Guidance on preventing and responding to cyberbullying, states that cyberbullying is “the use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT), particularly mobile phones and the internet, deliberately to upset someone else”. According to the website www.stopcyberbullying.org, cyberbullying is:

when a child, preteen or teen is tormented, threatened, harassed, humiliated, embarrassed or otherwise targeted by another child, preteen or teen using the Internet, interactive and digital technologies or mobile phones. It has to have a minor on both sides, or at least have been instigated by a minor against another minor.

If an adult is involved or becomes involved in such a matter, it is then termed ‘cyber-harassment’ or ‘cyberstalking’.

According to a government study in the UK[31], more than one third of children aged 12 to 15 have faced some sort of cyberbullying. Cyberbullying/harassment is a serious matter that did not exist before various telecommunications technologies were created and became readily available and accessible to young people and children. While bullying and harassment are not new phenomena amongst children and teenagers, the means through which such activity may take place have changed dramatically with the advent of mobile phones and affordable internet services. Children and young people are very capable in using the latest telecommunications technology, and many have significant presence on the web. Cyberbullying can involve a number of actions on the part of the bully, including:  posting false or embarrassing information about the subject of the bullying on Facebook, MySpace or Bebo profiles, sending threatening or degrading emails or text messages directly to the subject, or circulating embarrassing information about the subject to others via text or email. In some cases, the bully may steal the victim’s password and send inappropriate or embarrassing messages to others or may use the victim’s password to inappropriately change the person’s profile.

A related term ‘happy-slapping’ describes a fad in which someone unexpectedly physically attacks another person and the assault is recorded, typically on a mobile phone’s video camera. These videos are often circulated to others via phone or email, and sometimes the ‘happy-slapper’ posts the video on the internet.

Statistics

The incidence of cyberbullying varies considerably between surveys and depending on the age group in question. Estimates vary from 11% to over 30%. Goldsmiths carried out research for the Anti-Bullying Alliance (ABA) in 2006 which found that 22% of 11 to 16 year olds had been victims of cyberbullying. According to the MSN cyberbullying report in 2006, 11% of 12 to 15 year olds in the UK had experienced cyberbullying. In a four year study on bullying, Noret and Rivers found that 15% of the more than 11,000 children in their sample had received nasty or aggressive text messages and emails. This demonstrated a year on year increase in the number of children subjected to bullying through new ICT. In research conducted as part of the DCSF cyberbullying information campaign, it was found that 34% of 12 to 15 year olds had been victims of such activity. Despite discrepancies in the actual percentages of young people who are victims of cyberbullying, the overall conclusion is that this problem is significant in the lives of many children in the UK and other countries.[32] Furthermore, with the increasing use of ICT by children and the greater importance that such technologies have in this generation’s daily activities, cyberbullying is likely to continue to be a growing problem.

Legislation and policy

As a form of bullying, cyberbullying is covered by the range of education law that deems bullying unacceptable and outlines that the school community has a duty to protect its members (students, teachers and staff). The Education and Inspections Act (EIA) 2006 sets out some legal powers which are more directly related to cyberbullying. It gives head teachers the power to regulate, to a reasonable extent, the conduct of pupils when they are situated away from the school grounds. This is particularly relevant for cyberbullying as it is very likely to take place outside of school but it has definite ramifications for school life. Some cyberbullying activities may be deemed criminal under a variety of different laws, including the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 and the Public Order Act 1986.

The Government has undertaken a number of initiatives in attempts to raise awareness and reduce the incidence of cyberbullying, particularly amongst children and teenagers. Guidelines for dealing with cyberbullying have been published by DCSF.[33] A number of organisations have websites devoted to providing information on cyberbullying and information on the help that is available to victims and their families.[34] Directgov also provides information for young people in relation to cyberbullying, its effects, how to prevent it and where to get help.

Effects of cyberbullying

While bullying is not a new phenomenon, cyberbullying is a relatively new concept with impacts on its victims that are also additional to those suffered by victims of ‘traditional’ bullying. Use of ICT to bully and harass enables the bully to reach more people fairly easily and quickly whereas traditional bullying is a more face-to-face, one-on-one activity. Reaching more victims means that the problem of cyberbullying may have greater overall impacts. The ease with which information can be shared in cyberspace also means that embarrassing or hurtful rumours, pictures or information related to victims can be shared with large numbers of people furthering the harm that this exposure causes.

New ICT also permits bullying to take place at times when face to face contact is impossible thus cyberbullying may be perpetrated 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This results in the victim having no reprieve from the bullying and feeling vulnerable wherever he/she may be. New technologies also allow for increased anonymity of bullies, again creating more vulnerability for victims.

The effects of cyberbullying on victims vary. Depression, anxiety and other mental health issues may arise from cyberbullying. This can affect victims’ performance in school and relationships with others. In some cases, the negative behaviour escalates to the point where there is actual physical violence or harassment between the bully and victim. A number of cases have come to light in the media of young people committing or attempting suicide after being victimised by cyberbullies.

Workplace cyberbullying and harassment can have financial consequences for the victim and the organisation as it can lead to absenteeism and reduced productivity. Where the bullying affects the victim to the extent that they resign from their position the victim and his family may suffer financial hardships which may contribute to the break down of relationships.

With today’s young people and younger generations being considered ‘digital natives’ they are more adept at using ICT and other new technologies. These technologies are increasingly a part of their daily lives such that their virtual lives and real lives merge. With such increased use come increased opportunities for cyberbullying to take place. In the workplace, cyberbullying and harassment is increasingly problematic as ICT technologies become commonplace in most organisations. As social networking websites, video sharing websites and blogspaces become increasingly common and accessible, the incidence of cyberbullying and its impacts on victims may become more widespread and increasingly serious in nature.

6.2.2   Education sector

Advances in technology, like the internet and its wide coverage and ease of access, have had profound effects on education both in terms of content and how subjects are taught. Classrooms now have more than just blackboards and chalk. Electronic whiteboards, digital projectors and things like PowerPoint presentations are common means of delivering information to students in the classroom. While these new teaching aids have been considered improvements there may be some students for whom these devices lack the personal touch that they require to learn effectively.

The proliferation of home internet connections and the use of the internet by producers of knowledge to disseminate their work freely/widely has increased the opportunity for students to commit plagiarism if they are so inclined. Other technological developments however, have improved the tools available to teachers and providers to detect such plagiarism. Cheating in examinations using mobile phones for texting answers is also a relatively recent phenomenon made possible by developments in telecommunications technologies. A survey conducted by the student newspaper, Varsity, found that just under half of undergraduates who took their poll had submitted someone else’s work under their own name. Law students were found to be the most likely to plagiarise (62%).[35]

Advancing technologies have also had some negative impacts on the quality of students’ education. Text messaging, for instance, and the abbreviated slang many people use in texts is thought to have had a negative effect on many young people’s and children’s ability in spelling and grammar. There have been ideas put forth that the system of spelling and grammar in the English language should change to accommodate text language rules, however, the general consensus appears to be that text messaging has had a negative effect on the literacy of some young people and children.

6.2.3   Identity theft and internet fraud

In 2000, CNN reported that the internet and online commerce was allowing criminals to use false identification to commit crimes. Since that time, increased use of authentification and other security measures have helped to mitigate the risk of identity theft and other forms of online fraud. However, in 2005, Dr. Emily Finch of the University of East Anglia asserted that increasing use of technology actually worsens identity theft and that human vigilance is the best defence against identity fraud[36]. Criminals themselves use technology to their advantage to clone bank and credit cards, steal people’s personal identification numbers (PIN), to produce counterfeit money, to produce false travel documents such as passports and find ways of circumventing technological security measures.

Phishing is the process by which a person or persons fraudulently attempts to obtain sensitive or confidential information including usernames, passwords and financial details by representing oneself as a trustworthy company or person in email or other electronic communications. Phishing emails often take the form of an email from ‘your bank’ requiring you to verify your password. Many phishing scams fraudulently represent themselves as originating from banks, financial institutions, social networking sites and IT administrators within companies. Data breaches in 2008 have been estimated to have cost companies £700 billion worldwide. Phishing scams and trogan keystroke loggers were found to be behind UK online bank fraud in 2004 that totalled around £12 million.

6.2.4   Terrorism

The internet and cheap mobile phones have allowed for some terrorist networks and for individuals with extreme views to communicate, increase membership and support, coordinate actions, and raise funds. The number of terrorist sites increased exponentially over the last 10 years from less than 100 to more than 4,800 two years ago.[37] However, these numbers likely underestimate the true presence of such sites and information online. Terrorist websites can offer information on constructing bombs or can serve as virtual training grounds for terrorist activities. A number of terrorist groups and extremists have their own websites with discussion pages where members/viewers share their opinions and ideas related to terrorism with the hopes of raising membership and morale. Terrorist networks use the internet and related technologies in a number of ways to benefits their organisations. According to the United States Institute of Peace contemporary terrorists use the internet in eight different ways:

1. psychological warfare
2. publicity and propaganda
3. data mining
4. fundraising
5. recruitment and mobilisation
6. networking
7. sharing information, and
8. planning and coordination.

Recent examples of the use of the internet and other new ICT by terrorist organisations includes the development of a new generation of encrypted software called “Mujahidden Secrets 2”. This software gives security to users that allows them to communicate freely through email without being observed by intelligence agencies or authorities. It has also been reported that Al-Qaeda want to create an online Jihad University.[38] There is also evidence of online gambling being used by terrorist networks to launder money and videos, blogs and virtual training platforms are believed to be used for recruiting and training terrorists.

Legislation and policy relating to terrorism and the internet and ICTs

The Terrorism Act 2006 prohibits the encouragement of acts of terrorism and the dissemination of terrorist publications. This Act deems inciting terrorism over the internet a criminal offence and those found guilty of such an offence may be jailed for up to seven years.

One of the key priorities related to preventing terrorism that is set out by in the European Union Counter-Terrorism Strategy is to “develop common approaches to spot and tackle problem behaviour, in particular the misuse of the internet.”

6.2.5   Pornography, sexual predators

With its free flow of information and connections between users all over the world, the internet has become an ideal forum for finding, viewing and sharing pornographic material. Most readily available statistics regarding pornography on the internet come from the US. The number of pornographic webpages in the US has been found to be 244.7 million while in the UK the number is estimated around 8.5 million. The internet pornography industry in the US had revenues of US$2.5 billion in 2005 and US$2.84 billion in 2006.[39]

Whether or not adults’ use of pornography is a bad thing is a very subjective matter; the exploitation of children in pornography and their exposure to pornographic material on the internet is generally agreed to be unacceptable. As children are starting to use the internet at younger ages and as they are more and more knowledgeable about use of the internet and other technologies, it is very likely that many young internet users come across pornographic material at some time. In the US, the average age at which a child is first exposed to internet pornography is estimated to be 11 years. Approximately 90% of 8 to 16 year olds have viewed pornography online.[40] The likelihood of children accidentally encountering pornographic images online is elevated by the links between children’s characters and pornographic websites.

The use of children in pornography and the exchange of child pornography on the internet are perhaps the most disturbing issues. According to the Guardian, the number of websites offering child pornography to UK internet users increased by 75% in 2005.[41] In 2003 the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (US) estimated that 20% of all internet pornography involves children. The US Customs Service estimated that 100,000 websites offer illegal child pornography. As of December 2005, child pornography was a US$3 billion per year industry.[42]

The widespread availability and large use of pornography on the internet is thought by a number of people to lead to breakdowns in families and relationships. In 2003, two-thirds of the 350 divorce lawyers who attending a meeting of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers indicated that the internet was a significant factor in divorces with excessive interest in cyberporn being an issue in more than half of such cases.[43]

Grooming children for sexual exploitation or other harmful treatment has also been propagated through new technologies. Internet and online communication has proven to be a common means used by some people to make contact with young children (and older people as well) with the ultimate aim of exploiting the subject. Grooming involves befriending and gaining the trust of a child for the purposes of creating a situation where the child may be sexually exploited. Chatrooms, virtual worlds, and email communication are commonly used methods of contact and the anonymity such forms of communication afford to people has allowed many to pose as other children in order to enhance the level of trust between them and potential victims.

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This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

[2] DCSF, Press Notice 2008/0017, “£140m boost to science and maths teaching in schools”, January 2008 (http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/pns/DisplayPN.cgi?pn_id=2008_0017)

[3] www.onrec.com/newsstories/21255.asp

[4] CIHE figures

[5] e.g. www.futuremorph.org, www.equalfuturez.net

[6] University of Birmingham, Press Release, 16 December 2008 (http://www.newscentre.bham.ac.uk/press/2008/12/16STEMprogramme.shtml)

[7] Pro Inno Europe (2005) European Innovation Scoreboard 2005 (http://www.proinno-europe.eu/docs/Reports/Documents/EIPR2006-final.pdf)

[8] HM Treasury (2004) Science and Innovation Investment Framework: 2004-2014

[9] Brockbank, S. (2008) “The UK STEM skills shortage” The Life Science Centre.

[10] The projections of employment by discipline for various occupational and sectoral categories take no direct account of changes in the flows emerging from the educational system (i.e. the supply side). They therefore conflate both supply and demand influences. They indicate the numbers that might be expected if recent trends continue.

[11] See www.hrmguide.co.uk/general/child_workers.htm for some highlight findings of the 2001 survey

[12] R. Tyler “Saving small firms has become big business in Westminster”, thetelegraph.co.uk, 29 December 2008,  (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/3982481/Saving-small-firms-has-become-big-business-in-Westminster.html)

[13] The Telegraph, 5 January 2009. “Start-ups remain resilient despite recession” (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/yourbusiness/4125906/Start-ups-remain-resilient-despite-recession.html)

[14] HM Government (http://www.hmg.gov.uk/newopportunities/opportunities/ future_opportunities.aspx)

[15] DIUS (2008) Persistence and change in UK innovation 2002-2006

[16] See section 1 for more on the importance of STEM and its implications for innovation

[17] Cabinet Office (2008) Getting On, Getting Ahead

[18] Bailey, D. “Real dangers lurk in virtual worlds”, www.computing.co.uk

[19] Dell, K. “Second Life’s real-world problems” www.time.com

[20] Basic membership is free in There.com but a premium membership requires payment of monthly fees.

[21] Sawabey, P. “Serious business in virtual worlds” (2007) www.information-age.com

[22] Forbes.com (2007) “Ten ways to make real money in virtual worlds” (www.forbes.com/2006/08/07/virtual-world-jobs_ex_de_0807virtualjobs.html)

[23] http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2008/01/edward_castrono.html

[24] See http://www.opensource.ac.uk/mirrors/www.opensource.org/docs/definition.html for full definition

[25] BBC online, “Calls for Open Source Government” by Maggie Sheils (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7841486.stm)

[26] McPherson, A., B. Proffitt and R. Hale-Evans (2008) “Estimating the Total Development Cost of a Linux Distribution” The Linux Foundation (http://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/estimatinglinux.php)

[27] “Open source hardware 2008 – The definitive guide to open source hardware projects in 2008” (http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/11/_draft_open_source_hardwa.html)

[28] http://teen.secondlife.com – basic membership is free in this version of Second Life

[29] The use of virtual meeting places for work purposes (as discussed in section 5) is thought to present a possible solution to this problem as in theory it allows for people’s avatars to meet and discuss things without planning to do so.

[30] CBI Press Release “Over 90 minutes a week spent on personal websurfing at work” (http://www.cbi.org.uk/ndbs/Press.nsf/0363c1f07c6ca12a8025671c00381cc7/94d596bf6bcd69708025745e003b722b?OpenDocument)

[31] Cyberbullying – Safe to Learn: Embedding anti-bullying work in schools, DCSF (2007).

[32] Recent studies in the US, Poland and Japan have found similar results to those in the UK (see Gardner, W. (2008) “Cyberbullying: a whole-school community approach” ChildRight, February 2008: pp. 25-28. According to Smith et al (2005) studies have shown that 13 per cent of children in Australia have been exposed to cyberbullying by year 8 while in the US 42 per cent o f9 to 13 year olds had been bullied online and 53 per cent admitted that they had bullied someone else online.

[33] Cyberbullying – Safe to Learn: Embedding anti-bullying work in schools, DCSF (2007).

[34] For example, www.stopcyberbullying.org, www.kidscape.org.uk/cyberbullying/

[35] Guardian.co.uk “Universities review plagiarism policies to catch Facebook cheats” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/oct/31/facebook-cheating-plagiarism-cambridge-varsity-wikipedia) 31 October 2008

[36] Thomson, I. (2005) “Technology accused of aiding ID theft – Another blow to ID cards”, www.vnunet.com/2141845 .

[37] Kaplan, E., “Terrorists and the internet” (http://www.cfr.org/publication/10005/#2). Updated 8 January 2009.

[38] Harding, T. (2009) “Terrorists launder cash through online gambling” Telegraph.co.uk (www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/4060727)

[39] Statistics from Internet Filter Learning Centre (http://www.internet-filter-review.toptenreviews.com/internet-pornography-statistics.html)

[40] Statistics from Internet Filter Learning Centre (http://www.internet-filter-review.toptenreviews.com/internet-pornography-statistics.html)

[41] “Massive rise in child porn sites” (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2006/feb/26/news.childrensservices) 26 February 2006.

[42] www.internet-filter-review.com

[43] www.divorcewizards.com

There are three main narratives underpinning most discussions on the future of work. The first is that the formalisation of work is gathering pace, whereby products and services are increasingly being produced and delivered by the formal economy. Conversely, informal work, such as subsistence production, informal exchange and/or mutual aid, is rapidly becoming less relevant to everyday life. The second, known as the ‘commodification thesis’, suggests that capitalism is spreading into almost every corner of human activity. For example, this could include the marketisation of state functions or the pricing of environmental pollution such as carbon trading. The final narrative is that globalisation is gaining pace and that the path to development is the way of the free market, with nation states declining in economic importance. In other words the formal market knows the best course of action. Simultaneously, informal work, here taken to mean work that is not declared to the state but is legal in all other aspects, is seen as a brake on development and a residue of previous times.

Thus a binary division is constructed whereby the formal economy is seen as a positive, and thus the way to economic prosperity, while informal practices are cast in a negative light. For example, Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist, argued that the best way to formalise Latin America’s informal economies was to legally establish property rights (to allow people to borrow against them) and for the state to withdraw from everyday life. This echoes the policy prescriptions given in the late 1980s and early 1990s to Latin America and the former Soviet states by organisations such as the World Bank and the IMF. Central to these policies, which became known as the Washington Consensus, was that the formal market ‘knows best’ and as it grew people would be drawn into it. Formal work is also equated to ‘decent work’ as a recent report stated: “On the balance: The informal sector is dominant in developing countries … though its reduction is crucial for securing decent work”. This is, of course, not to say that all informal work is positive, as will be discussed further below, but such statements demonstrate the persuasiveness of the formal economy. Indeed the very terms used to describe informal work demonstrate its negative construction. Such practices are commonly referred to as ‘non-official’, ‘non-organised’, ‘hidden’, ‘black’, ’shadow’, ‘non-visible’, ’submerged’, ‘irregular’, etc. Thus informal work is almost always defined by what it is not, ie its lack of engagement with the formal economy.

Despite the widespread acceptance of the above narratives there is a growing literature that refutes such discourses. The prime reason for this is the recognition that in fact the informal economy is not disappearing and for many plays an important role in everyday life. Across the world informal economies are a significant percentage of GDP and there is evidence that their size is in fact growing. Friedrich Schneider estimated in 2006 that the size of the global shadow economy (as a percentage of GDP) was 35.2%, an increase of 1.6% from 1999/00. Of course within these figures there are wide variations between countries, ranging from the United States with a figure of 8.4%, to Bolivia with 68.3%. Only two countries have a single digit figure (the USA and Switzerland) with the vast majority over 20%. Very few countries have experienced a significant decrease in their shadow economy over this period. While the averages for the OECD countries are lower than the global figure, they still demonstrate the importance of informal economies in ‘developed’ regions of the world. Furthermore, Schneider states that between 1989 and 2002 the average size of the OECD countries’ informal sector rose by over a quarter. The International Labour Organisation has gone so far as to say that in the last thirty years the growth of informal economies has been ‘phenomenal’.

Most commentators accept that such figures are probably underestimates as people are, understandably, reticent to reveal the scale of their informal work due to fear of detection. Furthermore, surveys often fail to observe the full range of informal work, as respondents are unaware that some of their practices could be included. For example, people who provide unpaid care for others rarely state this in informal work surveys. What is clear, however, is that non-formal work is not decreasing in relevance: as Table 3 shows, in relation to the percentage of total work time devoted to unpaid work many major economies are moving towards informalisation.

Thus it can be seen that the formalisation and commodification theses are rather problematic. Not only do they ignore the fact that the informal economy is still significant but they also take a very narrow view on what constitutes economic activity. The following section demonstrates the wide variety of informal work practices, and some of the motivations behind them, in operation today.

The spectrum of informal work

As noted above, work is often split into a binary division, formal and informal. Such a narrow definition is very unhelpful when conceptualising informal practices, as it often leads to the assumption that it is only referring to ‘cash in hand’ work. However, forms of informal work are much broader than this. Discounting illegal activities the spectrum of informal practices includes unpaid work, volunteering, the exchange of goods, intergenerational transfers, mutual aid, ‘not for profit’ schemes, subsistence production (which includes not only growing your own food but also making/repairing clothes, etc), informal micro-enterprises and, of course, ‘cash in hand’ work. Gibson-Graham (two prominent geographers who critiqued the nature of the formal economy from a feminist perspective) developed an ‘iceberg’ analogy to show the diversity of the economy beyond the formal.

Within many of these practices profit is not the main goal, if it is a goal at all. Environmental and social justice concerns are often given priority and there is a sense that people wish to operate outside the mainstream economy. There are many reasons why people wish to do so. Of course the state, and most economists, would argue that people undertake such actions simply to avoid tax and/or that people from economically marginalised communities have no choice but to undertake such work. Again we can see that binary divisions are in operation (tax payment/avoidance, rich/poor); however, the motivations for engaging in such practices are far more diverse. Williams and Windebank have shown that in many instances it is those in higher income brackets who undertake cash in hand work (both as consumers and providers) as a means of increasing their income. Furthermore, it is not just about saving money. While the reduced cost of cash in hand work is a major attraction, other issues, such as reliability or not being able to afford the formal price, are important.

Enterprise formation is a major driver of the informal economy and again it is assumed that firms that operate in this manner are doing so solely to avoid taxation payments. Many micro-enterprises operate informally in the first instance, as the entrepreneur wants to see if the idea will work and become profitable before taking the step into the formal sphere. This is mainly due to the bureaucracy, time and costs involved in registering a formal firm. Migrants, for example, might find it difficult to obtain the information needed to register a firm or they might be unsure of the length of time they will be in the region. If the firm does become a success then the initial period of informality becomes a barrier to formalisation, as the entrepreneur might be unable to pay back taxes or is fearful of prosecution. Often enterprises that are not motivated by profit do not see the reason for formal registration as they do not want to spend time filling out forms or to be monitored by the state.

At the household level again there are many motivations for undertaking informal practices. Often it can be to save money; for example, there has been a reported increase in domestic food production in response to the recent rises in food prices. But in reality the motivations go much deeper than this. Growing one’s own food can have environmental and social considerations as well as cost benefits. It is also reported that there is a significant increase in intergenerational transfers and mutual aid, for example, parents helping their children raise a deposit for their first home or helping out with repairs. Although services such as childcare and household repairs are increasingly commoditised (right word??) many people prefer to keep such services within their social networks. Again the issue of cost is important but people also wish to ‘employ’ people they know and to use such exchanges as a way of building their social capital. For example, if you undertake some unpaid work for an acquaintance then they will be obliged to do some for you in return in the future. There is evidence that informal intergenerational support is increasing with young adults increasingly dependent on their parents. A study in the USA by the Institute of Social Research, found that between the ages of 18 and 34, young adults receive, on average, $38,000 in cash transfers, and perhaps more surprisingly, the equivalent of two years worth of full time labour. These figures, the researchers found, have increased dramatically over recent years.

Unpaid work within the home must also be considered within this spectrum. Such activities can take many forms such as childcare, caring and household jobs. While there has been some commodification of these processes, with, for example, an increase in ‘live-in childcare’ it is still not the norm. It is common for friends to group together to provide childcare to allow the other members to undertake formal work, an unofficial form of kindergarten, and there is an observed rise in the number of people providing ‘long distance granny nanny’ assistance. A time use survey conducted in 2005 by the Office of National Statistics found that on average people in Great Britain spent 142 minutes per day on unpaid housework. The survey found that 77% of men and 92% of women spent time each day undertaking such practices. This demonstrates both the gendered aspect of this informal economy and its importance to households.

Unpaid care giving provides perhaps the clearest example of the scale, and importance, of the informal economy within households. The Carers UK organisation estimates that almost six million people provide unpaid care within the UK and that the number grows by over 6,000 people every day. Buckner and Yeandle (2007) have calculated that this informal care giving has an economic value of over £87 billion per year. This is considerably more than the cost of formal health care in the UK with the cost of the National Health Service audited at £81 billion for 2006/7. Thus there is clear link between the formal and informal economies as the state, and the tax payer, would find it extremely difficult to provide health care without this informal support. As one of their interviewees states ’society would collapse without carers …’.

Volunteering outside the home is also an important factor in the relationships between the formal and informal economies. The 2001 Home Office Citizenship Survey found that 39% of people had volunteered formally in the previous 12 months and that 67% had done so informally. These are obviously significant figures and again demonstrate that for many people the formal economy is not their sole sphere of activity. The Community Service Volunteers organisation, applying the minimum wage to the unpaid work their volunteers undertook, estimated that the commodified value of their unpaid work was over £28 million in 2006/7, a significant input into local communities.

This necessarily brief overview of the forms of informal economic practices demonstrates that rather than a formal/informal economy there exists, as noted by Gibson-Graham in table below, a ‘diverse economy’. Many individuals/households employ a ‘livelihood jigsaw’ that comprises a range of both formal and informal practices. This is not a static relationship, as people move in and out of formal and informal spheres on a constant basis. However, it is clear that the informal economy is of vital importance to many people and often it provides the platform from which individuals are enabled to operate in the formal economy.

Sites of resistance or exploitation?

Although the above discussions detail the often positive aspects of informal work practices, when moving away from the traditional formal/informal definition care must be taken not to over romanticise informal work. Within the social sciences there is a trend to see informal work as an alternative, or resistance, to capitalism. While for some people this might be the case, for the majority of people the formal sphere still plays an important role in their everyday lives. By merely highlighting the positive another over-simplified dichotomy is put in place. As Smith and Stenning (2006, p3) state, ‘existing work on diverse economies … runs the risk of failing to problematize the forms of exploitation and inequality within the alternative, “non-capitalist” economies, despite theoretical cautions to the contrary’. Thus it is even more important here to realise that informal economies take many forms. Many of the practices described above can often be personally rewarding but they take up a great deal of time and, particularly in the case of care giving, there is little support and relief.

In many cases people wish to move their informal work into the formal sphere. Although intuitively it might seem a positive to avoid tax payments, in reality it provides many barriers. Such workers, or entrepreneurs, find it difficult to obtain credit and the lack of social security is a constant worry. In a similar theme it must also be remembered that in numerous cases workers have little choice but to work in an informal manner due to the actions of their employers. It might be that they are forced to accept cash in hand wages so the employer can avoid payroll taxes, or that informal payments are demanded to secure employment. The negative aspects of such work are numerous. Firstly, the worker has very little long-term security as he/she can be dismissed at will and there is no recourse if wage payments are not made. Secondly, such work is often exploitative, characterised by long working hours with no holiday or sick pay entitlements. Migrant workers might find that large deductions are made from their wages for their accommodation or they find themselves ‘tied’ to an employer to repay a transport or arrangement fee. Perhaps most seriously, however, is that such work often breaches Health and Safety regulations and is not subject to inspections. This can often lead to tragedy such as the deaths of twenty three Chinese cockle pickers in Morecombe Bay. While this is an extreme example, across the globe vast swathes of production are undertaken by economically marginalised ’sweatshop’ workers in dangerous conditions. By no stretch of the imagination could any of this paid informal work be construed as an alternative to capitalism in a positive way.

This is not to say that all informal work is negative. For many people it does provide a positive alternative to the formal sphere, be it for economic, ideological or environmental reasons. However, these positive/negative aspects again demonstrate the need for a much broader approach to the relationships between formal and informal spheres.

Virtual economies

In recent times new phenomena have developed in the informal economies – one of the most visible has been the rise of the car boot sale. This is semi-commodified as people have to pay for a pitch but the sale of goods is informal. This has also coincided with an increase in ’second hand’ shops on the high street – either for charity, exchange or sometimes profit.

Increasing internet use has led to the rise of sites such as eBay where people can sell goods on an informal basis. Often though such sites become mirrors of the formal economy with people setting up virtual shops – though of course one can speculate how much of the trading is still done informally (ie no tax is paid). There are numerous sites, however, dedicated to unpaid exchange and informal selling such as Craig’s list and Freecycle which demonstrate the importance of informal economies within virtual communities.

An interesting link between informal and formal economies is provided by online virtual world games such as Second Life, Entropia Universe and IMVU, for example, whereby currency earned in the game can be transferred out and converted to real currency – thus allowing people to earn money in virtual worlds. Conversely, items for game play, such as virtual ‘clothing’, ‘weapons’ etc can be purchased online on sites like eBay and transferred into virtual worlds. Also there is evidence of people being paid to play games in order to accrue experience and items for their ‘employee’ – thus the distinction between virtual and real formal/informal economies is becoming increasingly blurred. Furthermore, many real world firms are setting up online in Second Life, as are advertisers, etc. Universities also have a presence both in order to attract new students and teach current ones – therefore an informal space can easily become a formal site of commerce. Of course informal real world activities such as the distribution of pornography also take place in virtual worlds.

Probable futures

As the above has demonstrated, the informal economy is much more than merely a leftover from a previous time. It is clearly still of importance to many households and there is little evidence that it is declining in size. Given that informal economies have flourished during an era of rapid globalisation and the alleged commodification of everyday life, there is no reason to assume that they will diminish in importance over the next twenty-five years. If the current ‘credit crunch’ leads to a long period of recession then it can be expected to grow. This might be linked to formal work, such as ‘cash in hand’ work, in order to maximum household income. More likely, however, it will involve practices such as domestically produced food, the mending or making of clothes and an increase in domestic work, caring and childcare. Even when the economy grows rapidly as during the period from the early 1990s to 2007, this sustained economic growth has not led to a decrease in informal activity.

Despite the fact that the informal economy is not going to disappear it is probable that the state will continue to struggle to conceptualise the various forms of informal work and their relationship to the formal economy. This is somewhat understandable given the negative connotations of some spheres of the informal economy, as discussed above, and the fact that in certain situations it is exploitative, dangerous and illegal. Therefore, the relationship between the formal and informal will continue to be seen in binary terms, positive and negative respectively, for the foreseeable future. It would be very hard, for example, for any government to state that micro-entrepreneurs who are working ‘off the books’ have a positive impact upon the formal economy. Hence it is probable that government policy will concentrate on ’stick’ methods for trying to contain the informal economy, such as penalties for ‘cash in hand’ work and fines for previous tax evasion, rather than using incentives, such as ‘forgiveness’ for the previous non-payment of tax or ‘tax free’ or ‘tax deferment’ periods, to encourage micro-enterprises to move into the formal sphere.

Demographic changes will also impact upon the nature of informal economies. As Europe’s population ages then more people will perform unpaid caring roles as parents and friends require assistance in their later life stages. Furthermore, as life expectancy increases people will have more time to devote to informal activities post-retirement age. This will see an increase in grandparents providing childcare and other assistance to their children. Intergenerational transfers between parents and children will become even more important as student debt levels increase and first-time buyers continue to struggle to raise a deposit to purchase a house. Therefore, it is probable that children will remain at home for longer, often returning after university, receiving the informal support of their parents. This trend can also be seen in the rise of what is termed ‘helicopter parenting’ where the recent rise in communication technology has made it much easier for parents to remain in contact with their children, and conversely, children find it much easier to contact their parents if they need their support or a job done.

It is probable that there will be a growth in the importance of informal economies in, and around, virtual worlds. This will involve the growth of games such as Second Life and Entropia and the continuing importance of social networking sites. Sites such as Facebook will be used to share information and to alert people to opportunities in both the formal and informal economies. As environmental concerns grow over the next 25 years, the recycling and sharing of goods, such as the gifting of unwanted goods or car-pooling, will become increasingly common and will be facilitated by online communities and websites. Although the expected rise in home working, as a result of more effective ICT, has not materialised it can be expected that in 25 years time more people will be able to work from home. This, if working time does not increase correspondingly, will reduce the amount of time required for formal work (for instance, commuting will no longer add to the working day), leaving people with more time for leisure and informal activities. Such home working will also spur the creation of consultancies and micro-enterprises, which may begin in an informal fashion.

On a more negative note, if economic polarisation continues to grow at current rates then over the next twenty-five years increasing numbers of people will turn to informal economies in order to ensure the economic security of their household. This will be a mix of illegal and legal activities and will see people move even further from the formal sphere, and will possibly see an increase in levels of exploitation and unsafe working conditions.

Preferable futures

The most preferable vision is one where the meta-narratives surrounding the informal economy are broken down. It is hoped that there is a more widespread realisation that there is a wide spectrum of informal activities and that there are both positive and negative aspects to many of the practices. Perhaps the most important recognition is that in many cases the informal economy supports the formal economy. For example, without informal childcare some people would be unable to undertake formal work. It must also be realised that there is a deep social aspect to many informal practices that strengthen networks and often fulfil the formal role of the state, such as unpaid care giving.

If the varied nature of the informal is unpacked then it will be much easier to develop appropriate blanket policy responses rather than a ‘catch all’ approach. At one end of the spectrum, dangerous, criminal and large-scale informal activities such as drug and people smuggling should, obviously, be targeted with the full force of the law, while at the same time informal micro-enterprises should be incentivised into moving into the formal sphere. This could be facilitated by various policy measures such as a longer period where they can go unregistered, tax forgiveness or deferment, greater support, advice centres, access to accountants and tax advisors, etc.

A shift in culture towards rewarding entrepreneurship would also support such measures. For example, in the USA and Japan, entrepreneurs and innovators have a much higher public standing and as a result there is more of an entrepreneurial culture. The informal economy has an important role here as there is much less risk in operating informally in the gestation period of an enterprise – ie less money is invested, payments/time for registration are much lower. Furthermore, less punitive bankruptcy laws (and reduced stigma, which would arise from the culture change) would encourage people to take the steps into entrepreneurship and to try out ideas in the informal sphere before moving them into the formal.

In this preferable future employers who force employees into informal practices are clamped down upon, allowing those who wish their work to be formalised to do so. Furthermore, those undertaking informal work to support those in formal work, such as childcare or care provision, should have their efforts recognised and rewarded. This could be through direct payments or tax credits. Moving these roles into a more formal sphere would allow for training and support to be given. This is particularly important for those undertaking such work, such as school age children supporting parents. Increased social support facilities, such as childcare, would allow people to undertake formal work who otherwise would not have the time to do so – or who would be spending so much of their formal income on support as to not make it worthwhile to do so.

The preferable future would harness a more socially orientated economic model, where profit is not the main goal, which would assist all sections of society and harness the activities of both the formal and informal spheres. Volunteering and mutual aid would be promoted as key functions of society and Local Exchange Trading schemes (LETs) would flourish. While some of these actions might seem utopian in thinking and would cost the state money, the increase in tax revenue from the formalisation of informal enterprises would go some way to covering these costs. In short, informal economies are here to stay and the preferable future will be one that is able to harness their positive aspects for all of society.

The implications of the growth of the informal economy on education

The informal economy has a number of implications for education, especially in relation to lifelong learning. It can be argued that within schools there needs to be more discussion on the nature of informal economies and work. This would help promote the positive aspects of practices such as volunteering, mutual aid and the role of family and friendship networks in everyday life. On a more practical note as discussed above, there are a significant number of school age children who have to provide care to family members. The Education Network estimated in 2005 that there were around 175,000 school children who are devoting a significant amount of their time to caring for others. The Princess Trust for Young Carers notes that there are many problems that these carers face, such as a lack of time to do school work, limited social opportunities, unhealthy lifestyles (such as a lack of sleep due to night time care or limited shopping opportunities), amongst many others. All of these issues impact on their ability to enter the formal workplace when they leave school. While there is some attention paid to this problem there needs to be a greater understanding of the issue; for example, some schools believe no one attending their institution has to perform these roles.

Within the Higher Education sector, especially in Business and Management Schools, more attention needs to be paid to the varied nature of the informal economy. Business education would be an ideal place to start a broader rethinking of the ways in which informal economies could be drawn into the formal spheres. For example, entrepreneurs and managers in the formal sphere act as mentors to micro-enterprises, providing guidance on how they can formalise their work.

Arguably the biggest implication of the growth in informal economies on the education sector is in relation to lifelong learning. Workers in the informal economy develop many important skills that are relevant to the formal economy but often they are not recognised by formal employers. Furthermore, it can be difficult for informal workers to access courses aimed at developing different skill sets, for example the use of ICT in the workplace. While the government has set up numerous schemes aimed at helping people develop such skills they are often aimed at people who are not in work. This means it can be difficult for people who are working informally to access them, for example, because of a lack of time or childcare problems. This issue has been identified by the International Labour Organisation, which argues that such training must fulfil the following criteria:

• Training must be demand-driven
• Training must be targeted and needs-led
• Skills training for the informal economy needs to go beyond technical skills training
• Training has to be short, modest, and competency based
• Training should recognize complex livelihoods
• Training should be monitored and evaluated on an ongoing basis
• Trainers themselves should be adequately trained and capable of delivering quality training
• Both public and private training providers have important roles to play
• The level of skill adaptation impacts on the extent to which new technologies can increase productivity in the informal economy.

Another form of education/training that informal micro-enterprises would benefit from is the provision of centres that could provide confidential guidance on the procedures needed to move into the formal economy. This would include, for example, advice on tax, employment rights, and health and safety regulations. The confidential nature of such guidance would encourage entrepreneurs to come forward without the fear of penalties.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

Norwegian report on informal work

see Gershuny,2000; ILO, 2002a, b; Schneider and Enste, 2000; Williams, 2004a, b, 2005a, b; Williams and Windebank, 1999a, b)

2315 Schneider, F., Shadow Economies and Corruption All Over the World: What Do We Really Know?

Schneider, F., (2002) The Size and Development of the Shadow Economies of 22 Transition and 21 OECD Countries

http://www.cinterfor.org.uy/public/english/region/ampro/cinterfor/temas/informal/

On the Frontier of Adulthood: Theory, Research, and Public Policy (MacArthur Foundation Series) (Hardcover) by Richard A. Settersten Jr. (Editor), Frank F. Furstenberg Jr. (Editor), Ruben G. Rumbaut (Editor)

listen to http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/02/2008_19_thu.shtml

Oughton, E., Wheelock, J. and Baines, S. (2003) ”Micro-businesses and Social Inclusion in

Rural Households: A Comparative Analysis,” Sociologia Ruralis 43(4): 331-348

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/north_east/4088650.stm

Bender, 2004; Castree et al, 2004; Espenshade, 2004; Hapke, 2004; A. Ross, 2004; R. Ross, 2004

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/apr/13/schools.children

http://www.carers.org/professionals/young-carers/articles/transitions-to-adulthood-for-carers,3167,PR.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2005/apr/13/schools.children http://www.t-e-n.co.uk/index.php

http://www.jrf.org.uk/bookshop/details.asp?pubID=793

There appears to be a global consensus that argues for radical change in education, expressed as a belief that education is no longer fit for purpose. One strand of this draws on developments in neuroscience and the implications for learning and pedagogy. The chief argument here seems to be based on the thesis that the current design of schooling and the teaching and learning approaches which operate within formal settings are inappropriate or inefficient for children and young people’s learning. Certainly this has popular and intuitive appeal. ‘Brain-based’ and ‘brain-friendly’ approaches seem persuasive to the profession looking to enthuse and motivate their charges with the latest techniques inspired by scientific research (Goswami, 2006). After all who would argue for unscientific teaching or learning which was unfriendly to the brain? (For a more philosophical analysis of the relationship between neuroscience and learning see Davis, 2004.)

Another caucus in this consensus considers changes in technology and the rapid pace of development in society, arguing that the new ‘information age’ requires different skills for the workforce. The ability to adapt and retrain is central to the economic competitiveness of the nation as different skills are required in response to market forces. At the most radical its vision of the future is “de-schooled” (Illich, 1973) where learners acquire knowledge and skills in more informal settings and spaces over the course of their lives as required. The technophiles see ICT as contributing to this by enabling flexible “anytime, anywhere” learning with e-learning, ubiquitous internet access and “just in time” cyber-learning (Borgman et al, 2008). This has created a coalition of what might be called the new progressives, or Cuban’s (1993) ‘neoprogressives’ who are scientifically and technologically literate, making a persuasive case for radical change in education.

The nature of the learning environment is also central to these arguments, with a view that contemporary learning spaces are not appropriate or effective for learning. However the consensus does not hold as far as the solution to these problems. Some argue for change within schooling and formal learning environments to make them more learner- (or brain-) friendly, with others arguing that formal learning will become redundant and replaced by the flexibility and availability of information through technology.

Sections of the educational research community are also part of this broad consensus, though predictably less unified, but similarly arguing for change in education from differing perspectives from theory and research. Drawing on ideas such as radical pedagogy, constructivism, meta-cognition, situated learning and formative assessment they advocate change in schooling according to their particular personal penchant, like Aesop’s fable of the three tradesmen, who each argued that their own particular craft was essential to the defence of their city – from the bricklayer to the cobbler!

From Gutenberg to Google: plus ça change?

There have always been calls for education to change however. Each technological advance seems to have heralded the demise of the teacher and current forms of educational organisation, from the arrival of the printing press to motion pictures, with one of the wittiest analyses of this crafted by Harold Benjamin in 1939, using the sobriquet J. Abner Peddiwell:

“The wise old men were indignant. Their kindly smiles faded. “If you had any education yourself,” they said severely, “you would know that the essence of true education is timelessness. It is something that endures through changing conditions like a solid rock standing squarely and firmly in the middle of a raging torrent. You must know that there are some eternal verities, and the saber-tooth curriculum is one of them!”"

Benjamin, 1939

Through his satire he argued for the idea of learning to learn (or at least flexible and transferable Neolithic skills) as an important dimension of any curriculum. There are other historical instances of calls to reform education. John Dewey and the so-called progressive movement of the early 20^th century can be seen as a reaction to social and cultural changes in North America and the challenge of urbanisation and industrialisation (Ryan, 1997). Contemporaries of Dewey also saw technology (and multimedia) as the future of education:

On the average we get about two percent efficiency out of schoolbooks as they are written today. The education of the future, as I see it, will be conducted through the medium of the motion picture … where it should be possible to obtain one hundred percent efficiency.

(Thomas Edison, speaking in 1922, cited in Cuban, 1986)

What we need to decide for the present time is whether the current pace and scale of change is, on this occasion, of a sufficiently different degree or scale, or whether is this is another occasion when technology meets pedagogy, and, to paraphrase Larry Cuban (1992), pedagogy wins again. Certainly the way we interact with information is different in terms of quality and especially the quantity of information which is now easily accessible. Information on its own is not the same as knowledge, however, as the latter has a personal quality involving interpretation and meaning (Hendricks, 2005) which, in turn, pre-supposes a purpose in acquiring and using the information. The range and types of information are clearly changing with the advent of digital literacies, but these are not replacing other literacies. Rather they are overlaying them and increasing the complexity of what can and needs to be learned with the demands of multi-layered meanings and more complex semiotic systems (Kress, 2003).

So what is learning to learn?

In one sense learning to learn is a trivial idea, in that we all learn to learn. Humans have evolved to learn effectively by imitation and to be good at learning and acquiring new skills and knowledge. Just consider the rapid development in skills and knowledge from infancy through childhood. As social creatures the desire to learn to learn through participating is part of our early development (Berk, 2008). The concept of learning to learn has been extended in recent years, however, and encompasses the notion that we will need to become more effective, more efficient and more resilient learners due to the increasing pace of technological and cultural change; a response to Toffler’s (1970) Future Shock, perhaps. This will mean that we will need to learn for most of our lifespan in order to survive in a changing workplace and wider world. A range of more formal definitions of learning to learn exists, drawing on ideas of metacognition, thinking skills, self-regulation, self-efficacy and self-esteem (see, for example, Claxton, 2002). It is a well-used phrase in contemporary educational debates around the world, but the idea lacks conceptual clarity. In the UK, it is sometimes equated with lifelong learning or at least the foundational elements in lifelong learning skills (Cornford, 2002). It is widely acknowledged to require the development of meta-cognitive skills and techniques (Sternberg, 1998) as well as the development of self-regulation (Hautamaki et al, 2002) and independence more broadly (Rademacher, 2004). In policy terms, learning to learn is firmly part of the skills agenda supporting employability and increased economic competitiveness (Rawson, 2000), as we saw in the political appropriation of the term above. The complexity of what is involved can perhaps best be captured in the working definition used by Hargreaves (2005): “learning to learn is not a single entity or skill, but a family of learning practices that enhance one’s capacity to learn.” With this emphasis on learning practices, rather than a more individual or psychological description on skills or even a focus on personal dispositions (eg Perkins et al, 1993; Claxton and Carr, 2005) the academic focus has shifted towards learning activities and communities of practice (eg Wenger, 1998) as outlined in some of the publications from the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP): see, for example James et al (2007). The implications are therefore that learning to learn can best be seen as a multi-dimensional concept involving an understanding of the learning identities which develop over time and through and in response to different situations and contexts (Sfard, 2005) and which involves the development of specific skills and knowledge as well as broader attitudes and dispositions to learning.

Claxton’s four generations of ‘teaching learning’ (Claxton, 2004) provide a helpful way of distinguishing some of the practices that can often be clustered under the general banner of learning to learn in practice.

Table 1: Adapted from Claxton’s (2004) four generations of teaching learning

In the UK, the Campaign for Learning, a national charitable organisation, has been supporting a Learning to Learn in Schools research programme since 2000 (Higgins et al, 2007) over four phases of research. Phases 1 and 2 mainly investigated Claxton’s third generation of learning to learn, with teachers in primary and secondary schools researching ideas such as emotional intelligence, brain-based learning and learning styles. Phases 3 and 4 have tried to integrate teacher and learner enquiry as part of an active process of learning as central to the process of education (Baumfield and Higgins, in press). The concept of learning to learn is based on a dispositions framework (readiness, resourcefulness, resilience, reflectiveness, responsibility) with an overarching definition of learning to learn as:

… a process of discovery about learning. It involves a set of principles and skills which, if understood and used, help learners learn more effectively and so become learners for life. At its heart is the belief that learning is learnable.

(Higgins et al, 2007 p8)

A similar development with remarkable parallels to this project which developed independently on the other side of the globe can be found in South Australia (DECS, 2005). This also started from the view that there is scientific evidence which can inform learning, but evolved a broadly similar model of professional inquiry and research to develop teaching and learning in schools. The outcomes valued as part of this project include learners:

• exercising choice responsibly
• using meta-cognitive skills
• taking responsibility for learning
• accepting alternative viewpoints
• working with greater persistence
• expressing greater hope for a future with expanded opportunities
• experiencing improved progression in site-based programs
• able to articulate their learning
• self-assessing their learning.

These principles draw on a well-established set of ideas which see educational systems as ‘loosely coupled’ (Goldspink, 2007) and recent advances in the application of complex systems concepts to organizational management (DECS, 2005). These concepts, and the UK and South Australian examples, suggest some possible benefits from using self-organizational properties to improve institutional learning. Unlike more rationalist management and market approaches, this alternative model brings to the fore the need for a focus on people and relationships as key aspects of learning rather than structures or centrally determined standards for conformity (Goldspink, 2003). Both approaches emphasise the role of teachers and professional inquiry as part of learning to learn in schools in order to ensure that the difficult balance between complex and sometimes competing educational aims is achieved.

A team based at Bristol University (Deakin-Crick et al, 2004) has developed a research-based approach to learning to learn based on a concept of learning power. The aim was to identify the characteristics and qualities of effective lifelong learners and to develop tools and strategies for tracking, evaluating and recording people’s growth as effective real-life learners. Learning power was defined as: “A complex mix of dispositions, lived experiences, social relations, values, attitudes and beliefs that coalesce to shape the nature of an individual’s engagement with any particular learning opportunity (Deakin-Crick et al, 2004 p247).

The assessment of these is through the “Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory” (ELLI) with inter-related aspects of learning beliefs and attitudes about learning. Those whose profile is low on these dimensions appear to be fragile and dependent as learners. Strategic awareness appears to be a learned dimension or something which can be developed and taught over time, and in some ways seems to work as the individual’s monitoring of the other dimensions. These ELLI learning dimensions appear to be a reflection of the formal curriculum in that they are affected by all subjects and disciplines in the classroom and beyond (Deakin-Crick et al. 2007). What is clear from the data gathered from learners of different ages is that over time, and throughout the course of formal schooling, students tend to become less confident on all of the learning dimensions, especially in terms of creativity. At the same time they tend to become more dependent and fragile as learners. This suggests that in the current system, and at the present time, learning to learn and the development of an increased confidence in one’s own learning capabilities is hard to achieve.

Similar to the Campaign for Learning and South Australian projects, a school-based development and research approach involved teachers working with these learning dimensions to understand how they might be helpful to promote learners’ self-awareness and confidence in the classroom. They also used this information to decide on new approaches to develop students’ learning power. These interventions made a difference to students’ learning power profiles after two terms. They became more resilient and more strategically aware of their own learning and less dependent and fragile. There were also some indications that students achieved more in terms of traditional learning outcomes (Deakin-Crick et al, 2007).

The key themes underpinning all of these interventions into learning to learn were the development of teachers’ professional vision and values, supporting positive interpersonal relationships in both classrooms and staffrooms involving trust, affirmation and challenge (Hall et al, 2006). Other common features included the quality of dialogue and discussion and the use and development of terminology and language to talk specifically about learning. A further similarity is in the focus on dispositions (rather than learning objectives) as a way to ensure some of the longer term goals and aims of education are not drowned by short term targets and assessments.

Some similar aspects of assessment and engagement for students and the situational nature of learning also form a central feature of the UK’s Teaching and Learning Research Programme’s Learning How to Learn project. This research focused on the how (rather than the what) and took a narrower view of learning within the curriculum and the development of students’ understanding of their academic learning through a focus on formative assessment and feedback in classrooms (Sadler, 1998; Black and Wiliam, 2006). Again key issues such as metacognition and self-regulation by students and the importance of engaging teachers in the process are central to the research (James et al, 2007).

In the European Union learning to learn is one of the key generic or ‘transversal’ competences agreed as part of the Lisbon framework in 2000 for international progress towards shared goals, and which developed into the European Reference framework of key competences (Fredricksson and Hoskins, 2007; Hoskins and Fredricksson, 2008). Competences have emerged as a significant educational outcome as a result of the demand from policymakers to identify what individual learning outcomes are needed for a citizen to contribute to a modern globalised society, both economically and democratically. The idea of learning outcomes as competences is a blend of the usually separate components of knowledge, skills, attitudes and values. Competences are usually assessed in relation to real-life tasks in terms of being able to do things effectively rather than reproduce knowledge passed from one generation to the next (Hoskins and Deakin Crick, 2008) emphasising the importance of an active and first-person perspective. Again the rationale is based on a conviction that this conception of knowledge will be the most useful for a rapidly changing technological and globalised world, where it is not possible to predict what knowledge will be needed in the next five or ten years, let alone for a lifetime.

“… it takes a holistic notion of the individual combining the values, attitudes of the individual such as the desire to learn from others in interaction and the valuing of different knowledge with the cognitive processes of building on prior learning and the capacity to develop strategies and solve problems to learn something new.”

(Hoskins and Fredriksson, 2008, p11)

At the heart of the European conception of learning to learn is the changing nature of knowledge as a result of technological innovation, and the importance of economic competitiveness with an essential component of a student’s education seen as the ability to learn to learn effectively. (For an analysis of developments across Europe see, for example, Moreno and Martin (2007), or for a broader overview see Fredricksson and Hoskins, 2007) There is a further dimension to the European learning to learn agenda, however, in the development of indicators or assessments to track progress towards these objectives. Whilst this is understandable from a political perspective, from an educational viewpoint it raises the possibility of high-stakes assessments (Nichols et al, 2006) and a scenario of learning to learn tests and performance monitoring. The assessment of such competences at national and international level is likely to influence the development of learning to learn in practice, and the greater the stakes the more profound the impact, though the wider impact is likely to be complex (Au, 2007).

At a more profound level the concept of learning to learn is an epistemological one and some of the tensions in the application of the term relate to different understandings of the nature of knowledge and learning. Learning to learn emphasises the process of learning or of coming to know and implies a difference in the quality of knowledge achieved through purposeful activity on the part of the learner. As such it aligns closely with the philosophies of writers such as Dewey, Merleau-Ponty and Freire in terms of the relationship between the learner and what is learned. It emphasises the relationship between the knower and the known not so much as separable, but integrated in the same way that dancing creates both the dancers and the dance itself (Gill, 1993): knowing is an interaction or transaction between the knower and the known (Dewey and Bentley, 1949). Much of what is discussed as learning equates rather to the retention of information assessed through the application of specific academic skills with a logical separation of knowing and known. Conceptually this is difficult, as such acquired information can only really be described as knowledge once it is applied actively. An important facet of this relational quality of knowing is dialogue and interaction, or the application of these ideas creatively by the learner in expressing their understanding through discussion. Of course, Dewey would argue that this is still a limited conception of knowledge, as such activity could still be somewhat artificial and it is only valid once such information is applied in some purposeful inquiry.

If one is not able to estimate wisely what is relevant to the interpretation of a given perplexing or doubtful issue, it avails little that arduous learning has built up a large stock of concepts. For learning is not wisdom; information does not guarantee good judgement.

(Dewey, 1910, p106)

A version for the 21^st century might replace “arduous learning” with “diligent searching” and “concepts” with “internet weblinks“, but the underlying point remains the same. Learning is about developing the quality of one’s judgement and the facility to use the skills, knowledge or understanding in order to resolve a challenge or problematic situation, but above all this is through action. Such judgements are refined through experience and can be supported with the guidance of a teacher or mentor but are dependent upon transactional inquiry. The nature and availability of information changes the skills and judgements required, but does not alter the challenge of translating information into active knowledge, except perhaps that the increasing scope and scale of available information may increase the complexity of the challenge.

This intrinsically evolutionary and pragmatic stance towards knowledge conceives it as neither ideal or pre-given but discovered in purposeful action. ‘Knowing’, from this viewpoint, is always a creative act. Creativity in this sense includes how a child learns to crawl as well as how a musician composes a song. For Dewey, effective learning through expressive or purposeful action was not a gradual approximation to some ideal concept or form or any abstract proposition. It is knowledge because, like good science, it opens up creative possibilities for new ways of perceiving the world and for taking action within and upon it. This conception of knowing and learning seems more appropriate for a rapidly changing technological world where information is widely available, but it is learning, and in learning to learn what information to apply and how to apply it purposefully, that becomes the crucial issue.

The physical architecture and learning to learn

The second theme in this chapter is the nature of physical settings and locations for learning. In the development of learning to learn in schools there has often been a focus on the learning environment and the influence that this has on learners. This has been evident in teachers’ focus on creating appropriate conditions, with aspects such as ambient music and access to water. This has its most dramatic expression in the UK’s ambitious Building Schools for the Future Programme (BSF) which will see a £45 billion investment which aims to rebuild or renew 3,500 state secondary schools over the next 15 years. A key aim is to create “21st-century environments that will inspire new ways of learning” (CABE, 2007). This section therefore turns to considering the importance of learning spaces and environments, and the question of how designing spaces for learning might differ from spaces for learning to learn. Although the physical aspects of learning environments have effects on both teachers and learners, these are not as profound or direct as most people believe (Woolner et al, 2007). The most important aspects are poor temperature control, bad lighting, poor air quality and acoustics, all of which have negative effects on concentration, mood, wellbeing, attendance and, ultimately, attainment. It is therefore important to ensure that these aspects meet a basic level of adequacy. For the most part this can be achieved simply by conforming to the appropriate standards and regulations, which at least recently were not being achieved by a quarter of secondary schools (Ofsted, 2001). However, the overall relationship between aspects of the physical environment on learning is hard to identify. In a review of the environmental effects in education, Weinstein (1979) was quite cautious about any impact on learning. She concluded that although the ‘weight of the evidence suggests that design features can have a significant influence on students’ general behaviour … and on their attitudes’ (1979, p584), it is difficult to find reliable evidence of a definite effect on achievement. (1979, p599). More recent reviews have tended to be more optimistic about positive evidence for direct as well as indirect effects of the environment (see, for example, Moore and Lackney, 1993), yet many of these effects relate poor performance in schools with poor environments: an accurate and a significant correlation perhaps (eg Schneider, 2002; Young et al, 2003), but not necessarily a causal connection. Implications for designing spaces and planning for learning are much more speculative. Beyond the advisability of meeting basic standards, there is not enough evidence to give clear guidance to policy makers, planners or teachers on how to design for learning or to evaluate the relative value for money of different design initiatives. There are a small number of physical improvements to the environment which are related to improvements in attainment, but once the environment reaches a reasonable standard, a complex interaction of effects comes into play (Woolner et al, 2007) and it is hard to make specific recommendations without deciding on the particular learning purposes for which a space will be used.

Learning environments can also be thought of as composed of different dimensions: the physical, social and the cultural (Horne-Martin, 2004). Although the major concern of those planning and building schools or other learning spaces tends to be the physical elements, any hopes for the effect of changes in the physical environment on learning must be based on an understanding of this complexity of learning spaces. Schools are systems in which the physical architecture and environment is one of many interacting factors, including the pedagogical, socio-cultural, curricular, motivational and socio-economic. Getzels (1975) suggested that the changes in the typical United States classroom, from rows of desks in a rectangular room through a circle of tables to open classrooms, reflect changes in the cultural conception of learning. This relates to the idea of the symbolic meaning of a particular environment (Proshansky and Wolfe, 1975; Rivlin and Wolfe, 1985; Maxwell, 2000) and such conceptions are clearly behind attempts to improve or revive through physical regeneration. For example, the headteacher at a recently opened school commented:

‘This is more than just another school in Hackney: it is a symbolic school, an emblem, saying these places should be where children from all backgrounds in inner city areas should come and be successful’ (Ward, 2004).

The relationship between people and their environment is a complex one and any impact from changes to a setting are likely to be produced through a complex causal chain. It is an understanding of these mediating chains that is paramount and must take account of issues relating to ownership, relevance, purpose and permanence, especially in understanding the difference between learning and learning to learn. If positive changes are chosen and made by the teachers and learners who used them, this might then produce further positive changes, whereas negative aspects might cause a cycle of decline. Externally imposed changes, regardless of how beneficial their potential, are likely to have less of an effect than changes brought about through genuine consultation and an inclusive design process. Large-scale investment, particularly that which is heralded as ‘future-proofed’, will necessarily be less organic and rooted in the needs of specific communities than smaller-scale projects.

One of the schools in the Campaign for Learning’s Learning to Learn in Schools project (Higgins et al, 2007) investigated how to create a ‘learning to learn’ classroom by removing all the furniture and equipment and then re-introducing what was needed to support learning and learning to learn. They created learning zones in the classroom to support self-initiated learning in their mixed age Reception and Year 1 classes. However they also reported that there were significant challenges in terms of the curriculum and timetabling. Overall the school was also positive about the impact on children’s creativity and self-esteem but recognised the limits of what they could achieve within current expectations (Furnish and Tonkin, 2004).

It is certainly the case that the built school environment can be altered and is open to change and improvement so that, even if such changes are likely only to have a small and uncertain direct impact on learning these changes can be defended, particularly in schools where the students are disadvantaged in other less immediately alterable ways (eg Moore and Lackney, 1993; Young et al, 2003). ‘Change, for its own sake, can be a stimulating experience’ (Gump (1987, p703) and is potentially catalytic in terms of its effects on learning. The idea that reviewing and trying to change the nature of the learning environment is in itself empowering is discussed by a number of writers (David, 1975; Horne, 1999; Horne-Martin, 2002). This of course needs to be a genuine or authentic process (Dudek, 2000; Clark, 2002). A contemporary text at the time of experimentation with open plan education (IDEA, 1970), argued that all staff need to be involved to realise the potential of the space, while ‘there must be extensive involvement of the parents in the planning as well as in the implementation of the programs; otherwise, the new school is doomed before it is even opened’ (p20).

The ecology of schools is complex, however, and the forces restraining the use of new and flexible spaces in the other direction are also strong. The indications from previous large scale attempts to change schooling are clear and there are obvious lessons from the past (Woolner et al, 2005). The phrase “part of the furniture’ does not mean ‘comfortable’ and taken for granted for nothing. As Rivlin and Wolfe commented ‘It is rare for a person to move a chair once it has been placed-even in one’s own living room’ (1985, p7). It is crucial, therefore, for the growing trend of user involvement in design of learning environments to become embedded in normal practice. Learning to learn may need to involve learning to design or at least configure your learning space.

The key message from this synopsis is that considered and targeted environmental improvement is worthwhile but that the solutions are likely to vary widely across the country and should involve both teachers and learners in developing their understanding of learning spaces. The history of ambitious school building programmes (Woolner et al, 2005) warns us that interactive whiteboards and the spacious glass atria of today could be the typing suites and flat roofs of the middle decades of the 20th century. Overall, the evidence is consistent about the importance of involving those who use the learning spaces in defining and solving design problems in schools. A necessary consequence of this is that design solutions for learning (and learning to learn) should be individualised, organic and local. Indeed, the most successful are likely to be those which are seen as temporary or interim solutions and which have within them elements of flexibility and adaptability for new cohorts of learners and teachers, as new curriculum demands and new challenges enable more effective learning and learning to learn in schools.

The pedagogical architecture for learning to learn

One of the regular features of schooling is the arrangement of one teacher to large groups of learners, usually 20 – 30 in most types of schools. This places constraints on the kinds of interactions which are likely to occur. It typically makes the default pattern of exchange in the classroom very focussed on the teacher. The dominant pattern is where the teacher asks a question, a pupil responds and the teacher gives some kind of evaluative feedback. These exchanges are quite brief, lasting only a few seconds (Sinclair and Coulthard, 1992; Smith et al, 2006) and punctuated with only slightly longer explanations and instructions from the teacher. It has been described as Initiate – Respond – Evaluate/Feedback (I-R-E/F) and has clear advantages in terms of control (Mehan, 1979) as each of the episodes of interaction is started and finished by the teacher. It is therefore an effective way of managing didactic interaction with large numbers of students. The aspirations of those who advocate dialogue about learning (eg Alexander, 2004; Wegerif, 2008) may simply not be realistic unless the ratio of teachers to learners changes significantly. It is possible that the structure of this default pattern of exchange can be re-designed to enable more authentic exchanges using particular teaching strategies and techniques (Leat and Higgins, 2002; Smith and Higgins, 2006). Certainly some changes can be achieved by altering the groupings that students work in, such as through co-operative and collaborative group work (Baines et al, 2007) and by approaches such as peer tutoring (Robinson et al, 2005). Even in these situations however the focus of the interaction is still usually determined or at least managed by the teacher. With learning to learn, learners need the opportunity to initiate and determine the direction of their learning, at least for some of the time, so that their sense of themselves as learners can include a sense of control and self-determination.

One of the characteristics of learning to learn projects in classrooms is the change in focus to include explicit discussion of the process of learning (Deakin-Crick et al, 2007; Higgins et al, 2007; James et al, 2007). Many of the structural features remain similar but teachers create space for learners to talk to each other about learning, rather than simply the learning content. Devices such as role play, storyboarding or cartoon structures (Jones and McMahon, 1994; Wall et al, 2006) may also encourage reflection on learning, as can commentaries on learners’ portfolios, though again the challenge is to ensure the use of these approaches remains authentic rather than part of the ritual exchanges of schooling. An anecdote from a recent visit to a learning to learn classroom may illustrate this. A Year 6 pupil in one of the Campaign for Learning schools was explaining his digital learning portfolio (created using Microsoft’s Powerpoint) to the researchers. He commented incidentally that he was always getting into trouble from the teacher because he was so slow at getting started with adding a new entry, especially as the school year drew to a close, but explained “I like to look through what is in there first so I can see what I did before and what I’ve learned before I add anything new”. The balance between time spent on reflection on one’s progress and completion of learning tasks or even the learner’s recording of that progress may therefore need redressing if learning to learn is to become embedded in the culture of schools. Certainly one of the challenges that teachers acknowledge in developing learning to learn in schools is in finding the time to address it effectively with the competing demands of curriculum coverage and assessment (Higgins et al, 2007).

There is evidence that collaborative use of technology can be beneficial in enabling more authentic dialogue in formal learning situations (Mercer et al, 2004) and in establishing more effective learning interactions between learners. This is both by structuring the interactions (such as through the interface or software design for turn taking or by pacing a sequence of exchanges) and by scaffolding those interactions, such as by choices, prompts and feedback (Wegerif et al, 2003). From this perspective the technology is integrated into the pedagogy as both a physical artefact and a participant in the discourse: both a psychological and a physical tool (Säljö, 1999).

Challenges for the future

A number of further structural aspects of education strongly militate against the changes envisaged by the visionaries of informal, anytime, anywhere learning. Some learning may need to be in formal settings for social and economic reasons. Basic skills of literacy and numeracy will still need to be mastered. Classes of 30 equally inexperienced children may not be the most efficient or effective approach when looked at from the point of view of an individual child, but it may be effective and efficient when viewed from a cultural and societal perspective.

Technological change may have been slow to have an impact on schools and classrooms (Cuban, 1986), but in the UK at least digital technologies are having an more visible impact on classrooms. Becta’s Harnessing Technology report (Becta, 2008) indicates that there is now an average of 18 interactive whiteboards in each primary school and 38 in each secondary schools (compared with none a decade ago). The pupil-computer ratio in primary schools is 14 pupils to each desktop computer and an average of 32 pupils for every laptop. In secondary schools, there were an average of about four pupils for every desktop computer, with an average of over sixty pupils for every laptop. Digital technologies are now very much part of the equipment of schooling.

Technology is, however, very much still in the foreground. It tends to dominate rooms in which it is present and it still requires the space around it to be configured to incorporate it. Three-fifths of teacher respondents agreed that pupils enjoy lessons more if they use ICT than if they do not. The salient point here is that lessons with technology are still a pleasant change from lessons without, even if the actual technology is perhaps a little disappointing from the learners’ perspective (Robinson et al, 2008). In the future it seems likely that technology will be more integrated into the background or the fabric of the learning environment as part of the furniture of schooling. Smaller devices with distributed computing, clouds and wireless networking are likely to be more integral to learning environments in the future, with seamless connections between learners’ personal devices and school technology. Intelligent agents or virtual teaching assistants (Johnson and Rickel, 2000; Ashoori et al, 2007) may be programmed with the likely mistakes and misunderstandings that students can encounter (and perhaps programmed with an adaptive learning algorithm themselves so that they can improve over time).

Whether children will actually sit at home and learn virtually through their avatar in an online virtual learning environment seems at this juncture unlikely, unless this scenario offers significant advantages for particular learners, such as those who cannot attend in person or who have specific personal needs which can be better met in a virtual environment. This is especially true for younger learners who need supervision for physical safety. One of the sociological functions of schooling is to enable their parents and carers to be economically productive. A number of universities already run virtual courses in Second Life, but these courses are aimed at those looking for distance or part-time learning (Berge, 2008). Most learners prefer a face-to-face experience as we are innately social creatures who thrive on social interaction. Virtual social interaction may offer an alternative to no interaction but it is different and not without its challenges (Twining et al, 2007).

What of learning to learn and technology? If learning to learn is about learning to make choices about what to learn as well as how to learn (and furthermore to be aware of how well you have succeeded) in order to develop a confident learning identity over time then technology’s role is clear. It should support the learner in taking responsibility for these choices and in developing his or her own judgement about such learning. Sophisticated learning environments may add to the efficiency or effectiveness of this process, but at the heart of learning to learn is the idea of self-determination, so, in my view, the choices about the future of education and learning to learning to learn remain fundamentally ethical and educational, rather than technological.

Will the seamless integration of technology into learning environments really change schooling itself? It is over forty years since John Holt argued that the kind of knowledge schools taught was inappropriate:

Since we cannot know what knowledge will be needed in the future it is senseless to try to teach it in advance. Instead our job must be to try to turn out young people who love learning so much, and who learn so well, that they will be able to learn whatever needs to be learnt (Holt, 1964).

Holt’s argument may be persuasive and has been interpreted as meaning that formal curricula and formal schooling will be redundant in the brave new digital world. However, although the specifics of the curriculum may indeed be relatively unimportant and even irrelevant to the knowledge we need for later life, in order to learn to learn you have to learn something to base this understanding of learning upon. To be the effective and enthusiastic learners that Holt envisaged means that learners need to have become effective learners by learning something (and preferably lots of things). Something needs to be taught (or at least learned) to create these avid learn-to-learners. Expertise is therefore the development of complex learning skills and capabilities. Technology will be a part of learning to learn, in the same way that it will be a part of the world that learners study. Whether technology itself will determine the nature of learning to learning seems more doubtful.

There are some significant challenges posed by any increase in informal learning which replaces schooling. Technology may offer the possibility of anytime, anywhere learning, but it still has to take place sometime and somewhere. This poses a series of questions which the advocates of informal learning need to answer. Will all learners have equal access to the technologies they need for anytime, anywhere learning? Where will they be? Will the environment be conducive to learning? Who will be responsible for the learners? One of the advantages of the current system is that the state undertakes a duty of care for learners from 5 -16 and this enables their parents and carers to be economically productive. Who will support and scaffold the choices that learners make if the learning of young children becomes more informal, or will it be survival-of-the-fittest at learning to learn? This seems likely to perpetuate or exacerbate existing inequalities. These ethical questions dominate the debate about the future of technology and learning to learn. Although schooling, like democracy, may be inefficient and at times ineffective, it may be preferable to the alternatives on the grounds of equity.

Conclusions

Learning to learn is a diffuse and complex concept, with different aspects emphasised in different contexts. It is a global phenomenon with similar ideas about learning to learn articulated around the globe. The common features associated with the idea are those of lifelong learning to ensure economic competitiveness, as well as expressing some dissatisfaction with aspects of the current education system in terms of its appropriateness for contemporary society and culture. The key advantages for the development of knowledge production, creativity and communication in education is in the repositioning of the learner in relation to what is learned in terms of responsibility, choice and interest. This repositioning is most apparent in re-balancing the goals and longer term aims of education, in thinking about how the process of education influences the development of learning dispositions in the longer term. The learner becomes central in regulating their learning and in determining the development of their own learning history and identity. The educational research which has attempted to understand the beginnings of these evolutionary changes has also shared some common features. One key characteristic has been to see the teacher as a learner and to base the development of learning to learn on active professional inquiry, to balance short term targets and curricular goals with broader aims of education in developing dispositions for lifelong learning. There are, however, significant challenges. There is no consensus about what learning to learn entails or involves in formal or informal settings. Exactly how it relates to the assessment of dispositions towards learning is a key question which will determine its evolution. It threatens to be derailed by formal comparative assessments or by the persuasions of science and technology in determining what can be done because it is technologically possible rather than pedagogically desirable. Learning to learn reminds us, however, that education is a moral and political enterprise, as well as a scientific and technical one.

A future based on learning to learn does imply a qualitative difference in education. It suggests a change of emphasis from an absolute to a relative measure of performance or from simple to compound measures. Today’s learners are measured by the distance that they have travelled or by their their speed through the curriculum. Perhaps tomorrow’s learners will be assessed by the acceleration they show or the increase in their progress through a curriculum of skills, knowledge and active learning experiences, coupled with the development of their beliefs and confidence about themselves as learners. Additionally, rather than thinking of progress as a linear measure through the curriculum, the distance travelled, perhaps the breadth of development will also be important, the area of learning as a measure. This would represent a step change in understanding what it is important to assess in education, from progress as speed to the idea of acceleration or from distance to area of learning mastered, and a focus on the learners’ potential as well as their progress. The role of technology is hard to predict in the short-term, without beginning to consider the future beyond the current horizons. Technology will undoubtedly be a part of the world that future learners inhabit and therefore a part too of the pedagogical architecture through which they learn. Such developments should be driven by what is pedagogically desirable, rather than what is technologically possible. It is, however, essential that learning to learn does become a key feature of the future of education, to ensure that at the heart of education is learning to be human and to take responsibility for one’s place in a society which encourages and enables participation by all its citizens, to enable them to fulfil their own potential and shape the future for subsequent generations.

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This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

However, there has always been a strong boundary between the knowledge(s) produced within society and the knowledge that has been taught through official instruction in educational institutions. This is partly because education has been expected to fulfil a range of often competing functions which extend well beyond the passing on of knowledge.

Table 1.0 Typology of forms of knowledge

Schools have always taught and transmitted a selected range of knowledge according to the social, political and economic needs that are perceived to be important in a specific era. As Hargreaves points out:

Since the emergence of compulsory schooling and its spread across the world, state education has repeatedly been expected to save society. Schools and their teachers have been expected to rescue children from poverty and destitution; rebuild nationhood in the aftermath of war; to develop universal literacy as a platform for economic survival; to create skilled workers even when little suitable employment has beckoned them; to develop tolerance among children where adults are divided by religious and ethnic conflict; … to eliminate drugs and violence and make restitution for the sins of the present generation by reshaping how education prepares the generations of the future.’ (Hargreaves, 2003, p3)

Thus the purposes of education are multiple, although we might identify three elements: to foster a particular kind of citizenry, to prepare a future workforce, and to provide young people with ways to reflect on and navigate pathways through life. These purposes are not necessarily compatible and in different eras and circumstances some, yet not others, may be prioritised. Furthermore, rather than being able to ’save society’ it has to be recognised that learning takes place in social contexts that cannot be fully insulated from the social, economic and personal situations in which young people experience life. There is a growing sense that educational institutions need to be more open to the experiences that young people have if they are to foster successful learning, especially for groups whose everyday lives are insecure, chaotic and limited due to poverty and other forms of disadvantage. Young people who are secure, safe and materially comfortable are likely to benefit from education in whichever institution they find themselves. Schools can probably make the greatest difference to groups whose everyday lives are marked by disadvantage. Yet, such groups historically gained access to formal schooling later than groups with higher socio economic status (SES) and so traditionally have not been imagined as legitimate participants within educational institutions. A recent report publish by the Rowntree Foundation found that white, British boys from poor families (Cassen and Kingdom, 2007) achieve less well in secondary education than any other group including working class girls and Afro-Caribbean boys. A recent report by the Sutton Trust in conjunction with the LSE found ‘that social mobility has stagnated and is at its lowest point for decades’ (ibid., 2007). Furthermore forms of instruction have changed little across the long history of schooling. A ‘deep grammar’ has remained at the heart of schooling in which teaching is ‘conducted from the front, through lecturing, seatwork and question and answer methods, with separate classes of age-like children, evaluated by standard paper-and-pencil methods’. (Hargreaves, 2003, p4). Major challenges for education in the future will be to develop school curricula that are more inclusive and to broaden the repertoire of instruction (pedagogy) and assessment.

The school curriculum and working class groups

In the following section I shall describe the origins of the relationship between the academic curriculum and elite masculinity: that is, masculinity valued by groups with high SES. In this section I shall point to some issues that relate to working class masculine identities. There has long been a powerful association between masculinity, skill, and work of the body rather than of the mind in working class communities. Since the industrial revolution, being skilled was associated with being independent and being a good man (Schwartz Cowan, 1997, cited in Murphy and Whitelegg, 2006). Skills were learned in workplace apprenticeships and therefore were tied to specific fields of production and their earning power gave them value (Willis, 1977). Technical competence was associated with masculinity in opposition to femininity (Wajcman, 1991). Because the high status of manual and technical skills derived from their relationship with fields of productivity they were not associated with educational qualifications (Ivinson and Murphy, 2007 p67). This remains a challenge when it comes to teaching work related skills within schools (Brown, 1987; Brown and Lauder, 1992, 2001; Brown and Hesketh, 2004; Brown et al, 2001)

Debates about whether the school curriculum should be taught as subject content or skills including ‘technical skills’ and ‘life skills’ can be traced back to the end of the 19^th century (Barnes, 1982; Brent, 1978; Green, 1990; Green et al, 1995, 1997, 2003; Hirst, 1974; Hodkinson, 1998, 2000; Hogarth et al, 2003; Illich, 1973; Jones et al, 1995; Lawton, 1980; Lloyd et al, 2003; Moore et al, 1995; Pring, 1976; Young, 1977). However, the UK, in comparison to other European countries, has been slow to develop technical education as a specialist field requiring specific expertise (Green, 1999; Green and Steedman, 1997; Hobsbawm, 1968; Roderick and Stephens, 1978; Sanderson, 1994; Steedman et al, 1995) and the secondary school curriculum has remained dominated by subject content. There are expectations that the future workers within the so called ‘knowledge economy’ will be required to integrate forms of knowledge in order to act in an uncertain world with ingenuity, invention, initiative, flexibility and creativity (Brown et al, 2001a, 2001b, 2004; Hargreaves, 2003, Leitch, 2006). The gap between what is taught in schools and what will be required for the future appears to be widening as traditional canons, and ways of producing knowledge are changing due to the information revolution. The new skills based curriculum with personal learning pathways has been proposed as one solution to the disparity between practices inside and outside schooling.

The specific skills relating to workplaces are hard to teach in schools because the learning contexts need to replicate some of the conditions of laboratories, workshops and retail environments where specific skills are practiced, including the authentic production of goods that can be sold. It is easier for schools to teach generic skills, such as problem solving, communication, planning, and flexibility required for a wide range of occupations (Felstead et al, 2002, 2007). Such skills have become associated with the citizen-workers of the new ‘knowledge economy’ (DfEE, 2001b; DTI, 1998, 2001). These skills are meant to be delivered through all subjects and at all levels of the national curriculum in England and Wales, and referred to as ‘Key Skills’ in curricular documents.

As dominant political discourses struggle to change the nature of curricular knowledge, rhetoric about generic skills as transferable commodities is growing. We tend to talk as if knowledge can circulate like money. However, the notion that skills are disembodied and can be learned in any context irrespective of their relevance to such contexts is highly problematic. Bernstein (1990, 1996) has predicted that the focus on generic skills as transferable commodities has created an illusion that somehow skills can be removed from the person and from the process of knowing. The creeping shift in curricular knowledge towards skills-led qualifications points to a weakening of traditional boundaries (Bernstein, 1990; 1996) between school and work. There is a danger that the link between education and production will only be effective for the higher levels of education experienced mainly by groups with high SES. We are in danger of producing a new division of labour arising from the information technology revolution: those who work and those who train (Bourne, 2000, p42), with working class groups being prepared for a life time of retraining rather than a life time of employment (Jones et al, 1995; Willis, 1984).

I wish to argue in the following section that subject knowledge(s) taught in schools are cultural constructions that have long historical legacies. Any proposed or imagined shift in curricular content and teaching method needs to take into account the values, including class and gender values embedded within the cultural streams that make up the elements of the curriculum. Subject knowledge, such as physics or literature, was historically produced through practices that included and excluded particular social groups from participation in the construction of subject based, ideas, logic and meanings. These legacies remain active today (Ivinson and Murphy, 2007). Therefore when subject knowledge is made available to students in classrooms it acts as cultural material that provides resources for constructing social identities. For example, some middle class girls may find it liberating to gain access to historically male territories such as physics and mathematics, while some middle class boys may find that participating in domestic or vocationally oriented courses clashes with their endeavours to conform to high status masculinity within peer and other social groups. Yet, as Walkerdine (1988, 1990, 1998, Walkerdine et al, 2001) has shown even when girls cross into historically male, high status, territory there is a cost. Our ethnographic work backs up Walkerdine’s findings that when girls and indeed boys cross into knowledge territories that have the opposite gender value to their emergent gender identities, they experience conflict. Managing this conflict takes effort and requires support and back up. Schools can provide this support yet traditionally they do not because they are influenced by the historical legacies that associate certain groups with specific knowledge forms and not with others.

Curricular interventions that wish to shift the school curriculum in order to meet the needs of the future knowledge economy have to recognise the historical legacies attached to different forms of subject knowledge. The following section alludes to the cultural legacies of knowledge as a first step to planning curriculum change and to predicting which kinds of curricular intervention are likely to succeed or fail.

2.0 Knowledge and learning

Within academic institutions formal instruction is differentiate from people’s practical experience. The subject disciplines that make up school and university curricula can broadly be classified as ’scientific’ knowledge. Scientific knowledge, in contra-distinction to knowledge gained through personal experience, has publicly available criteria which govern how ideas are aligned within the discipline. These criteria are usually maintained by the communities that practice disciplinary knowledge and are often recorded in texts and manuals and embodied in the practices of members of scientific communities. ‘Scientific and common sense knowledge are often viewed as an opposition between abstract and concrete thinking’ (cf. Dowling, 1998). Universities and schools continue to value abstract knowledge over applied know-how. This distinction is maintained within the school curriculum as academic and vocational subjects. However the distinction does not reflect how people learn nor does it capture the way knowledge in any domain was, is and will be produced in the past, present or future. One of the major challenges for educational institutions will be to break down the hierarchy between abstract, applied and personal knowledge, in order to promote ingenuity, invention and creativity required for future ‘knowledge societies’ (Hargreaves, 2003). The classification of knowledge into the broad categories of ‘abstract’, ‘applied’ and ‘personal’, although useful for analytical purposes does not reflect the way people learn. Learning is a process in which knowledge, whether of mathematics or art, changes form as the learner encounters, absorbs and recreates knowledge. For example, coming to have abstract subject principles can be achieved through a process of continuous practice in which personal experiences provide the means for recognising and grasping unfamiliar concepts. There is a need to make a distinction between the classifications of forms of knowledge – the curriculum – and how knowledge is learned.

Learning is a process that takes place over time in which what is learned passes through many different states, including practice, making links, applying to different contexts and abstracting principles. Learning a subject in school can not be divorced from the personal experiences of the student (Lave, 2008). Even learning how to manipulate symbols in abstract systems such as mathematics involves desire, affect and personal investment.

The struggle over the curriculum and pedagogy has taken a new turn in late modernity as a battle between the world-view of the Enlightenment project and post-modern relativism. The post-modern turn rejects that there is a central meaning to the universe that can be discovered through scientific investigation and that instead there are multiple truths depending on the perspective of the learner/observer. This entails that in any situation there is no one meaning; there are multiple meanings. We are struggling to find pedagogic approaches that can do justice to the post-modern condition. If every voice is to be heard in the classroom then how will formal knowledge be produced? Yet if subject principles are imposed as rules then we risk alienating many groups such as working class boys, girls and minority ethnic groups who may not recognise the dominant code of academic culture (Bernstein, 1996; Keddie, 1971). One recent solution proposed by the Twenty-twenty Society is to individualise education so that each student has a personal tutor and sets their own learning targets. This places the responsibility for learning with the individual.

A socio-cultural approach to learning views the problem in a different way: not as a problem of individual identity, so much as a problem of culture. The emphasis is placed on the multiple settings that the student inhabits across the school day and week. Through their participation within a diversity of settings such as science, English and technical subjects such as Design and Technology, students develop an understanding of the specific codes, concepts and activities that belong to a diverse range of communities of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991; Wenger, 1998; Ivinson and Murphy, 2007). Learning comes from becoming a competent actor in each community and it is the contrast between what is acceptable practice in one setting, such as the science laboratory, that enables to students to recognise what is acceptable within a different setting, such as a drama studio. Learning takes place as students move between settings and experience the specificity of the practices that belong to each community. Students have to develop identities reflecting membership in multiple subject communities of practice. Identity is as much about recognition and validation as it is about self expression (Duveen, 2001). How a boy or girl is recognised within a specific subject community of practice is marked by the legacy of who in the past was identified with that knowledge. These legacies exert an influence that can be referred to as the core gender-knowledge identities carried by different subjects of the curriculum (Ivinson and Murphy, 2007). Learning involves becoming a competent participant in multiple communities of practice within the school. Disciplinary and vocational subjects carry and offer pedagogic identities that have gender values attached to them. As students move between subjects they have to negotiate social identities based on the possibilities and restrictions offered within each community of practice. A socio-cultural approach recognises that learning is fundamentally social rather than an individual process.

The problem with reclassifying elements of the curriculum as skills is that it confuses two issues, namely the classification of knowledge and the process of learning. Given the deep historical roots attached to different elements of the curriculum, which are maintained and reinforced by elite universities, it is most unlikely that renaming subjects as skills will achieve any significant change in which groups achieve and which do not in a subject. However, the term ’skill’ suggests process as opposed to subject content and therefore appears to offer a useful way forward. However, instead of focussing on skill there is a need, first, to recognise how the learning process takes place, and second, to recognise that groups are differentially positioned with respect to subjects even before they enter the classroom due to the class and gender identities that are brought into school by students. These are not fixed identities although society sets up limits on how, for example, a working class boy can express himself if he wants to ‘get it right’ (Davies, 2003 pp9-10) as a boy in the face of peers, teachers, parents and the other social groups to which he wishes to belong (or not). Participating in a school subject has consequences for the construction of class and gender identities because subjects offer cultural material for expressing, performing and being recognised as the one ‘who is good at’, or ‘no good at’ activities. Activities such as ‘writing romance’, ‘using sanding machines in Design and Technology’, or ‘painting pink coloured flesh in Art’ are not class or gender neutral. To be seen painting pink flesh can be quite threatening for a working class boy (Ivinson and Murphy, 2007, p138-140). Students have to manage these identities and we have seen them protect themselves by refusing to participate in activities that challenge, for example, a working class male or an elite feminine identity. By recognising the historical roots and legacies of subject knowledge it is possible to take account of the class and gender associations that elements of the curriculum carry even today.

3.0 Class and gender connotations attached to curricular knowledge

Elements of the curriculum have class and gender associations that derive from deep historical legacies about practice, ie who had access to educational institutions in the past. Within educational institutions which class and sex groups had access to high status academic subjects and to vocational or other applied subjects remained at the heart of the school structure arguably up until very recently.

The hierarchical valuing of abstract knowledge within the academy can be traced back to the Greco-Roman curriculum inherited by Western Christianity. Manual practices were never integrated into ‘formal public systems of knowledge transmission’ but were passed on through family and guilds (Bernstein, 1996, p 22). The dichotomy and hierarchical valuing of abstract and applied knowledge goes back a long way. Greek society gave the Trivium (logic, grammar and rhetoric) high status and the Quadrivuim of applied knowledge (geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and music) lower status. The Trivium is the exploration of the ‘word’ or text. The Quadrivium is abstract knowledge about the structure of the ‘outer’ world, broadly speaking ‘mathematics’. The final set of subjects in the ancient curriculum, known as the mechanical disciples, included medicine and architecture which were dropped from the classification of formal knowledge in the 5^th century (Ovitt, 1987) and reappeared again much later. There was a strong classification of knowledge into mental and manual practice (Bernstein, 1996, p22). This distinction can also be mapped onto social representations of masculinity and femininity.

Elite or esoteric masculinity became associated with abstract knowledge. Cultivating interiority though practices of contemplation and meditation with the aid of sacred texts became central to the Christian tradition practiced in the medieval monasteries which were the first institutions of learning. Within the medieval monastery, monks and priests removed themselves from the mundane necessities of everyday life, dressed in sack cloth and denied the flesh and their appetites. Development of inner consciousness or interiority was privileged and the work of the body was downgraded. The mental-manual dichotomy has remained tied to social class distinctions. By the 13^th century this duality was reinforced by the total exclusion of women from the high offices of the church and hence from contemplation and the development of interiority. Woman became associated with exteriority, the world, caring, nurturing and containing. The idea of passive ‘mother earth’ as a realm which man manipulated and controlled remained central to how technology was imagined. Notions that girls are not technical still circulate today.

The Trivium dominated the secondary school curriculum from the first Grammar schools in the 14^th century up until around 1870 (Jarman, 1963). The resilience of school curricula to resist the inclusion of new subjects despite the rise of the scientific method in the 17^th century and the enormous advanced in engineering technology that fuelled the Industrial Revolutions is a remarkable phenomena and draws attention to the deeply conservative nature of school knowledge. The academic school curriculum remained divorced from the sphere of economics right up until the 1870s so that no one would have expected a grammar school boy to emerge from education equipped to take up his position in the world of work (see Ivinson and Murphy, 2007, pp75-76).

The most abstract systems of knowledge such as mathematics and logic carry strong masculine associations (Willis, 1989). If the Trivium aimed to forge a certain kind of citizen, it was most definitely that relating to elite masculinity to the exclusion of other social groups. ‘In the seventeenth century the discourse about the scientific method mapped versions of masculinity onto cultural representations of scientific ways of knowing and acting that were celebrated by the scientific community’ (Brawn, 2000, cited in Ivinson and Murphy, 2007, p69). Abstraction, objectivity and logic became associated with masculinity and the mind.

Women and the working classes were not considered worthy of proper education until the 20^th century. Femininity became associated with the lived world, nature and holism. Because women were imagined as nurturers concerned with people, so they became less imaginable as scientists. Even today girls struggle with the conflict between the personal and caring values of femininity and being good at science and mathematics (Walkerdine, 1988, 1998). English did not become a subject in universities until the 1930s and up until then it was considered ‘fit for women, workers and those wishing to impress the natives’ (Eagleton, 1983 p29, cited in Ivinson and Murphy, 2007, p76). The purpose of education for upper and middle class girls was further influenced by the strict demarcation of life into the public and private realms. This resulted in an education designed for no purpose beyond attaining a husband and the culturally valued accomplishments required to entertain his friends’ (Purvis, 1991, cited in Ivinson and Murphy, 2007, p20). ‘These included conversational knowledge of some foreign languages, the ability to play musical instruments, to sing and to embroider. The greater the extent of her accomplishments, the greater a woman’s cultural capital would be in the marriage marketplace’ (Ivinson and Murphy, 2007, p20).

In contrast, working class children’s education was generally tied to their future lives as labourers and it was only recently that working class children gained access to an academic curriculum as a legal entitlement. This historical legacy created an allegiance between working class groups and non academic knowledge, ie knowledge gained though the family, guilds and personal experience. Before the Education Act of 1870 only a minority of working class children were in full time schooling and for girls it was approximately 10% of the female population (Purvis, 1991). Working class children were educated to spell and to read the Bible but not to write their own texts. If the masses could write, it was argued, they might be tempted to produce texts of their own (Hunt, 1972, cited in Robinson, 2000). If the masses could not write, the state could at least control the texts that they read.

Social class values are attached to knowledge domains and as with gender values they remain active in contemporary classrooms and are reinforced unwittingly by teachers. Furthermore, students choose to align themselves with particular subjects depending on where they feel they have a legitimate sense of belonging or allow them to express an emergent class and gender identity (Ivinson and Murphy, 2003, 2007). For example, we have found middle class boys limiting their involvement in Design and Technology as activities that activity aligns with working class traditions (Ivinson and Murphy, 2007, p112). The interaction between the social identities extended to students by teachers’ pedagogic instruction and the identities students bring with them into school as class and gendered citizens tends to reinforce the hierarchical stratification of subjects. Relationships between middle class boys with science and mathematics and working class boys with vocational courses, between middle class girls and the humanities and languages and working class girls with domestic vocational courses are strong patterns that can be detected in achievement measured by GCSE subjects taken and grades attained. Such longitudinal trends alert us to the conservative nature of educational institutional change. Despite speculations about new forms of curricula, such as skills-based curricula, the values carried by subject cultures are likely to be intractable and possibly may become further exaggerated over the next 40 years.

3.1 Present Curricula

Throughout the history of schooling social groups have had a differential access to and experience of curricular subjects. The notion that all students should have access to all subjects of the curriculum up to age 16, lasted for only a brief period of time, peaking with the national curriculum in England and Wales in 1988. The national curriculum in England and Wales made the full range of curricular subjects available to all students for the first time. The subjects of the curriculum were classified as core (science, English and Mathematics) and foundation (History, Geography, Modern Foreign Language Music, Art, Design and Technology, Physical Education, Religious Education)

Over the last decade a range of new subjects have entered the curriculum and there has been some relaxation on the compulsory need for all student to take all subjects. Some groups may be exempt from taking a Modern Language at GCSE. New subjects such as applied technologies have grown, as has generic training. The new applied subjects are assessed and accredited GCSEs or VGCSEs and are supposed to address skills in applied fields. In this new curricular organisation GCSE Art can be studied as a VGCSE in Applied Art and Design, and GCSE science as a VGCSE in Applied Science. Generic (training) pedagogies represent knowledge as a transferable commodity that has exchange value in the market.

The new 14-19 education documents signal a diversification in learning pathways to encompass academic, applied and vocational routes. This suggests a transformation of the ‘ideal’ student from one who can master ‘academic’ subject principles towards the new citizen-worker of late modernity who ideally possesses generic skills, flexibility and heightened individuality. New pathways to learning introduced in the 14-19 curriculum (QCA, 2000, WAG, 2002) such as Vocational GCSEs were part of a range of hybrid academic/vocational courses aimed at addressing the low status of ‘applied’ subjects. The increasing use of the term ’skill’ in curricular documents points to a weakened of traditional boundaries between school and work, (Bernstein, 1990, 2001). The multiplicity of new vocational courses in secondary schools is supposed to fulfil two aims: to re-engage disaffected groups, and to provide appropriate silks for the globalised economic market. However, we found that 13/14 year old boys still value traditional masculine skills rather than ‘generic’ skills (Ivinson and Murphy, 2007).

3.2 Future curricula?

It is most likely that over the next three decades elite universities will continue to exert considerable control over what counts as high status knowledge, regulated by entry requirements that will remain tied to academic subjects. It is likely that elite universities will continue to recognise academic rather than vocational qualifications for a range of reasons. Their allegiance will probably retain vestiges of the Greek ideal that scholars should learn to think before applying knowledge to the world. The main function of a university is to advance knowledge, and pure research requires some autonomy from the state and economic markets. The 1980s and 1990s have been characterised as an era of plenty that has seen the rapid expansion of the number of students in higher education. This increase is possibly not going to be sustainable in a coming era of scarcity. The school curriculum will probably not continue to be a purely academic curriculum as recent policy documents have pointed out. There will therefore be a further fragmentation of curricular knowledge. However, this fragmentation will be experienced differently by different groups. If strongly defined subject disciplines give way to hybrid knowledge forms this will probably not affect groups with high SES who will continue to follow a traditional academic curriculum.

For some students much learning in school is viewed as irrelevant and this is exacerbated in locales where there is high unemployment. In such areas even gaining certificates will not lead to a job making it difficult for students to invest in and feel any sense of belonging in schools. With the collapse of the industrial base and the scarcity of apprenticeships the group of students who find education irrelevant and who find it difficult to imagine viable economic futures will probably increase.

4.0 Changes in Pedagogy and Communication

The right hand column of table 1.0 lists the institutions where knowledge resides and is created. If knowledge is codified and recorded in texts which are stored and available in libraries and universities such knowledge is potentially available to all, even if access to books is variable. The capacity to store data in digital and virtual forms exponentially increases society’s ability to codify and retain information for future generations.

Knowledge that is codified and stored in texts is enduring and so accessible across a long time frame. Some ancient Greek and Roman texts are still available for scholars to access today. Universities are institutions that codify and record knowledge, and therefore are the sites where knowledge is produced, although this may be changing. The capacity to store knowledge electronically may well shift the central role of universities as the places where new knowledge is produced. The role of the WWW is likely to increase. One effect of the WWW is that knowledge becomes democratised: all citizens can potentially access ‘all’ information.

The subjects of the school curriculum were versions of university knowledge up until recently, before the curriculum became diversified to include vocational subjects and, more recently, generic skills. Such knowledge was passed on to the next generation via pedagogic instruction, usually a via transmission model. According to this model students are relatively passive recipients and teachers drill, instruct and explain subject principles to them. This style of teaching has been around for 4,000 years (Cole, 2003) and will remain a form of instruction in schools in the future.

A ‘child centred’ pedagogic intervention grew up in the 1920s and had some influence on the primary school curriculum after WWII, epitomised in the Plowden Report (1961). According to this model the child is viewed as an active learner who is given artefacts and problems to solve. Although this model has some influence on the primary school curriculum it has been far less prevalent in secondary schools. Although a transmission model has tended to dominate in practice students undertake a diverse range of activities in subject lesson only some of which are dominated by reading texts and writing. Practical work takes place in science, D&T, art, music and ICT, while independent research, project and coursework takes place in the Humanities, English, Modern Languages and Religious Education and Citizenship. However, assessment tends to be dominated by written test, despite the various attempts to broaden the media through which assessment takes place. The assessment practices in a subject will always have a strong influence on the pedagogic modality adopted by teachers.

In the future, new pedagogic practices involving virtual media, designed virtual classrooms and specialist software for teaching, for example, literacy and numeracy skills will be developed. These media will only dominate in schools if assessment practices also use such media. If university entry requirements change to incorporate electronic assessment tasks, these will rapidly become available in schools. However, due to the limitations of marking assessments electronically (eg multiple choice questions and answers) it is unlikely that elite universities will choose electronic marking in the near future. Electronic assessment for basic skills such as some literacy and numeracy skills is available and is likely to increase in schools for non-academic courses. Such forms of assessment are cheap, easy to apply and efficient. However, they can de-skill teachers and remove the human face of learning from disaffected groups who are likely to become increasingly disengaged. Once the novelty of working on a computer wears off, computer-based learning becomes mechanical and repetitive. The language laboratories introduced into secondary schools in the 1970s were heralded as a pedagogic break-through yet their appeal lasted less than a decade. There will remain a need for face-to-face human interaction in good quality teaching and learning. We may already be unwittingly further alienating disaffected groups of students by teaching through electronic media. Such groups are arguably those who most need human interaction as part of their learning.

The growth of online discussion fora for mature learners has been developed and is likely to increase. Many young people already use online chat rooms and fora such as Facebook to do homework. Different groups of young people will have differential access to, and ability to use, such media including web 2.0 technologies to enhance their learning. The following section turns to this problem and links to changes in family structures.

5.0 Changes in family structures

We are moving ‘increasingly into second, third and even fourth partnerships with extended families of a complicated and demanding nature. The family as a supporting environment will change, though how is unclear’ (Harper, 2008, p4)

Already many students live between two and sometimes three households. Some children live in households with siblings from two, three or more partnerships. They have relationships with parents who live in different households and see them occasionally. Sometimes over the course of their schooling young people will live with a variety of parents in a variety of different households. The range of parenting patterns is becoming increasingly diverse. Some households are busy and noisy because there are siblings from two or three or more relationships, making it difficult for students to find the space and quiet to do homework. At the other end of the spectrum there are children who have stable parenting experiences and due to decreasing fertility rates parents can support their children with high levels of cultural and economic capital. For some children, preparation for schooling starts early and parents provide a higher level of learning support than in previous generations, because they have high levels of education themselves. There is a wide variation in children’s experiences of home life and parental support and this will most likely continue to widen. The gap between children in poverty and affluence is widening and will be exacerbated by differential fertility rates between social groups. In some socio-economic groups women become mothers early and in others late. Even although the population is not rising in the UK the pattern of fertility is different across social class groups. These trends suggest that childhood poverty will most likely rise.

One of the important issues for educational achievement is how much support young people get from home. Some parents are able to provide a range of support based on their knowledge of the education system, their willingness to structure time for homework and pay for tutors. Other parents lack time, financial resources and knowledge of the education systsm.

Access to ICT at home is likely to become increasingly important as virtual media are used for pedagogic purposes. However, access alone is not enough in itself to ensure educational support. Some groups of young people access ICT for leisure activities dominated by game playing. Other groups of young people use ICT to meet, chat and exchange information including homework information. However, it is likely that using ICT for educational support will not be spread evenly across socio-economic groups. In some communities the WWW is viewed with suspicion and is associated with pornography. In other homes access to the WWW is seen as an important source of information and children are encouraged to become ICT literate. There is a third group of young people, often boys, who are using ICT to create websites and fora for mobilising and exchanging information. These groups are practicing skills that will help them to gain high level symbolic resources and prepare them for jobs in the new creative, technological industries. This may change as the technologies become main stream. Middle class groups have been more readily associated with the creative aspects of literacy that allow them to construct new meanings while working class groups have tended to be given less encouragement to use literacy to assert autonomy, negotiate and create meanings. This pattern is likely to be replicated with respect to ICT literacy. Schools will be presented with a serious challenge to make ICT technologies and media available to groups with low SES so they can used ICT to mobilise, create and be inventive. Historical legacies suggest that only with enormous political will backed by considerable resources will this be achieved in the future. It is much more likely that ICT technologies will be used in schools to control disaffected groups (cf. Apple, 2000).

6.0 Discussion around the skills curriculum

Harper (2008) predicts a future skills shortage due to changing demographics. By 2020 almost half the population will be aged 50 and older, creating a mature population. There will be a shortage of young people.

The skills required in the global market are not the same as the manual and technical skills valued in traditional working class communities. Research points out that instead of motivating disaffected boys many school-based vocational courses have led to cynicism because they fail to provide boys with the skills needed for work or for their imagined futures (Stanton and Bailey, 2005; Nuffield, 2008a and b). There is a mismatch between the ways boys recognise skill and the way skills are presented in school. The political intention to raise the school leaving age to 18 by 2015 places schools under increasing pressure to develop pedagogic practices appropriate to boys with low SES. If we are to re-engage this group of boys in school we will have to develop appropriate pedagogies that value work of the body and hand as well as of the mind (Arendt, 1998/1958; McWilliam 1995 cited in Bourne, 2000, p43). However, there is deep confusion over the meaning of the terms “skill” and “vocational”. According to Bernstein neither term can adequately provide a meaningful education as they are interpreted and instantiated in school curricula at the moment.

The increasing use of ’skills’ as a synonym for both VET and its outcomes – eg ‘Education and Skills’, ‘Learning and Skills’ causes confusion in policy and provision (Stanton and Bailey, 2005). Stanton and Bailey (2005) argue that blurring the boundaries between schooling and work may be counter-productive because the higher status academic qualifications, assessments and pedagogies will most likely dominate in schools and the vocational courses will lose their distinctive qualities and become ‘cheap’ training grounds for low level basic literacy, number and ICT skills (Bernstein, 2001, Bourne, 2000) or more pessimistically prepare boys for life long training rather than work (Keep, 2002, 2005).

In contrast to skills required by employers in specific areas of business, such as leisure and finance, ‘generic’ skills are said to be required by the citizen-workers of the new ‘knowledge economy’ (DfEE, 2001; DTI, 1998, 2001) and include flexibility and heightened individuality (Goldthorpe, 2003). In curriculum documents generic skills include literacy, number, and ICT skills on the one hand and communication skills on the other. These are skills that are supposed to be transferable between school and work. Prior research demonstrates however, that the contextual framing of skills dominates so that young people do not recognise skills acquired in one context when they move to another (Whitty, Rowe and Aggleton, 1994a and b). Research questions whether skills can be transferred between school and work places (Lave, 1988; Lave and Wenger, 1991; Stanton and Bailey, 2005; Nuffield, 2006, 2007, 2008a and b). The Nuffield Foundation Review of the 14-19 Education and Training has expressed serious doubts about the quality and relevance of the learning experience for low achieving young people following vocational courses (Nuffield, 2008a). Early research suggests that “vocational” aspects of vocational courses get diluted in schools due to lack of resources and expertise (Stanton and Bailey, 2005; Nuffield, 2007, 2008a and b). It is costly to reproduce work place scenarios in schools. There is a danger that vocational courses will merely inculcate ‘generic’ skills that neither employers nor students value (Bourne, 2000).

Rhetoric about generic skills as transferable commodities creates a fiction that learning can be disembodied and disconnected from persons, bodies and communities of practice. Bernstein (1990, 2001) has predicted that the focus on ‘generic’ skills as transferable commodities will have the effect of removing the person from the process of knowing. Bourne points out that a shift to ‘life-long learning’ could replace productive work for lower class boys who will be expected to substitute training for work (Bourne, 2000, p42). One way out is to develop pedagogic practices that are distinctly different to academic pedagogies and the first requirement is to recognise the embodied element of skills learning (McWilliam, 1995, cited in Bourne, 2000, p43). There is a need to make visible the full range of practices that are required for learning to take place. Learning requires work of the body, mind and head even if the balance is differently organised according to curricular subject. For example, training in the scientific method requires learning to ‘look’ at phenomena in new ways. This practice requires training the eye, the body and the mind.

7.0 Future scenarios of schooling

In the following future scenarios I have taken account of changing knowledge forms, demographic shifts, an increasingly diverse range of curricular forms, pedagogic modalities and changes in family structures. I am assuming that scarcity will replace plenty.

Key drivers

• As the gap between the rich and poor increases, so social differentiation will increase
• As family structures become more complex and more class embedded due to differential fertility rates between groups, children will have very different childhood experiences
• Changes in knowledge structure and availability based on the information revolution will change the role of universities as the primary repositories of knowledge and a plurality of knowledge creating spaces will burgeon. However, knowledge hierarchies will be perpetuated and access to high status knowledge and rich pedagogic experiences will continue to reflect historical patterns that reflect social class and gender divisions
• The economy will be characterised in terms of scarcity rather than abundance which will make it increasingly difficult to fund high quality education for all students.

Given the long historical legacies attached to forms of knowledge outlined in section 2.0, I have assumed that some aspects of schooling will not change’ for example, high status knowledge will remain text and discourse based rather than virtual, access to elite universities will remain restricted ensuing that the academic curriculum will not become skills-based, and the need for face to face human interaction in learning will not be replaced by virtual pedagogies in academic curricula. A series of hierarchies will endure between elite and low status forms of knowledge that can be traced to deep historical legacies. For example, access to high and low status forms of knowledge will continue to reflect class and gender patterns.

Scenario 1

This scenario reflects increasing diversification in times of scarcity. A decrease in young people by 2020 will require fewer schools making the possibilities of providing a diverse range of schools in a locale unlikely. The broad range of subjects on offer in secondary schools will settle into three broad streams reflecting the old tripartite education system. An elite academic curriculum will be available to a minority, a mixed academic and technically oriented curriculum will be available for the majority and a vocational and skills based curriculum will be available to the remaining group. However, scarce resources will ensure that the academic curriculum will remain traditional with the development of relatively few virtual pedagogic tools. The vocational curriculum will not develop pedagogies to teach trades and crafts authentically. Instead there will be an increasing reliance on virtual pedagogic tools to drill students in basic literacy and numeracy skills. Schools remain relatively insulated from the economic market. Elite students continue to be taught to think, the majority will receive a broad and balanced curriculum as outlined in the National Curriculum 1988 Act, and the third group will receive a watered down version of vocational education focussing on basic literacy and numeracy skills.

Scenario 2

In a time of scarcity this educational scenario predicts increasing social disintegration. There will be a move towards a skills based curriculum. Disciplinary subject boundaries become blurred as the curriculum becomes defined in terms of skills and competencies. However, even although academic subject curricular documents will use rhetoric of skills and competencies they will continue to be taught as subject content aimed at teaching subject principles in relatively traditional ways. This conservation of a traditional academic curriculum will be driven by entrance requirements for elite universities. Even students following academic curricula will be required to take a minimal number of technical or vocational courses and there will be a rise in uptake of ICT-related and business management courses especially by boys. The majority of students will follow a mixed skills and competency led curriculum. This second group will become the knowledge workers in skilled jobs. The inherent conservatism within school cultures (see section 2.0) and scarce resources will ensure that the potential for creative virtual pedagogies will not develop rapidly. Exceptions to this will be schools close to relatively new university departments of education in which virtual pedagogic technologies will develop, led by the US and the Pacific Ring countries. Support from families in terms of paid outside school tuition, access to, and encouragement to be creative with, web based 2.00 technologies in the home will increase. However, this kind of ‘top-up’ support from families will be available to children with relatively high SES. Students with relative stable home environments will allow the second group to supplement school educational provision. There will be an increasing uptake in subjects related to new media and virtual technologies with students aspiring to jobs in creative industries. The third group will have a different experience of schooling.

Due to scarcity, declining roles and the shrinkage in the number of secondary schools, strong skills based vocational education will not develop in secondary schools and increasingly this third group will move between FE colleges and schools. These groups will spend less time in traditional school classrooms requiring increasing forms of surveillance, tracking and recording. New forms of assessment will be developed for the third group. There will be a growing group of students with low SES who will not receive top-up provision and who will become increasingly dependent on state education provision. However, schools will not invest in educational provision for groups with low SES due to the pressure to achieve good examination results. Schools will continue to focus extra support on students who they judge to be on the borderline between grades ‘D’ and ‘C’. Groups with low SES will continue to be those most excluded from school and they will continue to resist educational practices that they perceive to be ‘irrelevant’ to their lives and futures. Due to changes in family structures, this group will experience increasingly nomadic lifestyles exacerbated by spreading curriculum across sites. Coupled with the increase in use of technologies for pedagogic purposes this group will experience less human interaction in learning processes. Less social solidarity will be experienced in homes and in schools leading to increasing social alienation. This will exacerbate a rise in alliance to sub-cultures and outlaw groups as young people search to find a sense of belonging. They will not access web 2.0 technologies creatively and instead will become the ‘victims’ of increased use of ICT technology to deliver basic skills practice and to control and monitor movement. Industry and the private sector will take increasing control of education for traditional working class groups as schools fail to ‘engage’ them in learning. The rise of the role of the learning mentor will lead to increased surveillance on individual learning pathways. Many students will slip though the surveillance nets developed by schools and social services and will enter sub-cultures and unofficial local economies. If they live in areas of high unemployment, they will increasingly live outside official institutions, work places and community structures. Unlike the other two groups they will remain tied to their localities, travel less widely and become reliant on locally available resources.

This scenario depicts a widening of the gap between social groups, in which young people will increasingly lead parallel lives, with hugely different access to symbolic, human and educational resources. This will lead to a small elite upper class gaining access to the few professional jobs, majority middle groups entering a diverse range of jobs in new industries (regions in Bernstein’s typology) and an underclass that will have experienced a very different educational world to the other two groups. Ostensibly the (school) curriculum embraces the concerns of industrialists by foregrounding skills and competencies. Employers such as MacDonalds will take on the role of educating the third group. Therefore control over education of the traditional working class group will move away from schools and universities towards employers and the private sector.

Scenario 3 – A possible way forward?

A commitment to social justice drives this educational scenario. Scarcity of energy, clean water and non-contaminated food will drive this moral imperative. This scenario is unlikely to come about by 2020 but may come about by 2050. Fears about global environmental sustainability introduce a new moral imperative in schools making a break with traditional religious moralities and post-modern secular relativism. A recognition of locale-global connectivity and the interconnections between economic systems ushers in a realisation that national citizenry has given way to global citizenry. It will become apparent that a skills and competency based curricula cannot fulfil the educational aims of teaching citizens to deal with complex social and political problems. It will be recognised that competencies reflect neo-liberal philosophies that over-emphasise the individual and neglect the social and community contexts on which societies depends. Attempts to mine the inner potential of the person usually referred to as ‘gifts and talents’ ignore the socially embedded nature of learning. A few schools will adopt this philosophic approach before 2050 forging a new curriculum although these schools will remain in the minority and are more likely to be primary rather than secondary schools. Curricula will foreground thinking and will not address the concerns of industrialists but of environmentalism and global politics. Thematic and project work will blur disciplinary subject boundaries. The principles of philosophical enquiry and new forms of artistic creativity will underpin school activities. This process-based approach to learning will be reminiscent of previous child centred approaches to learning. Divisions between social groups will become less apparent, as learning will be based on bridging students’ local indigenous knowledge and culture with a curriculum based on ‘thinking’ principles. This type of curriculum will only become apparent in secondary schools if the principles that underlie its philosophy are adopted in the entry requirements of elite universities. Therefore a radical change to our understanding of teaching and learning will have to be led by HE. Schools will become well insulated from the immediate concerns of the market yet not from long term social needs. Creating the knowledge workers of the future can best be achieved by increasing, rather than decreasing the boundary between schools and work. Allowing schools to operate according to different principles to those of the economic marked allows them to do a fundamentally different job, that is, to teach thinking skills before applying them to the world. Students need time to develop critical thinking skills required to approach complex social, moral and political problems. Ironically this kind of curriculum would nurture the critical, creative and innovative thinking skills required for workers in the new knowledge economy. Returning to some of the educational ideals within the Greek curriculum might not be such a bad idea.

Footnotes

Note1 The typology of forms of knowledge was compiled with reference to Bernstein’s 1990 paper The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse (see refs), from Bernstein’s chapter in the Greek curriculum, 1996 chapter 4 ‘Thoughts on the Trivium and Quadrivium: The Divorce of Knowledge from the Knower’ and from Tresilian, N. (2008) After Capitalism, Special Issue 21^st Society, Journal of the Academy of Social Science 3 (2) 201-211.

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While most jobs require occupation-specific skills to do them, a generic skill is something that is needed in a range of jobs. How to do word-processing would be a technical example, but many interactive skills involving communication are common to a range of jobs. Physical strength is another skill or attribute that is needed to do a wide range of jobs, usually the manual ones. In higher-level jobs, one expects to find that occupation-specific skills are in some sense the most crucial. For example, a doctor is expected to be equipped with the appropriate medical knowledge and expertise. Nevertheless, nowadays it is not considered enough for doctors to stand back and prescribe for objectified patients: rather, they must explain their ideas and listen closely to what patients have to say. These “explaining skills” and “listening skills” are not, in principle, different from what has to be deployed to varying extents in many other jobs. In lower-level jobs, the generic skills may be relatively more important, in that a job might not require so much formal training to acquire technical expertise, but still need, for example, good communication skills.

Generic skills might in some cases be something that most people either lack or possess, arising from their lives in general. For example, a worker might have physical skills or the ability to listen well to others, without ever having been taught them. However, even doctors are now trained to have communication skills, and we know from case studies that companies put on specific training programmes. These might be training in the use of computers in some way, for example, the use of particular software, but they can also be for communication and other generic skills. To take one example, Ashton and Sung (2002) report that substantial resources are spent on staff development in the Laiki Bank in Cyprus, and a training programme is designed to inculcate customer service skills, communication skills, service skills, negotiation skills, sales skills, and so on. These are activities which, while highly productive for the bank, could be found in many other jobs in any country, and not just in the banking industry. According to Ashton and Sung, generic skills use and relevant training programmes are often found in “high-involvement” organisations, that is, organisations which set in train a raft of practices designed to maximise employee involvement in the objectives of the organisation.

I return below to the role of employee involvement as a potential driving force in increasing the use of generic skills across the economy. While such studies of individual workplaces or sectors have often hinted that generic skills have become more important in recent decades, it is only in the past few years that quantitative research has shown that the growth of generic skills use is pervasive across much of modern industry.

We know this from surveys of what workers actually do in their jobs. In the three UK Skills Surveys (1997, 2001 and 2006) the job requirements approach was used to frame questions about the tasks involved in respondents’ work (Felstead et al, 2007). The use of computers – their importance in the job, and the level of complexity – is perhaps the most obvious example. Workers were also asked about the importance of ‘making speeches or presentations’ (an aspect of communication skills), the use of physical strength or stamina, the importance of planning activities and many other work tasks. The responses were scored and then averaged in groups to give indicators of generic skills in several domains. These domains are influence skills, literacy, self-planning, numeracy, physical skills, checking skills, problem-solving and external communication skills. The constituent activities included in each domain are listed in Table 1 below.

3. The Growth in the Use of Generic Skills

Figure 1 Changes in the Use of Generic Skills, 1997-2006.

Source: Skill Surveys, 1997 and 2006.

Each skills index ranges from 0 to 1.

Figure 1 shows how generic skills (other than computing skills) have grown in use between 1997 and 2006. As can be seen, the skills that appear to have risen the most are influence skills, literacy and self-planning. The first two of these are aspects of communication skills, while influence skills can also be categorised under interactive skills. Thus we can see that the quantitative evidence confirms the earlier unsystematic reports of case studies about the increased importance of such skills. Meanwhile, there have been much more moderate increases in numeracy skills use and in external communication skills, even smaller rises in checking skills, and no statistically significant changes at all in the use of physical skills or of problem-solving skills. This last finding – unchanging use of problem-solving skills – is somewhat surprising in the light of the case studies literature. I return to this apparent puzzle later.

Table 1 The Growth of Generic Tasks

The last row of Table 1 shows also that computing skills have been rising particularly fast: the proportion of employees for whom computers are essential to their jobs has risen by 16.3 percentage points. We do not have a separate scale for computing skills. However, further analysis not shown in the table implies that the level of usage of computing skills has also been increasing. The proportion using computers to perform complex or advanced tasks (examples ranging from use of statistical packages to advanced programming) rose from 16.3% in 1997 to 22.6% in 2006.

The rising use of literacy skills bears closer examination: does this increase come at the top end with rising proportions of employees in literate jobs requiring extensive writing and reading at high levels of accomplishment? Or does the increase come at the bottom end, from a decline in the number of jobs that can be done without any basic reading or writing?

Figure 2 High and Low Literacy Usage

Source: Skill Surveys, 1997 and 2006.

Figure 2 divides the literacy scale into three levels. It can be seen that both tendencies are in play. Jobs in Britain are being literacy up-skilled at either end of the spectrum – suggesting that basic literacy policies are needed but that there is also an ongoing workplace need for improving the supply of workers capable of relatively high levels of literacy.

A look at the specific activities contained in the literacy index confirms the same story. Table 1 lists all the activities involved in each domain, and displays the extent to which their importance has changed over the period 1997 to 2006. It can be seen that for both basic and advanced activities there are increases in the percentage of workers for whom the task is an essential part of the job.

Figure 3 High and Low Numeracy Usage

Source: Skill Surveys, 1997 and 2006.

Figure 3 shows the same analyses in respect of the use of numeracy skills. Altogether, numeracy requirements rose much more slowly over the period, and this is reflected in the fact that none of the constituent activities changed very much. One can see from Figure 3 that numeracy requirements changed very modestly over the decade at both ends of the spectrum.

4. Explaining the Changing Use of Generic Skills.

The increased demand for generic skills is very broadly consistent with the theory of skill-biased technological change. This is the idea that prevailing new technologies have tended to complement (and hence lead to rising demand for) high-skilled labour, while reducing the demand for low-skilled labour. Sometimes the argument is framed as a requirement of the ‘knowledge economy’, where high-skills-related knowledge advantages are at the heart of generating a competitive edge.

Nevertheless, as has been seen there is quite a range of generic skills, and not all generic skills are increasing in their use. Looking at Figure 1, one plain observation is that the rise of the cognitive element implicit in literacy and in influence skills seems consistent with the theory of rising demand for educated labour. However, not all these elements are merely cognitive. The rising use of interactive skills, especially the influence skills, calls for some explanation.

In recent years researchers have formed a more nuanced account of the factors leading to changing skills demand (Autor et al, 2003). A careful consideration of what kinds of tasks are likely to be affected by automation leads to the hypothesis that it is mainly routine tasks that can be replaced by a software programme. Routine tasks can be manual, such as painting a new car, or non-manual, such as adding up the cost of a shopping basket. Both examples are tasks that are rarely performed by humans nowadays in modern economies because they have been able to be replaced by robots in factories or computerised cash tills in supermarkets. By contrast, non-routine tasks cannot be replaced since they require flexible judgements or physical actions in response to eventualities that are hard to foresee; only humans can perform these actions. There are, as yet, no robot lorry drivers on our motorways, no robot carers in our care homes, and no companies managed by digital CEOs.

Computers and automation thus replace routine tasks but not non-routine tasks. At the same time, they may also expand the use of certain non-routine tasks with which the technologies are complementary. To make effective use of the new technology, new operations have to be created, networks to be formed, and functions and jobs may need to be re-organised (Bresnahan et al, 2002). A raft of higher-level cognitive and interactive skills seems to be required to carry out these tasks. Analytical skills come into play in deciding the most effective and strategic ways of deploying the new possibilities that computers offer. Communication skills of a higher order are then needed to bring about the changes and to operate in the more fluid and innovative environment, in which new ideas are required to be generated, absorbed and transmitted. Often the cognitive and interactive skills, though in principle separate, are combined in the same tasks, such as when a team worker makes a presentation to clients or colleagues. These kinds of skills usually need higher levels of education, and it is for this reason that the impact of the computer revolution is thought to be an important factor behind the rising demand for highly educated workers in modern economies.

Note, however, that the rising use of computers does not predict a falling demand for lower-level skills if they involve non-routine activities. Thus, there may be a tendency in some countries for there to be rising numbers of workers doing such jobs, even at the same time as there are increasing numbers of highly educated workers carrying out the tasks requiring high cognitive and interactive skills. This process is described as a polarisation of labour markets, because it means that the proportion of jobs with both high and low level skills is increasing, while the proportion of jobs in the middle is declining (Goos and Manning, 2006). This process has been detected in Britain (up to the end of the 1990s), the United States, and, in recent years, in France and the Netherlands. However, it is not found in most other countries in continental Europe, and the recent picture in Britain is also more complex (Fernández-Macías and Hurley, 2008). This mixed picture arises because technology is by no means the only force that is driving the structure of jobs in our modern economy.

One additional factor that helps to explain the rising demand for communication skills is organisational change. To a certain extent, managers have been changing their work organisations in response to the changes in technology made possible by computers. However, independently, managers have been drawing on new ideas about ways to get the most out their workers, especially given the declining presence of trades unions. One of these ideas is described by the catch-all phrase “employee involvement”. Broadly, this means the attempt to induce employees to become more committed to the organisation’s objectives. This process could simply operate through improved incentives, for example by linking performance to pay in some way. However, there are limits to which this can be done for many workers, and the alternative favoured by many employers and management theorists is to seek the emotional commitment of workers, so that they identify more with the firm’s values and vision, and are prepared to work harder for it, in particular to contribute ideas for productive improvements, and to stay with the firm longer than otherwise. This movement for “high-involvement management practices” has been going on for at least 20 years, and involves a raft of policies and strategies, including, among other things, the use of quality improvement circles, good communication between management and employees, via regular informative and/or consultative meetings, suggestion schemes, worker surveys and so on, use of a formal appraisal scheme, and teamworking. Alongside these organisation policies one would often expect workers to be granted greater autonomy in their jobs in a high-involvement firm. These new organisational practices, as well as the new technology, call for more communication skills of various kinds, and recent evidence suggests that the steady spread of high-involvement management practices may be partly behind the growing use of communication skills, including literacy, displayed in Figure 1.

5. Conclusion.

The evidence is that certain generic skills are being increasingly used in the British economy. Notably, it is influence skills, literacy, and self-planning that have been growing the fastest, while others, such as physical skills, have remained unchanged. In other words, both cognitive and interactive skills are increasing. It is likely that the inexorable spread of computer-based technologies have been one major driving force behind the changing use of skills, but this force is supplemented by the slow but steady spread of high-involvement management practices in both private and public organisations.

The relevance for labour markets is that scarce skills can affect the structure of pay in labour markets. While a number of skills can quite easily be generated as needed within firms, either by formal training schemes or through providing a conducive learning environment, sometimes skills become scarce, cannot easily be supplied in the short run, and acquire a “quasi-rent”. Influence skills, in particular, appear to have acquired a premium in recent years, even more so when used in a complementary way with the deployment of computer skills (Green et al, 2007).

The relevance for education and training systems is two fold. First, the rising demands for higher-level cognitive and interactive skills provides some substance to the idea that modern jobs are indeed requiring steadily higher-level skills that need to be met by increasingly higher-educated workers. There is, thus, a continuing economic rationale for educational expansion, in addition to the many social and moral arguments in favour. Second, policies for education and training curricula should reflect the identified needs for communication skills in modern workplaces. This means not just the continuing demands for a more literate workforce that can write and read adequately to convey meanings concisely and accurately, but also the evident requirements for communicating through interacting with other people. Whether in teams or through making presentations, or through influencing people to think differently, or helping to solve the many complex problems of modern workplaces, increasingly modern workers need to be able to communicate with others, and listen to them, in more sophisticated ways than in earlier days. Educationalists might like to take note of how this might affect the ways we teach the arts of communication in our schools.

References.

Ashton, D. and Sung, J. (2002). Supporting Workplace Learning for High Performance Working. Geneva, International Labour Office.

Autor, D.H., Levy, F. and Murnane, R.J. (2003). Computer-Based Technological Change and Skill. In: Appelbaum, E., Bernhardt, A. and Murnane, R.J. Low-Wage America. New York, Russell Sage Foundation.

Bresnahan, T.F., Brynjolfsson, E. and Hitt, L.M. (2002). Information Technology, Workplace Organization and the Demand for Skilled Labor: Firm-Level Evidence. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 117 (1), pp.339-376.

Felstead, A., Gallie, D., Green, F. and Zhou, Y. (2007). Skills At Work, 1986 to 2006. University of Oxford, SKOPE.

Fernández-Macías, E. and Hurley, J. (2008). More and better jobs: Patterns of employment expansion in Europe. Dublin, European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions.

Goos, M. and Manning, A. (2007). Lousy and lovely jobs: The rising polarization of work in Britain. Review of Economics and Statistics, 89 (1), pp.118-133.

Green, F., Gallie, D., Felstead, A. and Zhou, Y. (2007). Computers and Pay. National Institute Economic Review, July, pp.63-75.

Machin, S. and Van Reenen, J. (1998). Technology and Changes in Skill Structure: Evidence From Seven OECD Countries. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 113 (4), pp.1215-1244.

See, for example, Machin and van Reenen (1998)

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

The difficulty with the question “what is the meaning of work?” is not so much coming up with possible answers – there is no shortage of those – but understanding what the question is really inquiring after. Inevitably, the meaning of work strays into related but distinct questions such as “what is work?” or “why do we work?” Work obviously means many different things. On an individual level, it can be a job, a career, or a calling. There is the economic work of earning a living and the cultural work through which people come to define their identity – with a lucky few going on to enjoy experiences we associate with the word “meaning” such as interest, stimulation, friendship, fulfilment, and generally feeling useful, connected and respected. On a social and historical level, work is key to understanding social change – perhaps especially the effect of technology (Gamst, 1995; Joyce, 1987). And on a philosophical level, the concept of work raises issues not just to do with the pursuit of the good life, but also the barriers we create around work and leisure, work and play, time and space, market-work and the work of raising a family (Appelbaum, 1992; Tilgher, 1931). Many issues are encompassed by the polysemic little term “the meaning of work”. And it is due to this elusive character that theoretical approaches to issues around the meaning of work often appear to be incompatible – indeed seem to be talking across each other. As the social psychologist Marie Jahoda has put it: “A theory designed to explain the physiological concomitants of work or unemployment cannot encompass data on their subjective meaning; a theory concerned with social comparisons cannot deal with the phenomena of intra-psychic conflict; a theory about alienation as a consequence of the division of labour is unsuitable for explaining individual attitudes to work.” (Jahoda, 1982, p7)

Nevertheless, for our purposes here, “the meaning of work” would seem to be used in two separable, but clearly related senses. In a great deal of the scholarly writing, what is at issue is broadly what might be called cultural interpretation using the traditional tools of social science. To write of “the meaning of work’ is to refer to the significance of work to the individuals who do it, or to some aggregate of individuals such as groups, sectors or societies. What work means, in this sense, is concerned with attempting to answer the question: ‘”what does work mean to you?” The question seeks interpretations and to understand differing orientations towards working. And perhaps the only credible answer to the question of what work means is that its meanings are radically ambivalent and highly diverse, as will be explored more fully in the next section. “Work may be a mere source of livelihood, or the most significant part of one’s inner life; it may be experienced as expiation, or as exuberant expression of self; as bounden duty or as the development of man’s universal nature,” wrote the sociologist C. Wright Mills. “Neither love nor hatred of work is inherent in man, or inherent in any given line of work. For work has no intrinsic meaning.” (Mills, 1951) Let us call this sense of the meaning of work the “interpretation” mode.

However, to speak of experiencing “meaning” in work, or that work gives “meaning” to the rest of life – or any of the other permutations of “meaningful work” or “meaningless work” – is to use the word in a subtly different way. Meaning, here, relates to whether purpose and significance is felt, as in the more personal and more urgent question “do you consider your work to have meaning to you?” The question seeks more than an interpretation of work, but rather asks whether work has substance, significance, value and importance as lived experience. The “search for meaning” is that yearning for a feeling of wholeness and harmoniousness with the world, between day-to-day activities and some animating purpose that gives direction to life as a whole. Meaningful work is expressive of one’s nature or personality, to do with fulfilment and the realization of potential and the sense of a life cohering; it is more philosophical or experiential in character than meaning in the mode of interpretation. Meaning in this sense is captured by Studs Terkel’s oft-quoted finding from the foreward of his book, Working: “Work is about a daily search for meaning as well as daily bread; for recognition as well as cash; for astonishment rather than torpor; in short for a sort of life, rather than a Monday-to-Friday sort of dying” (Terkel, 1974). Or again: “Meaningful work and leisure consist of activities that aren’t just instrumental, but are rewarding or pleasurable in their own right,” as Joanne Ciulla has claimed (Ciulla, 2000). By extension, meaninglessness is an absence of harmonious relation between work and wider life-values.

The two modes of meaning – the interpretation version and the philosophical-experiential version – are obviously closely related to each other (although on occasion, social scientists who study “the meaning of work” may experience a sudden desire to stow their clipboards at the moment when the concept of “meaningful work” raises its head because the latter would seem to call for normative value judgements anathema to many in the field). However, the difference in perspective is important to what will follow. Over recent years, writers on work have produced a substantial number of new texts concerned with understanding the issue of “meaningful work” more directly (Ciulla 2000; Svendson 2008; Martin 2000; Overell 2008). The tone of some of this material is rather different from an older tradition of writing about “job satisfaction” or “the quality of working life” (see Weir, 1976): heightened expectations surrounding work have become increasingly culturally obvious. Even a UK government strategy paper was called “Full and Fulfilling Employment” (HMP, DTI, DWP, 2002).

Section 2: The Meaning of Work – Work as Interpretation

When people are asked casually why they work, or when inquisitive children ask their parents why they have to go to work, the answer that seems most successfully to fend off further questioning is to explain work in terms of income. We do it to earn a living; it is a means-to-an-end; what the jargon terms “the cash nexus”. In different generations the answer has also held good in many studies as offering a primary motivation underlying work (Goldthorpe, 1965; MOW, 1987; Baldry et al, 2007). For many, work is clearly driven by its external consequences rather than its intrinsic satisfactions. Nevertheless, writing on the meaning of work has arguably been less concerned with the economic rationale underlying work and rather more fascinated with the psycho-social and cultural issues surrounding it (Klein, 2008).

This balance between the economic rationale and other rationales for work has been well demonstrated in surveys. According to one study, asked if they found their work to be a “means-to-an-end”, 51% agreed. The same survey found 69% saying their work was a “source of personal fulfilment” and 78% that it was “stimulating and/or challenging” (The Work Foundation, 2006). Meanwhile, there was very strong resistance (86%) to the notion that work was meaningless.

The broad pattern has been echoed in more substantial investigations of the meaning of work, too. A study of 15,000 workers from the US, UK, Japan, West Germany, Sweden and Israel found that the “economic rationale” was pre-eminent for just over half of the sample respondents. But the survey also uncovered deep commitment to the value of working. Fractionally under half the respondents favoured the “expressive” rationale – that work offered interest, friendship, identity, a chance to be useful. Two out of three had a strong attachment to working as a life goal, with work coming second only to family when people were asked the importance of different roles in their lives (MOW, 1987).

Even a recent book which criticised some of the work-rhetoric of recent years about “de-alienated knowledge work undertaken within non-hierarchical networks and information flows” noted that the economic meaning of work is overlain by many other interpretations and needs. “Wherever possible people at work look for something beyond that, a sense of purpose or redemption, a source of challenge or enjoyment, or the ability of the work to confer or reinforce social identity or identities.” (Baldry et al, 2007)

It can sometimes come as a surprise to read news stories about lottery winners who choose to carry on working. Yet their decision is consistent with the weight of research findings. In 1955, two sociologists, Nancy Morse and Robert Weiss, first asked the question, “If by chance you inherited enough money to live comfortably without working, do you think you would work anyway?” A total of 80% answered yes. The question has been repeated by others in large-scale research exercises in 1969 (67.4%), 1974 (73%), 1977 (71.5%) and 1987 (86%) (Gini, 2000). On the other hand, it could be argued that the question does not distinguish significantly between work in an abstract, idealised form and the particular, concrete job situation individuals find themselves in. Still, when people are asked about how “satisfied” they are with their jobs overall the answer that approximately two thirds are either “satisfied” or “very satisfied” has been broadly consistent through time, albeit with some modest fluctuations (Brinkley, Coats, and Overell, 2007; Green, 2005). Such findings appear to indicate surprisingly warm feelings towards work. Yet the notion of “satisfaction” has been criticised for revealing little about the nature of the work and indicating rather more about the immense flexibility of people in adapting to their circumstances – in other words, a willingness to put a brave face on things (Weir, 1976).

The idea of work fulfilling a “psychological need” has a long history. Arguably, a lot of the social-psychological literature on this point can trace its roots to the classics. Immanual Kant noted, “If a man has done much he is more contented after his labours than if he had done nothing whatever; for by work he has set his powers in motion.” In other words, what makes the category of work so humanly important is that through it, and around it, life can take on its wider purposes; we have an existential need for work. It has been noted that almost all the great visions of utopia down the ages do not envision the elimination of the institution of work altogether, but rather suggest shortening the working day, increasing variety, and sharing the dirty work as if the absence of work is beyond the limits of human understanding. Furthermore, philosophical traditions with outwardly little in common with each other have frequently placed a high valuation on the activity of work. For example, Catholic social thought and historical materialism unite in viewing in work an activity that is fundamentally human in the sense of species-specific to the human race (contrast Karl Marx, 1973, and John Paul II, 1981) Yet whether this valorisation of work is something that holds good for all human time or is a specific consequence of the historical process of change – in particular post-Enlightenment, post-Reformation thinking and its links with the beginnings of industrialisation. According to Kumar, the roots of the tendency to let work define human identity lie in technological change. “With industrialism, work is placed at the centre not just of man but of history. Work is the means by which man makes himself … The question ‘who am I?’ which would formerly have been answered almost everywhere in terms of religion, family or place of origin could now really be answered only in terms of the occupation a man worked in.” (Kumar, 1973)

The notion of human beings having a strong dependence on work for self-esteem, identity and a sense of order was repeated frequently in both theoretical and empirical explorations during the twentieth century (Maslow, 1954; Herzberg 1959; Kornhauser, 1954). Indeed, in the early 1970s, the sentiment propelled a series of government interventions in Western democracies around the subject of the meaning and quality of working life, which attempted to address concerns that alienation was squandering both human and economic potential (see Work in America, 1973; Weir 1976). Yet the importance of work to people has emerged not just from studying people who had it, but perhaps more powerfully from studying those who did not – a point that may reassert itself as the economic climate worsens in 2008-9. In fact, generalising about the experience of the unemployed has struck scholars as more valid than generalising about the much more diverse experience of employment (Jahoda, 1982). In a famous study of what happened in the village of Marienthal not far from Vienna during the early 1930s, researchers attempted to provide greater understanding to the oft-noted phenomenon that people with time on the hands after losing their jobs did not suddenly begin to take up the violin, read more books or spend more time with their families. It led them to believe work gave people their fundamental “sense of reality”. Without work, workers lacked a sense of time structures; they felt little contact with others; they did not participate in collective activity or purpose; they suffered from a lack of status and a consequent loss of identity; and they lacked all regular activity (Jahoda, 1982).

Work, then, undoubtedly means an income. But if much of the scholarship on the question is to be believed, it means much more: the basis of modern social life, the premise of psychological wellbeing, the grounding of “reality”. We turn next to examine the related notion of “meaningful work”.

Section 3: The Meaning of Work – Meaning as Fulfilment

There is perhaps rather less of a scholarly tradition of writing specifically concerning the notion of “meaningful work” – indeed, to this author’s knowledge, there are no books or scholarly articles with the phrase “meaningful work” in their titles prior to 1982 (see Schwartz, 1982), though more have been written since. There are, of course, many formulations of what might be called “good work” or what the International Labour Organisation calls “decent work”, which might be viewed as the necessary preconditions of the individual search for meaning at work and are rooted in industrial relations and human rights perspectives (see ILO, 1998; Coats, 2008).

However, the notion of meaningful work would seem to be gesturing towards an idealised norm of work that looks at issues beyond traditional ideas of “job quality”. After all, having a good job and being well-treated is no guarantee of work’s meaningfulness. Meaning is in a sense what happens after the material and moral conditions of work have been addressed (see Ciulla, 2000).

It is self-evidently very difficult to generalise about what is meant when a person seeks or experiences meaning as by its nature it is highly subjective; in addition, pursuing meaning can seem a little elitist, even luxurious. However, some writers have sought to establish criteria for meaningful work either through survey evidence or through philosophical first principles – and from very different perspectives. The Work in America report, for example, ventured that, “When it is said that work should be ‘meaningful’ what is meant is that it should contribute to self-esteem, to a sense of fulfilment through the mastering of one’s environment and to a sense that one is valued by society” (Work in America, 1973).

Writing from a managerial standpoint which attempts to marry the individual’s search for meaning – some 70% of respondents to its survey claimed to be looking for meaning – with an organisation’s interest in performance, Roffey Park Management College has suggested meaningful work has a number of underlying qualities (Holbeche and Springett, 1984). Work becomes meaningful when it is “inherently worthwhile” – personally compelling jobs which allow people to lose themselves in tasks; it relates to a feeling of interconnectedness and trust shared with other people at work; to autonomy and respect – the freedom to make choices and be fairly treated; to balance – the management of personal commitments outside work; it is about an idea of doing something for the common good and benefiting others; and, finally, the alignment between personal values and the values that pertain in a place of work.

According to Estelle Morin, six key categories have emerged from studies since 1997. They are social purpose (doing something useful to others); moral correctness (the justifiability of work processes and results); achievement-related pleasure (enjoying one’s job and developing one’s potential); autonomy (use of skills and judgements to solve problems and make decisions); recognition (adequate salary and affirmation); and positive relationships (trust and interesting contact) (Morin, 2002). It is, of course, quite possible to challenge these features as over-idealised – unconnected from the reality of working life, even. In response, we might reply that it is necessary for societies in general and policymakers and educators in particular to think about what kind of work they would like to create.

In an innovative argument, the philosopher Mike Martin has contended that meaning in work is primarily concerned with motive (Martin, 2000): meaningfulness necessitates a trinity of inter-related motives to be present. First, there are craft motives; individuals seek after and embrace professional ideals that evoke their talents and interests. Second, there are compensation motives; these might include pay, but go much wider, into areas such as power, authority, leadership and recognition – self-interested concerns, but not necessarily egotistical ones. Third, there are moral motives; these involve trust, caring and vocation. Each of these sets of motive is a wellspring of intrinsic satisfaction in work.

A notable feature of such lists is the mixture of essentially self-interested motives and other-directed motives in work. Martin has argued that motives are invariably mixed. Meaning flows from our understanding of our own identity, but the exercise of defining a self, if is to be more than merely cynical, involves reference to goods that extend beyond ourselves. The judgement about which activities are worthwhile is never entirely subjective: our notions of meaningfulness in work tend to descend from an assumption of shared values about public goods. Meaning struggles to be meaning if it is a matter of personal pleasure and preference alone (see also Gardner, Csikszentmihalyi and Damon, 2001).

Meaningful work can be further been illuminated through a contrast with older ideas of “vocation” or “calling”. A vocation can be seen as connoting with an unshakable ethic of public or community service, a practical ideal of activity in which a person’s work becomes morally inseparable from his or her life; it “subsumes the self into a community of disciplined practices and sound judgement whose activity has a meaning and value in itself, not just in the output or profit that results from it” (see Bellah et al, 1985). The concept of vocation certainly explores very similar territory to meaningful work. But there does also appear to be a difference because vocation is premised on a sense of other-directedness and self-denial while meaningful work is very concerned with self-making and self-reference. Experience has to be personalised to have meaning. The contrast between vocation and meaningful work is at its sharpest if we think of vocation as a calling to the service of others and meaningful work as the personal experience of that service (see Overell, 2008).

Section 4: Criticisms of the Search for Meaning and Theories of Social Change

Explaining the rise – if that is the word – of meaningful work remains a key task and the subject of considerable theoretical debate. It has been argued that the concept of meaning and concomitant concerns about the loss of meaning from a culture in which instrumental reason is paramount arise only in the context of “modernity” or “advanced modernity”. Meaning is related to the search for identity or what, after the 1960s, has come to be called the “project of the self” (Taylor, 1992; Taylor, 2007; Giddens, 1999). It flows from a narrative of expressive individualism – of people each with special potentialities and unique characteristics who seek out experiences which help tell of the personality and create an identity. The philosopher Charles Taylor has argued that the way we talk about identity and meaning today would have been incomprehensible to our forbears of a couple of centuries ago. “To know who you are is to be oriented in moral space, a space in which questions arise about what is good or bad, what is worth doing and what not, what has meaning and importance for you and what is trivial and secondary.” (Taylor, 2004) Moderns, he has claimed, are engaged in a constant “act of becoming” utterly unfamiliar to previous generations and he has criticised this stance as being symptomatic of a slide towards self-referential subjectivism.

Richard Sennett has expressed related concerns about the pursuit of meaning as a recipe for unhappiness, not to mention vacuity (Sennett, 1976; Sennett, 2007): the old-time stress on “character” has come to be replaced by a much newer emphasis on “personality”. “Today”, he wrote, “impersonal experience seems meaningless and social complexity an unmanageable threat. By contrast, experience which seems to tell about the self, to help define it, develop it or change it, has become an overwhelming concern. In an intimate society, all social phenomena, no matter how impersonal in structure, are converted into matters of personality in order to have a meaning.” Because all personalities are to some extent a “cabinet of horrors” setting out to pursue meaning directly can lead to an “uncivilised” clamour for “authenticity”. (Sennett, 1976)

Some 32 years after he published these words, Sennett has more recently attempted to steer the debate about work and its meaning towards a revival of the old notion of craftsmanship. Although he has used the term in a new sense of standing for the pleasures of work for its own sake – an “active, creative” phenomenon – much of his book nevertheless dwells on the bodily experience of tools and physical objects as “steadily adding value” to a person’s life. The question of how well the craft ideal translates to “thin air”, immaterial type jobs – in call centres, trading futures, software integration, spin doctoring – remains an interesting one.

Other writers have been more explicitly concerned to tie meaning to industrial and social change. The argument has frequently been made that the process of industrialisation – given paradigmatic expression through the production and assembly lines so often associated with Fordism and Taylorism – resulted in a loss of meaning from work, variously attributable to the division of labour, the segmentation of whole tasks, deskilling, technology, time and motion men and the allegedly overweening power of machinery (see Braverman, 1974; Sievers, 1994). However, over recent years a more popular argument has emerged that technology, and in particular information and communications technology – often travelling under the sobriquet “the knowledge economy” – has been the cause of higher demand for skilled workers educated to a relatively high level, more interesting and potentially fulfilling work, and new organisational forms. (Blauner, 1967; Drucker 1968; Bell, 1974;). The adoption and dispersion of ICT has tended to reduce the need for people to do routine tasks while increasing the need for people in areas that required intellectual problem-solving and complex communication (Castells, 1996; Levy, Murnane and Autor, 2003). Some 42% of workers in the UK are now counted as professionals, managers, or associate professionals (the top three official occupational categories), while a third now have a degree (Brinkley, 2007). Naturally, more knowledge-intensive work does not entail more meaningful work. However, it is arguable that it helps create the conditions in which questions of meaning and fulfilment occur for more people.

Among the most important steps towards substantiating the idea that peoples’ needs from work have changed in the course of the late 20th century has been the work of Ronald Inglehart and the World Values Survey he pioneered. The instrument purports to cover some 70% of the world’s population in 43 countries and has been used annually since 1970. The central finding of his research has been that values in advanced societies differ markedly from those that pertain in less advanced ones. Economic growth, security, and faith in the power of science and technology that are the most important priorities for countries in the process of industrializing are not the priorities are of those that have reached a stage of advanced, or as he put it, “post-industialization”. Among these, “post-materialist priorities” such as self-expression, the quality of life become progressively more pronounced within the culture as a whole, and this in turn has a bearing on the motives and meaning of work: “There is also a gradual shift in what motivates people to work: the emphasis shifts from maximising one’s income and job security towards a growing insistence on interesting and meaningful work … [and] we find a growing emphasis on more collegial and participatory styles of management.”

As has been noted, his theory can be viewed as a socialized version of that advocated by Abraham Maslow and it remains highly controversial (see Giacalone and Jurkiewicz, 2004).

Section 5: Conclusion and implications

Anyone who emerges from the education system blinking into the contemporary world of work is likely to feel the pull of two separate meanings attached to the activity of work. The instrumental view of work as a means-to-an-end remains very strong and, as is well-known, pay correlates strongly with education level. The role of education in leading to better paying work is a foundational relationship in any society which values social mobility. However, only modest acquaintance with the culture of modern work is enough to alert participants to the huge psychological hopes that have become invested in work over recent generations. Work is where people “realize their potential”, in the phrase beloved by the human resources profession; it is where people “make a difference”. Google, the search engine, has even attempted to woo recruits through the boast, “come and be part of a community doing meaningful work”. (Overell, 2002) It is surely true that this emphasis occurs much more in certain sectors of the labour market – especially those employing a lot of graduates. Nevertheless, it is this tension between the material and non-material benefits of work that ought to offer strategic direction to the education system, viewed at least in part as a preparation for working life.

Few would wish to remove the incentive of material reward at the end of the passage through the education system. If there is an important truth attached to the idea of the knowledge economy, it is that as societies advance, higher levels of education and skill will be increasingly in demand from the world of work, and still carry the promise of greater material comfort and wellbeing for individuals as they seek to negotiate a route through a career. The message that income buys choice is increasingly powerful. Many, however, might wish to add that seeing in work the “closed meaning” of income maximisation is to miss some of the most important cultural cues of what is happening in the world of work. The literature concerning meaning has become very closely entangled with the literature on the knowledge economy. The inward resonances of work – how we feel about it and the effect it has on our motives and behaviour – has become a prominent consideration, both from the perspective of the individual and from the perspective of employers looking to enhance organisational effectiveness. The emphasis on self-making work rather than means-to-an-end work has become marked. Political messages often seek to speak to this tension. The UK government’s “full and fulfilling” jobs sits alongside the Lisbon Agenda’s “more and better jobs”.

The dimensions of meaningful work that might be brought to bear on the education system are broad. Profound ethical questions are raised by seeking or finding meaning in work: to do with the use and passage of time; the balance between self-interested motives and other-directed motives; the formation of character and calling; to do with the kind of society we wish to encourage; and to do with psychological health and happiness – the nature of the good life. Meaningful work brings these potentially abstract questions up close to individuals and groups. Indeed, it is perhaps work that is the most obvious vehicle through which individuals come into practical contact with these issues at various points of the lifecycle.

The urgency and busyness of working life can prevent much dwelling on such matters – and perhaps that may be a relief. Yet the argument could be made that the education system broadly conceived is a good place to think through them. In historical terms, people are starting work later and working longer. Much of life is consumed by work. So from a commonsense perspective it makes sense to think how one’s work might rank as a useful, productive contribution and as personally rewarding and fulfilling, even though the reality of work tends, one way or another, to fall short of the aspiration. Trend-spotting is a notoriously dangerous game. Yet if one were forced to hazard a prediction, it is that the new emphasis that has occurred over recent years on meaning, identity and self-making in work is likely to become more intense rather than less – even if a recession as deep and long as is currently feared at the time of writing erodes the employment rate significantly. The appetite for understanding meaning, particularly among younger, more educated workers, is too great.

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This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

One of the most significant general failings of English skills policy over the last quarter of a century has been a refusal by those in charge to acknowledge and confront the realities of the labour market as it currently exists and as it is liable to continue to exist in the short to medium term. The tendency has instead been to view employment through rose-tinted spectacles, to concentrate attention and comment on growth at the upper end of the occupational spectrum, ignore the persistence of a large body of low paid employment at the bottom of the labour market, and to allude to universal increases in the demand for skills and qualifications being generated by an all-encompassing knowledge-driven economy which has either already arrived or whose achievement lies just around the corner. Policy makers’ belief in this tale of a smooth progression to the sunny uplands of high skill, presumably high wage employment has been supported by a narrative produced by various commentators (for instance Leadbeater, 2000; Giddens, 1998) whereby the forces of globalisation and technological change are inevitably driving all developed economies in this direction.

One of the biggest problems with this approach to conceptualising the future is that it very often falls into the trap of creating a universal narrative, that offers little nuance and which suggests convergence round a single trend or set of conditions. This makes for a neat and simple story, but arguably does so at the cost of doing significant damage to the inherent complexities of the labour market and employment. Many of the papers prepared for the work strand of BCH have tried to grapple with what multiple, different and divergent futures may look like. At any given moment, very different conditions may pertain across the occupational spectrum.

The approach taken here is somewhat different from the guru literature. Rather than predicate predictions on the arrival of an episode of universal, discontinuous change, the author of this paper has chosen to extrapolate from past and current trends, and to use these as a guide to what the future may look like. This approach may provide a picture that is at once complex and diverse, but also more familiar (ie looks more like the present), and less entertaining and novel than many others. It does at least have the virtue of being founded on a somewhat more robust empirical base.

The value of pessimism

The assumptions upon which what follows are centred are pitched somewhere between mild pessimism and reasonable caution. As suggested above, much of the ‘future industry’ relies upon the sale of ‘happy ever after endings’ whereby a knowledge driven economy will make all jobs satisfying and well-paid. Given the trend of developments over the last quarter of a century, this seems an unwise basis for developing policy. The benefit of a slightly more pessimistic view of likely developments is that, if it should prove incorrect, policy can easily be adjusted to accommodate a faster and wider pace of change towards better and more knowledge intensive work. If, on the other hand, policy scenarios are founded on expectations that there will be a uniform and widespread demand for a more skilled and certified polyvalent workforce and this assumption proves unfounded, adjustment to policies and programmes may be much harder to achieve. In other words, it might be best to plan policy on a failsafe basis, not least as one of the central messages of what follows is that the differentiated incentive structures that the labour market may be producing will often tend to militate against, and undermine policies based around, assumptions of universal participation and achievement.

A key focus for such concerns is the distribution of rewards for those in employment. The last two decades have seen a widening disparity between the rewards of those at the bottom of the labour market and those accruing to employees at the very top of the occupational hierarchy. What assumptions are we to make about trends in the future? For instance, the Cabinet Office Strategy Unit’s recent paper on social mobility (2008) chooses mildly optimistic assumptions that suggest a narrowing in the distribution of income as a result of the government’s educational policies and moves up the value chain by UK employers in the face of the challenges of globalisation. Other scenarios are less optimistic (see Brown et al, 2008). These issues matter because there is relatively strong evidence (Green, Preston and Janmaat, 2006) that lower levels of income inequality (plus other measures of social equity) tend to be associated with higher levels of educational participation and achievement, whereas high levels of income inequality are often found in countries that have fairly polarised patterns of educational achievement (for example, the USA). At the very least, a highly polarised earnings distribution may produce weak incentives to engage in learning for those who expect to be heading towards jobs at the bottom end of the income distribution (see below).

The short term policy goals

Before looking at what may happen, it is worth reminding the reader of the scale of short term 14-19 policy objectives for which the labour market is expected to act as the motor and with which employers are expected to actively engage. These include:

• Far higher levels of achievement of Level 2 (GCSEs and/or Diplomas) at age 16

• Far higher levels of post compulsory participation, with the aim of reaching 90% in the near future.

• Far higher levels of achievement at Levels 2 and 3 (A Levels, Diplomas and NVQs) at age 18/19

• Diplomas (at both Levels 2 and 3) to have achieved parity of esteem with GCSEs and A Levels, both in terms of entry into HE, and also in terms of the esteem with which they are held by employers and the size of the wage premia they are willing to offer to those who hold them.

• The provision of high quality work experience to all youngsters, and the embedding of such provision within the Diplomas.

• An expanded, vibrant and high quality apprenticeship system as the sole means of acquiring vocational qualifications for 16-19 year olds.

• An end to jobs without formalised, certified training for young people under the age of 18 as part of the move to a raising of the compulsory learning leaving age to 18.

Taken individually, each of these objectives might be deemed ambitious when judged against our performance over the last 25 years – this despite the fact that this period as a whole witnessed levels of growth in higher end occupations (and hence a labour market ‘pull’ for more qualified young people) that current projections suggest will not be matched in the short to medium term. Taken together these policies represent the expectation that reforms will deliver nothing less than a step change in participation and achievement that will enable England to match the kind of performance found in other developed countries and to move us from the lower end to the upper quartile of the OECD league tables on secondary education.

Labour market structures and the incentives they create

The changing labour market

As noted in the Introduction, current English 14-19 policy assumes that the trajectory of structural changes in the labour market is creating demands for skill that render it imperative that participation and achievement undergo a step change (Leitch, 2005 and 2006; DfES, 2007). From this follows an associated belief that the labour market and employers’ patterns of recruitment are creating material incentives (in the shape of positive wage returns to qualifications) that will drive young people to make choices that will enable the desired change in 14-19 achievement to be brought about. Unfortunately, both of these policy ‘givens’ may be partially mistaken.

In reality, the much-vaunted knowledge-driven economy is, and is liable to remain, in part a mirage (Nolan and Wood, 2003; Brown and Hesketh, 2004; Thompson, 2004). There are knowledge driven sectors, occupations and firms, but the effect has not been uniform or general across the entire labour market and while there has been, and will continue to be, growth at the top end of the labour market in the professions and managerial work, large swathes of low paid employment remain (and are set to remain) in areas such as personal services, cleaning, retail and wholesaling (which now employers about 15% of the workforce), and hotels and restaurants. At present, about 22% of the entire UK labour force are low paid on EU definitions (ie it earns less than 60% of the median hourly wage), with a third of all female workers being low paid (Lloyd et al, 2008). Compared to countries such as France and Denmark, the percentage of our labour force who are low paid is relatively high (Lloyd et al, 2008).

Calculations by the IPPR (see Cooke and Lawton, forthcoming) suggest that between now and 2020 occupational change will not produce any significant reduction in the overall proportion of the workforce that is liable to be low paid – in other words almost a quarter of the entire workforce and about a third of all female workers will remain low paid. They also note that occupational projections for the UK tend to point towards a continuing polarisation in the occupational structure, with growth in many top and bottom end occupational groups and a relative ‘hollowing out’ of the overall proportion of middle tier occupations, which suggests that demand for vocational Level 3 qualifications may remain limited (Dickerson and Vignoles, 2007). It also means that progression out of bottom end jobs may be hard to contrive as the occupational ladders needed to make this happen are largely absent. This problem is already acute, as analysis by Cooke and Lawton (forthcoming) also demonstrates that, at present, those who find themselves in low paid employment are often unable to progress out of such work, and for those that do manage to move up the job ladder, the amount of progression (in terms of any improvement in earnings) is often small and the longevity of any upward mobility uncertain.

The other point to make about the labour market is that it is not a uniform phenomenon across the UK. Different parts of the UK have labour markets that vary across a range of dimensions, not least the range of occupational openings that they offer and the proportion of jobs in different sectors and at different wage levels that they support. There is some evidence (Local Futures, 2006; Green and Owen, 2006) that good, high paying, high skill jobs and low paid, low skilled work are both becoming more concentrated in certain localities, leading to a polarisation of the employment options facing some communities. This has two implications for educational provision. First, the range and quality of opportunities available to young people via the work-based route in areas with a concentration of poor jobs may be attenuated, and that similar problems may attend the provision of an adequate number and quality of work placements for those pursuing education-based vocational offerings. Second, in certain localities the incentives on offer to youngsters to remain in post-compulsory E&T from many of the openings in the local labour market will be weak – a point expanded on below (see also Keep, 2009).

The experience of work and the workplace

Just as low paid work is not set to vanish, there will remain significant, perhaps widening, variations in many other aspects of how employees experience work and how they are managed. Just as the idea of the universal knowledge worker, with high levels of autonomy and ‘authorship’ (to use Leadbeater’s ghastly phrase) over their job tasks is liable to remain a distant vision for many workers, so too is the prospect of everyone being employed in workplaces that value creativity, and manage their employees using sophisticated human resource management techniques that aim to develop and sustain high levels of commitment and innovation (Kersley et al, 2006).

Put bluntly, the experience of work will depend in future, as it does today, on occupational labour markets and even more importantly on the identity of the individual employer and their product market strategy and models of work organisation, job design and employee relations policies (Ashton and Sung, 2006). Rather than universal convergence around a high norm, the most likely outcome is a large, possibly growing range of variance between different workplaces. Being employed by Deloitte Coopers is and will remain very different from working for a budget hotel chain (at whatever level in the organisation), in terms of:

• What one is paid
• How one is managed and motivated
• What training and development opportunities are on offer
• What career pathways can be accessed

In other words, the gap between work in ‘leading edge’ employers and work in ‘trailing edge employers’ may be liable to widen rather than diminish, which poses major challenges for policies that seek to meet the needs of both categories through raising skills and aspirations.

Many employers will continue to view the vast bulk of their workforces as an easily substitutable factor of production, or as a cost to be minimised, rather than as assets or sources of competitive advantage in their own right. This is particularly liable to be true for those working in organisations that cater to cost-conscious customers via price leadership strategies (Lloyd, Mason and Mayhew, 2008). It is hard to see what will change this situation.

Recruitment, selection and qualifications

The clash between official expectations of the labour market and what are, and will continue to be, sometimes less glossy realities is made manifest via the recruitment and selection process. Insofar as official policy has a view of the processes whereby young people gain entry into paid employment, there is a strong presumption that formalised, ‘best practice’ personnel management textbook methods are an almost universal norm and that these revolve around a meritocratic model based on the possession of formal qualifications (Keep, 2005). Unfortunately, what evidence we have available (and it is patchy and poorly synthesised – see James and Keep, forthcoming) tends to paint a somewhat different picture.

The textbook model does apply in some cases, but tends to do so more for jobs at the upper end of the occupational spectrum, and operates alongside other, less formalised approaches to the process. Data from the large-scale Workplace Employment Relations Survey (WERS) shows that these informal processes include the use of word of mouth advertisement of vacancies (used by 44 per cent of workplaces) and the recommendation of candidates by existing employees (used by 45% of workplaces) (Kersley et al, 2006, pp72-73). At present, what evidence we have (Kersley et al, 2006) suggests that use of these informal approaches may be increasing. Moreover there is often a strong logic to the use of such methods, not least in using social networks to secure information on candidates’ generic and social skills and work ethic that are weakly assessed by formal qualifications (Lockyer and Scholarios, 2007; Iles and Salaman, 1995).

This in turn underlines the fact that employers are aiming and liable to continue to aim to acquire a range of skills, attributes, and attitudes through the recruitment process, many of which bear a weak relationship with formal certification and which often lie outside the spectrum of skill that qualifications (as currently configured) assess (Payne, 1999; Keep and Payne, 2004; Warhurst and Nickson, 2001; Bowles and Gintis, 2002). These include creativity, physical strength and resilience, manual dexterity, social and communication skills, appearance, voice and accent, effort (eg willingness to ‘put in the hours’), and a positive attitude towards authority.

There is also a wealth of evidence that suggests that the part played by qualifications in the recruitment and selection process for many jobs at the lower end of the occupational spectrum is patchy (Evaluation and Development Agency, 1997; IFF Research, 2000; Jackson, 2001; Jackson et al, 2002; Johnson and Burden, 2003; Miller et al, 2002; Spilsbury and Lane, 2000; Newton et al, 2005; Bunt et al, 2005). The CBI claim that their members are often operating a 80/20 rule in recruitment, whereby employers afford an 80% weighting to uncertified generic and soft skills, and 20% to hard skills (CBI, 2007, p13). These preferences and patterns of behaviour on the part of employers do not seem likely to undergo radical change in the foreseeable future, unless interventions such as a widespread use of licence-to-practice are introduced by government or some other agency.

None of this is to suggest that qualifications are or will be unimportant, merely that they represent one factor among a number within decision making in the recruitment and selection process, and for many jobs at the lower end of the labour market that process itself may be relatively informal and may rely upon social networks and forms of skill and job-readiness indicators that lie outside the ambit of formal certification (for a fuller discussion, see James and Keep, forthcoming). What it does mean, is that lower level qualifications, particularly vocational qualifications, produce weak and uncertain returns in the labour market and that the average wage premia they attract is often limited (Jenkins et al, 2007; Dickerson and Vignoles, 2007). Again, it is hard to see how this is liable to change dramatically in the near future. Policy makers appear to be pinning their hopes on the idea that if employers are allowed to re-design vocational certification to suit their needs, they will be more willing to offer a wage premium to those who hold such qualifications. The problem with this scenario is that what we know about such jobs suggests that the skill requirements (in least in terms of certifiable skills) are often so limited in scope and nature, and the supply of labour that holds such skills so relatively abundant, that employers may see no need to pay more for them however well they are covered by a qualification (Lloyd, Mason and Mayhew, 2008).

This somewhat depressing picture concerning low paid work, the hetrogeneity of what work will be like, and the nature of the recruitment and selection process has a number of serious but frequently unappreciated implications for policy on initial education (and Education and Training policy more widely). These implications stem from the way in which the structure of labour market opportunities, the pay levels they generate, and hence the returns they offer on the acquisition of various types and levels of qualification produce an incentive structure that may not be particularly conducive to the kind of high participation, high achievement future to which policy makers aspire (Keep, 2005 and 2009).

Thinking about incentives

In trying to think about the many different forms of incentives that face individuals when they contemplate engaging in Education and Training (E&T), the following typology may be of use (for a fuller exposition, see Keep, 2009):

Type 1 Incentives are generated inside the E&T system and are designed to create positive attitudes towards the act of learning through intrinsic interest. Type 1 incentives are bound up with things such as the curriculum, pedagogies, assessment regimes and opportunities for progression.

Type 2 Incentives are generated in wider society and the economy and the rewards they confer are external to the learning process itself. They include wage returns to particular types and levels of qualification, access to higher status employment associated with higher educational achievement, cultural expectations (including those of parents) about the value of learning, and forms of labour market regulation (such as licence to practice) that make the acquisition of particular qualifications a prerequisite for access to particular forms of employment.

Increasingly, government has noted that neither of these incentive categories has produced signals that are sufficiently widespread or strong to engender the desired step change in participation. It has therefore increasingly come to rely on Type 1b Incentives, which provide government subsidy to act in lieu of Type 2 Incentives from the labour market – Educational Maintenance Allowances (EMAs) would be a prime example here (Keep, 2005, 2009).

Incentive patterns and their impact on initial education

As hinted at above, what we know about both the evolving structure of the labour market and the recruitment and selection behaviours of many employers suggests that the incentives on offer to those youngsters not following the ‘Royal Route’ through post-compulsory education of A Levels and HE entry, may be facing Type 2 incentives that are both weak and uncertain.

This suspicion is confirmed by the mass of data generated by many studies of the rates of return (in terms of higher average lifetime earnings) that accrue to different levels and types of qualification.

Overall, the message from this research is fairly simple and fairly stark – at every level academic qualifications appear to generate higher average returns than their vocational counterparts. In addition, for lower level vocational qualifications the pattern of wage returns is extremely complex and confusing and often depends on the form of E&T through which the qualification was achieved, but in many instances the returns (especially to NVQs) are either somewhere between very low and nil, or in some cases actually negative (having an NVQ Level 2 sometimes appears to be associated with earning less than someone with no qualifications) (see Dearden et al, 2000; Dearden et al, 2004; Jenkins et al, 2007; and Dickerson and Vignoles, 2007).

It might be noted in passing that we have no very reliable means of knowing how effective or otherwise the sequence of attempts at creating a set of general vocational qualifications (of the type represented by GNVQs, AVCEs, vocational A Levels) has been, since no iteration of this project has lasted long enough for a significant cohort of its ‘graduates’ to be absorbed into the labour market and to therefore generate robust data on the rates of return to the qualification. Obviously from the perspective of current reforms, a key issue is the wage returns that will accrue to the Diplomas at all levels. If the mantra of ‘parity of esteem’ with the academic route (ie GCSEs and A levels) is taken seriously, this means that Diplomas will need to generate broadly similar labour market returns to their academic counterparts – something that the vast bulk of non-academic qualifications have never achieved. At the very least, the Diplomas need to appear worth studying, and to offer positive enhancements to lifetime earnings. Even this test may prove a demanding one where Diplomas are leading candidates towards families of occupations in lower paying sectors of the economy (eg retail, health and beauty).

Moreover, the law of unintended consequences comes into play when we consider the unfortunate juxtaposition of developments in the labour market (growing polarisation in job growth at the top and bottom end, hollowing out of middle level jobs, poor progression opportunities from low paid work, and rising geographical concentrations of bad jobs), with policy developments which have placed a heavy emphasis on the massification of HE. This is because as graduates cascade down through the labour market the range of relatively highly paid job opportunities available to those without degrees is gradually being reduced. This means that the incentives to going down the Royal Route are if anything strengthening (not because the returns to degrees are necessarily improving, but because a whole range of career routes are otherwise closed off), while at the same time the incentives confronting those who cannot or do not wish to enter HE are becoming less powerful in terms of what labour market opportunities non-HE learning routes and qualifications will lead to (Keep and Mayhew, 2004). It should be noted that these opportunities will not only generally offer lower lifetime earnings, but also reflect weaker levels of other Type 2 Incentives, such as opportunities for career progression and development, social status, and intrinsic job interest (see Keep, 2009).

In summary, what we appear to be faced by is a situation where the strength and reliability of Type 2 Incentives tends to fade as we progress down both the occupational ladder and the levels of qualification. As the incentives weaken, so does the logic for post-compulsory participation, so that for young people who live in communities where the range of local job openings is narrow and often leads to lower end occupations, and for whom escape via HE entry appears an unrealistic or unappealing prospect, the reasons to stay on and try to achieve a qualification may not appear particularly compelling.

In many other developed countries, including the USA, Canada, and Australia, as well as North European countries such as Germany, Austria and Switzerland, a very different Type 2 Incentive structure pertains, because of the extensive use of licence to practice labour market regulation. In these countries, youngsters wanting to enter particular occupations (car mechanic, builder, plumber, retail assistant, bank clerk) know that in order to stand any chance whatsoever of pursuing this goal, they must obtain the required Level 2 or 3 vocational qualification. Such expectations are often reinforced by other, wider societal and cultural expectations and norms, and in the case of some countries, by wage systems that mean that even lower occupational category employment secures relatively generous rewards. All this delivers a strong, absolute form of incentive to both participate and achieve. Much of the difference in the levels of post-compulsory participation and achievement that the UK tends to register vis-à-vis other OECD countries can arguably be put down to this absence of labour market regulation rather than to other countries necessarily having more sophisticated and engaging curricula, assessment system and pedagogies that are delivering relatively more powerful Type 1 Incentives than are found here (Keep, 2005). If this is the case, then it suggests that much of the effort expended on English 14-19 reform over the last quarter of a century may have been, at least in part, misdirected.

The consequences of all this are that for far too many youngsters, the Type 2 Incentives that they face, particularly in terms of pay and career prospects, are fairly weak, especially for those following many Level 2 vocational courses. As a result, the following quote, from a study sponsored by BP some 16 years ago remains depressingly apposite:

“Much has been made of the need to place greater emphasis on post-compulsory vocational studies. The business community has been particularly vocal. The message is clear: in order to compete, we must improve the skill level of the British workforce. However, financial incentives to pursue these courses contradict the message … the expected lifetime earnings associated with lower level vocational qualifications …. generally fall below those of school leavers with only GCSEs. Employers do not seem to place a high value on low level vocational skills and, as a result, young people are acting rationally in not participating in training to the same extent as on the Continent. Quite simply, as long as some employers contradict the message through their pay and recruitment policies young people will continue to spurn such training.” (Bennett et al, 1992, p12)

Despite a whirlwind of activity and reform within the field of 14-19 policy, the problem neatly outlined above remains every bit as important now as it was then.

Indeed, it could be argued that the government’s decision to compel young people to remain in learning until 17 (and within a few years 18) simply reflects an implicit admission of failure on this point, and, rather than regulate the labour market, they have chosen instead to regulate young people, who are deemed easier to coerce than employers. The most likely outcome of this policy, besides a considerable level of non-cooperation on the part of some young people, is that participation may rise, but achievement may not. In other words, young people will be more or less grudgingly warehoused in some form of ‘learning’ experience until 18, but without necessarily experiencing any very compelling incentive to achieve anything during their post-compulsory phase.

Employer expectations

Much of the policy rhetoric has surrounded education policy, and skills policies more generally, has placed great stress on the centrality of education, training and skills to business success (at the level of the national economy, sector and individual enterprise). The corollary, it is believed, is that business leaders will inevitably be extremely concerned about skills, and will be willing to devote large amounts of time, energy and company resources to co-operating with government to redesign the education and training (E&T) system, to participating in the governance of the publicly-funded E&T system (eg Sector Skills Councils, the LSC, Regional Development Agencies, etc), and in helping to deliver the myriad of (often somewhat short-lived) government schemes and programmes that this system revolves around. Given official assumptions about the centrality of skill to future competitive success (Leitch Review, 2005, 2006) it seems reasonable to suppose that the official belief must be that employers’ interest in skills and initial education and training will intensify further.

There are a number of points that can be made in relation to these beliefs about the present and future. First, when it comes to young entrants to the labour market, particularly those aiming to enter occupations where high levels of qualification are not a prime requirement, we need to remember that employers have, and will continue to have, access to many alternative sources of labour, such as HE students working part-time, women returners, older workers, and migrant labour, all of which may offer a more socially-skilled and flexible labour force. In other words, rather than expend time and energy trying to help reform and support 14-19 provision, or target the outputs of that phase of education for recruitment purposes, employers will be able to look elsewhere. Moreover, for many occupations, the development of mass HE will enable employers to recruit for a broad range of jobs at age 21-plus, rather than from 16-19 year olds, and earlier phases of education will matter to them only insofar as it helps equip enough young people to enter the degree courses from which they recruit.

Second, and more fundamentally, there is much evidence that skills are often, for businesses, a third or fourth order issue (Ashton and Sung, 2006; Keep and Mayhew, 1999; Keep et al, 2006; Grugulis, 2008). If this is and remains the case then initial education is but one, often minor, sub-section of what for many employers will be a relatively marginal set of issues. Acceptance of this reality has tended to be strongly resisted by policy makers,

And this raises a range of issues about what can or should be expected of and from employers in future.

Meeting the needs of employers

Unless policy trajectories change dramatically in the future, one of the key goals of government activity is liable to be ‘meeting the needs of employers’. As has been suggested on a number of previous occasions, the policy maker’s notion of ‘employers’ as a meaningful and homogeneous collective category is open to serious question (Huddleston and Keep, 1999; Gleeson and Keep, 2004). The skill needs of employers will continue to vary across sector, sub-sector, occupational grouping, firm size, and product market strategy. As noted above, divergence, rather than convergence may be the story of labour market developments over the next twenty years.

As a result, different employers will want varied outcomes and outputs from the education system, and insofar as the volume and/or quality of the supply of those requirements are finite at any given moment, they may well find themselves in competition with one another for a limited supply of suitable young people. As a result, the idea of ‘meeting employers’ needs’ (often specified as a simple and unproblematic goal for policy), is in reality liable to be extremely problematic, since different employers want divergent outcomes and to satisfy one set of demands may well be to dissatisfy another (Huddleston and Keep, 1999).

The upshot of this will be (as now) positional competition between sectors and occupations for particular segments of the ability range. History tells us that some forms of employment tend to be much less attractive to bright youngsters than others, and sectors at the losing end of the spectrum have a tendency to blame the education system (in the shape of poor or inappropriate careers guidance and teacher bias) for their woes. There is a strong likelihood that these issues will impact on the Diplomas, in that some of the lines of study will attract those of higher levels of ability and others will not. Lines that are linked to employment opportunities in sectors and occupations that are associated with relatively low pay, weak career and progression opportunities, and poor working conditions (eg unsocial hours) are liable to struggle to recruit students in sufficient numbers and of a quality to satisfy the expectations of some employers. The CBI has called for the numbers of young people opting to go down each Diploma line to ‘match’ the size of demand from employers (CBI, 2007). The danger is that, as has often been the case in the past, when employers’ expectations are not met, the temptation (on the part of both employers but also government) will be to blame the education system and its staff for failing to meet the needs of the labour market (Huddleston and Keep, 1999; Gleeson and Keep, 2004).

Conclusions

The foregoing poses some major challenges for policy development. In essence what it suggests is that a future labour market that offers divergent opportunities and rewards is liable to create an incentive structure that is similarly polarised. Those who know they are heading for A Levels (or their future equivalent), an elite university and employment in a well-paying occupation with a sophisticated employer will have very strong incentives to participate, to develop a wide range of skills and attributes, and to achieve. Those who live in localities with a concentration of low paid employment, who do not see themselves going on into higher education and entering what is in effect a national (or even international) labour market, and whose pathway is therefore down a vocational route (broadly defined) will often be facing much weaker and more uncertain incentives. When issues such as parental class are added in (see Keep, 2009) the outcomes may create major challenges for policy.

In formulating scenarios of the future and using these to plan E&T policies, there is an urgent need to come to terms with the deficiencies that exist and will continue to exist in the demand for skills from employers. At the lower end of the occupational spectrum demand will be weak, patchy and limited, and there will remain a large number of jobs that will be low paid and essentially low skilled.

A polarised and highly differentiated labour market poses major challenges for the construction of a common educational experience within state education, not least given that the compulsory phase of this is now going to be expected to last from 3 to 18. Constructing a unified, common platform of learning that can meaningfully occupy this 13 year period, and fit people for a very varied set of labour market destinations and trajectories, as well as prepare them to be responsible citizens and parents, and provide a foundation for lifelong learning (which may be nothing to do with their jobs), will plainly be a challenging exercise.

There are, in essence, two ways that policy could address these issues. The first is to assume that the answer will lie in further reform of pedagogy, curricula and assessment regimes, and that these can produce internal (Type 1) incentives within the learning process that will be sufficient to motivate more young people to participate and to achieve.

The second way of viewing the problem (ie the one adopted in this paper) would suggest that the heart of the problem lies outside the classroom, and that a polarised labour market will produce strong incentives at the top, and weak incentives at the bottom, and the E&T system cannot necessarily entirely compensate for this state of affairs. While further tinkering with qualification design might help to ease problems at the margin, the real obstacles to progress lie in the structure of occupations, their associated wage premia, and limited ladders for progression. In other words, it is reform of the labour market rather than of education that will be needed.

In taking this line, the author is not suggesting that a better curriculum offering and improved forms of pedagogy, coupled with a more nimble assessment system are not worthwhile and valuable goals in their own right, but on their own there is a strong likelihood that they will prove insufficient to power us towards the kind of policy goals currently being espoused. Only in combination with a reformed labour market and more uniform demand for skills across all occupations can they do that. We have changed curricula, qualifications and pedagogic regimes for this age group many times since the middle of the last century, and yet world-class levels of participation and attainment have continued to elude us. In a sense an analogy can be drawn with an attempt to design the perfect car, wherein ceaseless efforts are made to perfect the bodywork, upholstery and instrumentation, but with little if any attention paid to the design of the engine – which is small and low powered. The result is something that looks quite nice parked on the drive, but which is unable to travel any great distance at a reasonable speed.

The key issue for the construction of the scenarios is that they engage with a labour market and workplaces that encompass extremely diverse experiences and outcomes. These, in turn, will tend to create incentive structures that for upper level occupations and good employers will support policy, and in the case of lower end employment and bad employers will tend to undermine the rationale for participation, achievement or a rich and inclusive curriculum. If we are thinking in terms of universal educational norms or minimum entitlements, this raises some very big questions about at what level these should be pitched in the face of a spectrum of labour market opportunities and needs. Some employers will want creative, polyvalent knowledge workers. Others will want people who don’t expect too much, have limited ambition to progress (since opportunities to do so may be low), and who do what they are told. One response might be a highly differentiated set of educational experiences and streams of provision. The future is not going to be simple!

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This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

The history of work-life balance begins in the latter half of the 19^th century when reformers successfully campaigned against long factory hours and were able to demonstrate that reductions in working hours had no impact upon levels of output. During the early part of the 20th century the campaign to reduce working hours continued through a series of pioneering studies that demonstrated the relationship between time spent at work and the level of output was a complex one. These studies also took account of the importance of motivation and morale, fatigue, concentration, and attention to reveal that there were conditions under which a reduction in working time led to increased production, and there were optimum arrangements for the length of working time and intervals for rest pauses, in particular circumstances.

During the 1960s and 1970s, though the term work-life balance had yet to be coined, a number of factors can be identified that eventually gave rise to the current policy mix. These included:

• health and safety at work;
• international competitiveness;
• equality; and
• the flexible labour market.

During the 1960s the debate was very much about the extent to which paid overtime was “manufactured”, as explained below. The analysis focussed upon informal work group organisation and the joint regulation of working practices, within a framework of collective bargaining. The approach was at the heart of the report of the Royal Commission on Trades Unions and Employers Associations in the late 1960s. The analysis built on the productivity bargaining experiences of the previous decade. Productivity bargaining recognised that groups of manual workers often exercised unilateral informal control over many aspects of their working practices. Case after case revealed that the control included the regulation of working hours where overtime was paid at premium rates. Long overtime hours were often not necessary but “manufactured” to boost earnings. The consequence was a low productivity culture, associated with low hourly rates of pay and long hours of work. The answer was to negotiate new productivity packages, which included major changes in work organisation and working practices – including flexible patterns of work organisation – increasing basic rates of pay and curtailing overtime working.

The 1970s proved to be a turning point brought about by a wide range of factors, such as increased international competition, changes in technology, new forms of organisation, increased female participation, as well as changing and more diverse working-time needs of individuals. It was during the 1970s that regulation also began to recognise the importance of equality with the introduction of the Equal Pay Act in 1970 and the Sex Discrimination Act in 1975. Since then issues relating to social equity and justice have multiplied and become more prominent and explicit. It is argued that long working hours among men in the child rearing years have disadvantaged women in two ways: they have made it less possible for men to share in childcare and home building, leaving the onus upon women to carry those responsibilities; they have made it less possible for women to compete for more senior jobs if a major criterion for promotion is commitment to the job, as demonstrated by long hours at work.

During the 1980s the political focus was very much upon liberalising the economy, including the labour market. At the heart of labour market reform was the introduction of more flexible patterns of work – frequently referred to as “atypical forms of employment” (increased temporary/fixed-term employment, etc.). This took place at a time of a major structural shift in the labour market with employment moving from the production to the service sector, which tended to favour female employment at the time. The introduction of more flexible forms of work was an important strand in improving labour supply because it potentially allowed groups of individuals otherwise unable to enter the labour market the opportunity to do so. It was only during the 1990s, especially the latter half of the decade, that Government began to play a more interventionist role to give employees (and potential employees) certain rights with respect to establishing a work-life balance that suited them.

The Current Work-Life Balance

Since 1997, there have been a number of regulatory changes that have been driven by a desire to make the labour market more equitable, efficient and safer given that the work-life balance agenda has some of its origins in a desire to improve health and safety. The Working Time Regulations have their origin in the European Union, where successive UK Governments have been amongst their less enthusiastic supporters, reflected in the UK’s desire to retain the opt-out.

From a regulatory perspective work-life balance encompasses:

• Maternity rights – all pregnant employees are entitled to 52 weeks of maternity leave regardless of their length of service. Mothers are also eligible for Contractual (Company) Maternity Pay, as agreed with their employers, or Statutory Maternity Pay for 39 weeks, plus other potential welfare benefits.
• Paternity leave – an entitlement to a father to take a short period of paid leave to look after his baby or support the mother following birth.
• Adoptive leave – an eligible employee adopting a child can take time off when the child is placed for adoption for 52 weeks and may be eligible for Statutory Adoption Pay for 39 weeks.
• Parents’ and carer’s right to request flexible working – an employee with a child aged under six, or a disabled child aged under 18, and carers of adults, can request to work flexibly. The employer has a statutory duty to consider the application and refuse it only on the basis of clear business case for doing so.
• Time off for dependants in an emergency – this right enables an employee to take the necessary action to deal with an unexpected or sudden problem concerning a dependant and to make any necessary longer term arrangements. Whether the time off is paid or not is at the discretion of the employer.

These all relate to the Government’s campaign to promote work-life balance and are all concerned with the care of young children or other family commitments in one way or another.

Work-life balance, however, is about balancing time between work and activities outside of work which will include time spent looking after young dependants but many other activities, both frivolous and important, too. In this respect, perhaps the most important statutes are the Working Time Regulations because they establish the maximum number of hours that an individual may work (provided the individual has decided not to opt-out from the regulations).

• Working Time Regulations - a central provision of the regulations is to set a maximum 48-hour working week, averaged over a 17-week period, though other basic rights and protections provided for in the Regulations include a:
  • limit of an average of eight hours work in 24 which night workers can be required to work
  • right for night workers to receive free health assessments
  • right to 11 hours rest a day
  • a right to a day off each week
  • right to an in-work rest break if the working day is longer than six hours at one stretch
  • right to four weeks paid leave a year.

Additionally, from a regulatory perspective if improving work-life balance is seen as reducing the constraints upon individuals’ work-leisure choices, then there are other regulations (including proposed regulations) to consider.

“Flexible working” describes the various work patterns adapted to suit the needs of employees, but which may also have important benefits for the employer. Common types of flexible working are:

• part-time – working less than the normal hours of full time workers and, while there is no absolute value of hours, a full time worker usually works 35 hours or more a week
• flexi-time – where the employee chooses when to work, bearing in mind there is normally a core period during which the individual must be present
• annualised hours – set the hours that an employee is expected to work over a year – if the employee works more than average hours over some period, this is compensated by lower than average hours at some other time of the year
• compressed hours – involve working the agreed weekly hours normally worked over, say, five days a week, over fewer days (e.g. 36 hours over four days)
• staggered hours – allow different start, break and finish times for different employees in the same workplace
• job sharing – occurs where a job designed for one person is shared between two or more people
• home working – involves carrying out part or all of the work from the employee’s place of residence.

Currently there are plans to extend provisions already in place following the Walsh Review, principally the right to request flexible working for parents of children aged under 16 (currently the age cut off is six, and 18 if the child is disabled).

In addition, the Government is currently considering providing employees with the right to request time off to train:

“The right to request time to train would work by giving an established employee a legal right to ask their employer to give them time away from their mainstream duties to undertake relevant training, which their employer would be required to consider seriously.” (DIUS, Time to Train, p5)

As with the Right to Request Flexible Working regulation employers will be obliged to give serious consideration to any such request.

The regulations listed above in many respects represent the core of work-life balance once a person is in employment. There are, of course, many other factors which relate to finding work in the first place, lest individuals end up viewing work-life balance from the abject position of being involuntarily out of work. Levels of employment demand, the welfare system, skill levels, and anti-discrimination laws are all related to work-life balance insofar as they affect the individual’s ability to find (any) work, and find work in those sectors of the economy where they are likely to be afforded some form of work-life balance that suits their needs.

The Incidence of Work-life Balance

Historically, in comparison with the European Union, the UK has been a country with relatively long working hours. Figure 1 shows the trend in total working hours over the last decade, based on Labour Force Survey data, which shows that there has been a gradual reduction in working hours for both men and women, but, for some groups in the labour market, long hours of work remain the norm. It has been estimated that one million people work sustained long hours; that is, over 48 hours a week on average for a 17-week period (the limit specified in the Working Time Regulations). This figure is not limited to senior managers – where the divide between work and non-work activities is somewhat blurred when, for example, social functions are factored in as time at work – but also includes manual workers. The data go on to reveal that the business need for long hours working was manifest in some cases, but there was also evidence that, it in some cases, it arose from custom and practice unrelated to the production process.

Figure 1: Trends in Average Total Hours of Work, 2001 – 2008

Source: Labour Force Survey / Eurostat

There are often cultural factors that lead to either long hours of work – which by definition is neither a flexible form of working nor one consistent with work-life balance unless the individual freely chooses to work in that manner – which are unrelated to business need. “Presenteeism” is one such factor by which employees demonstrate their value to the business by their almost constant presence which, in turn, has a contagion effect such that other people feel the need to mimic the practice. Employers, however, can and do find innovative alternatives to a dependence upon long hours, although it needs to be borne in mind that changing working time arrangements, particularly where they are linked directly to payment systems, can prove both difficult and protracted. The Work-Life Balance (WLB) Surveys, conducted in 2000, 2003, and 2007, provide information about the extent to which employers provide flexible forms of working. Figure 2 shows the results from the second and third WLB surveys.

Figure 2: Provision of Flexible Working Time Arrangements by Employers, 2003 and 2007

Source: Work Life Balance Employer Surveys; Hayward et al., 2007

The data show an increase in the provision of flexible working time arrangements by employers, with 84% of employers providing at least two or more flexible working time arrangements in 2007. The incidence of provision increases with the percentage of women in the workplace, and it is larger establishments and those in the public sector that are most likely to report provision. Provision is not the same as take-up, and the evidence points to take-up not increasing at the same pace as provision. Where employers do not provide any flexible working time arrangements – 4% in 2006 – it tends to be because it is not compatible with the business. The WLB3 Employer Survey also reveals that 40% of employers had received a request from an employee to work flexibly and 90% had agreed to that request.

A representative sample of employees can provide a more detailed picture of take-up. Figure 3 shows results from the WLB3 Employee Survey and compares employer provision with actual take-up by employees. Take-up refers to the percentage of staff taking up a flexible working time arrangement where it is provided by an employer. It can be seen that relatively few employers allow working from home on a regular basis, but, where it is provided, a substantial percentage of employees take it up. The data show that some flexible working time practices, such as reduced hours for a short-period or a compressed working week, are taken up by relatively few employees. Overall, 90% of employees said flexible working time arrangements were available to them and 62% reported that they were working flexibly. The percentage of employees that had approached their employer about working flexibly was 17% in 2007, the same as in 2003, and 60% said their request had been fully met and a further 18% said it had been partially met.

Figure 3: Take-up of Flexible Working Time Arrangements by Employees, 2007

Source: Third Work Life Balance Employee Survey; Hooker et al., 2007

In relation to policies aimed more directly at parents, evidence reveals that 34% of workplaces reported a female employee being pregnant over the past twelve months, with 94% going on to take maternity leave. There are differences between the proportions of workplaces reporting a female employee being pregnant in the public and private sectors, with 56% of the former reporting a pregnancy and 30% in the latter. Why this should be the case is unknown, but there are a number of possibilities: women thinking of becoming pregnant may choose to select the public sector, the public sector may have more job opportunities for women of child bearing age, or pregnant women in the private sector may be more likely to leave employment before becoming pregnant. The EOC investigation into discrimination during pregnancy revealed few differences in incidence between private and public sectors. Employers overall appear to be increasing the provision of childcare support, with 14% providing some form of support or guidance about support in 2007, compared to 4% in 2003.

Developing an Effective Work-life Balance for the Future

There is a wide body of evidence which suggests that work-life balance favours both employers and employees. These relate to overall effects on business performance or assisting particular groups of workers. For instance, an early study demonstrated how the provision of flexible working time arrangements allowed older people, many of whom were of post-retirement age, to re-enter the labour market because they were able to choose when they worked in the light of their other commitments and their ability to work. Ultimately the success of work-life balance is dependent upon employers being able to implement the practices so that, at worst, they do not impose an unsustainable cost on their businesses. If it were to impose an unsustainable cost, then the likely outcome is some form of regulatory avoidance, such as not recruiting people who may demand some of work-life balance assistance. To date, the evidence about the introduction of flexible working time arrangements and leave entitlements appear to have been largely beneficial to employers, even if the percentage of employers reporting a positive impact appears to be declining over time (see Figure 4).

Figure 4: Perceived Effects of Flexible Working and Leave Arrangements

Source: Work Life Balance Employer Surveys; Hayward et al., 2007 Figure 9.2, p.65

There remains evidence that the take-up of work-life balance is uneven across the economy and that some demand from employees has not been met. Women, for example, are much more likely to take up flexible working time arrangements than men, even though an increasing number of men find themselves in the role of secondary earner in their household. Also, take up is much greater in large establishments and the public sector. In looking to the future the key question is how work-life balance can be extended to a wider group of people and employers.

The Government has responded over time, by increasing the range of people who fall within the scope of existing regulations, such as extending the right to flexible working to carers in 2006, and proposing to further increase the scope of this regulation by making it available to all employees with children aged under 16 years. Regulation is very much family focussed, but there is an intention to broaden the scope to include time off for training such that individuals can pursue, within limitations, their intellectual interests. In other countries, study leave is also available (eg Denmark) and the UK Government is currently considering making this provision available. Improving the take up of education and training seems an essential step towards lifelong learning, reducing inactivity rates and improving productivity amongst older individuals. At the present time, male employees aged 16-17 are nearly three times more likely to receive training than those aged 50-64.

As noted in the introduction, in order for Government to justify intervention, the net social benefits of doing so need to be demonstrated. In the case of family focussed interventions, the argument is made with reference to the burden of family care being disproportionately borne by women. There are two principal social benefits from assisting women – and men – to meet the costs of family care: (i) increasing the current supply of labour; and (ii) ensuring a future supply of labour by reducing any employment barriers to childbearing. There are also issues of equity that form a further aspect of social benefits: (i) equality of opportunity – everyone has the same opportunity to use their talents, and society should mitigate the effects of race, gender, inheritance, etc. (ii) equality of process – people in the same situation should be treated in the same way (iii) equality of outcome – everyone should have an equal share of resources produced by an economy.

It is likely that, for the foreseeable future, the work-life balance from a public policy perspective, will be focussed mainly on the family rather than a wider set of issues relating to how individuals want to balance their time between work and the rest of their lives. Aside from a right to time off to train, it is unlikely that work-life balance from a regulatory standpoint in the UK will be expanded much beyond the area Government has mapped out for it since the late 1990s. That said, progress since the late 1990s has been substantial, with a range of issues previously regarded as matters to be decided between employees and their employers now falling within the remit of public policy. The evaluative evidence, insofar as it exists, suggests that the benefits to employers, employees and the State derived from the current set of regulations are sufficiently large that they are unlikely to be repealed or made more limited in scope.

Where there is room for further extension of work-life balance is in relation to the take-up of existing policies. There are several issues of interest here:

• whether there is ignorance amongst employers and employees about the scope for introducing work-life balance – as the Walsh Review suggests – such that it will be possible to further roll-out practices across the economy with the assistance of some form of advice, guidance and information; or
• whether there is a selection issue, where those employers that have taken up work-life balance are those that are capable of doing so (or find it in their own interests to do so) and those that remain face difficulties doing so.

There is an analogy with the high performance work practices literature. Such practices are self-evidently beneficial to the employer and employee that it is puzzling why so many employers have failed to do so. The answer is likely to a mix between ignorance and lack of applicability (the selection issue) but it is not clear about the extent to which either is the case.

Myers, C.S. (1924) Industrial Psychology in Great Britain. London, Cape

Whybrew, E. (1968) Overtime Working in Great Britain. Research Paper No. 9, Royal Commission on Trades Unions and Employers Associations. London, HMSO.

Donovan, (1968) Royal Commission on Trades Unions and Employers Associations. London, HMSO.

European Foundation, 2003

Hogarth, T. et al, 2000.

BERR (2008) Right to Request Flexible Working: A review of how to extent the right to flexible working to the parents of older children. London, DTI, May 2008

Hogarth, T., Daniel, W.W., Dickerson, A. and Campbell, D. The Business Context to Long Hours Working Department of Trade and Industry, Employment Research Series Report No.23, DTI, London

Purcell, K., Hogarth, T. and Simm C. (1999) Whose Flexibility? The Costs and Benefits of Non-Standard Employment Contracts. York, Joseph Rowntree Foundation

Hogarth et al. ibid

Hayward, B., Fong, B. and Thornton, A. (2007) The Third Work-Life Balance Employer Survey: Main Findings, Employment Relations Research Series No. 86, BERR, London, December

Hooker, H., Neathey, F., Cassebourne, J. and Munro, M. (2007) The Third Work-Life Balance Employee Survey: Main Findings, Employment Relations Research Series No. 58, BERR, London, March

Hayward et al., 2007

Although the data are not directly comparable over time, there is tentative evidence that the percentage of employers reporting a pregnancy has increased in the public sector and decreased in the private sector.

Adams.L., McAndrew, F. and Winterbotham, M. (2005) Pregnancy Discrimination at Work: A Survey of Women. Manchester, Equal Opportunities Commission

Eaton, S.C. If you can use them: flexibility policies organisational commitment and perceived performance. Industrial Relations, 42 (2), pp.145-167; Dex, S. and F. Schiebl, Flexible and family friendly policies, Journal of General Management, 24 (4), pp 22-37

Hogarth, T. and Barth, M. (1992) The Costs and Benefits of Hiring Older Workers: The B&Q Case Study. International Journal of Manpower, 9 (2)

Bosworth, D.L. (2008) An Ageing Population: the Challenges Facing the UK. Contribution to Skills in England, Learning and Skills Council.

In Rawls’ Theory of Justice he suggested that decisions should be made according to the veil of ignorance test. If we did not know, in this case, whether we were a man or woman then would we choose policies that discriminated against women?

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Parents/Moneyandworkentitlements/WorkAndFamilies/Pregnancyandmaternityrights/DG_10029290.

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Parents/Moneyandworkentitlements/Parentalleaveandpay/DG_10029398.

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Parents/Moneyandworkentitlements/WorkAndFamilies/Adoptionrightsintheworkplace/DG_10029406.

http://www.berr.gov.uk/whatwedo/employment/employment-legislation/employment-guidance/page35663.html.

DTI [now BERR], Time Off for Dependants: A guide for employers and employees. URN 99/1186. London: Department of Trade and Industry. http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file11419.pdf.

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Employment/Employees/WorkingHoursAndTimeOff/DG_10029491.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

2.1 The avoidance of technological determinism

Technological determinism essentially is reflected in the idea that, if we have the capacity to develop technology in a certain way, then we will or should do it and that this development will have an ‘impact’ on the rest of our social and economic life. Technological development thus becomes both an imperative and a determinant. Here our actions are reduced to those behaviours that will ensure the speedy uptake of the new technological possibilities (Brown et al, 2000) and any objections can be tagged as ’standing in the way of progress’, usually with some reference to the Luddites.

In reality, of course, human agency does steer the course of take-up and diffusion. We are able to make decisions about which applications seem relevant or useful: a good example is the poor take-up of 3^rd generation mobiles compared to the unexpectedly rapid diffusion of the relatively low-tech text messaging (Cliff et al, 2008). Having said this, we also need to recognise that the majority of such decisions will be made by those in society with the economic and social power to define what is ‘useful’ and what is a problem worthy of a technological solution. Not all problems get technology thrown at them: in our society we can conveniently get money from a hole in the wall, but two thirds of the world has trouble in getting a clean water supply.

Past mistakes in forecasting often stem from a failure to acknowledge this inter-relation between the technical and the social. However, to say that technologies, once the decision has been made to develop them in a particular way, have no effects beyond those which have been planned is equally delusory. We have to avoid both technological determinism on one hand but also the view which sees technology solely as a social product on the other. While technologies are undoubtedly shaped by the processes of social and economic decision making they, in turn, affect the policies, the users and the infrastructure associated with them – thus technologies reflect society but also shape and modify it (McKenzie and Wajman, 1987; de Laat, 2000).

For example, the path or trajectory may be influenced in this way by non-technological factors but, once a step is taken for whatever reason at the time, further developments will often follow on from it in a pattern of irreversibility and path dependency. A good example is the QWERTY keyboard which was originally developed to slow the pace of typists down because of the technical limitations of the early mechanical typewriter, yet which remains the dominant model for all digital keyboarding. We therefore need to appreciate the consequences of existing or emerging technological trajectories as, once established, their inertia may limit the possibilities of choice.

We can say therefore that technological trajectories are constructed by societies in an interactive process between scientific innovation, citizens’ demands, the intervention of relevant actors such companies or government, and the responses of economic and legal institutions (Peláez and Kyriakou, 2008).

2.2 Taking a broad definition of technology

What we mean by ‘technology’ is in reality a socio-technical system. A purely ‘hard’ scientific/technical view of technology as essentially ‘tools’ is too narrow, for hardware only becomes a particular technology (for example, the assembly line, the call centre) when it is made part of social and economic life and organisation. The ’soft’ aspects of technologies are the other side of the technological coin to the hardware; soft aspects are the capabilities such as knowledge, skills, processes and values which are needed to apply the hardware within specific socio-economic contexts. To develop soft technology can require training, organisational change, or the provision of new services.

This is because technology is how we apply scientific and empirical know-how to meeting and fulfilling economic goals and social needs in real life. Thus, to plot the trajectory of change we need to identify likely technical advances, and map them against the developing socio-economic needs.

3.0 What is the connection between technological development and economic activity?

Lee and colleagues for the Work Foundation point out that the neoclassical economic model saw technological change as an exogenous variable, external to the working of the economy. Newer economic approaches (endogenous growth theory) see a growth in knowledge affecting both technological change and economic growth (Lee et al, 2007). This conception of growth thus places a high value on the role of innovation.

When looking at technological trends in the context of the economy, the popular focus is often to concentrate first on:

a) new products (such as PCs or DVD players) and the sectors which produce them.

Actually it could be argued that equally important changes to our way of life have been through

b) modifications to existing products (phones) and

c) to the application of technology to change the ways we do things (shopping, banking). Indeed ‘innovations are framed in terms of letting us do things faster, over a greater distance and more conveniently than they are done today’ (Brown et al, 2000).

Using the past experience of ICT we can, in Table 1 below, identify three related areas where technological development will affect economic activity (modified from Brinkley, 2008).

Table 1: Technological development and economic activity

In 2 and 3, the ‘technological frontier’, the boundary of what can be produced with current resources (including knowledge), is pushed outwards as new methods of production and new products are created (Lee, Schneider and Brinkley, 2007).

In addition, the degree to which any of these will flow from any particular technological development will depend on several contextual factors including:

• The business environment (including labour, product and financial markets)
• The education system.

4.0 Looking ahead to 2025

The task of predicting where technological change is going to transform our patterns of work and employment is complicated by several factors.

• Technological convergence and blurring of the boundaries between technologies
• The technology/social need interface
• The increasing difficulty of defining discrete sectors of economic activity
• Public attitudes towards particular technologies
• Exogenous factors which may have an equally strong effect on patterns of employment (Cliff et al, 2008).

5.0 The path of technological development and convergence

5.1 Increasing levels of automation

Ever since the industrial revolution and the demise of the handloom weavers technologically-enabled labour displacement has always generated both negative and positive scenarios. In the short term large-scale job shedding in declining or outmoded sectors has created undoubted emiseration for whole occupations, and the prospect of technological change is inevitably seen with some foreboding by many sectors of the workforce. It can be argued that to focus solely on this immediate effect is to assume that there is a fixed amount of output to be produced and that the replacement of labour by technology will yield a zero-sum end result: the machines will get a bigger slice of the economic activity cake but the cake will remain the same size. Against this, the positive scenario argues that realistically we should adopt a positive-sum model as, in the long term, the increases in productivity stimulate the economy and create jobs often in totally unforeseen industries: the ‘cake’ gets bigger. However, even if true, we should note that this is not quite comparing like with like: when occupations die, the negative effects (loss of income, career, status and hope) are often concentrated in specific geographical localities, whereas the consequences of growth are usually more widely dispersed.

Existing predictions concerning labour substitution through automation see a trend of intensification in existing semi-automated sectors and the diffusion of automation to previously untouched sectors as the cost of intelligent automation continues to fall. Extracting from the graphical projections produced by Peláez and Kyriakou (2008) Table 2 indicates the following approximations for different sectors for the year 2020:

Table 2: Predictions of sectoral levels of automation in EU countries by year 2020

[Source: Figures adapted from Peláez and Kyriakou, 2008]

It is clear from the above that even sectors previously immune to labour displacement are likely to experience this within two decades.

5.2 Technological convergence

The above, however, is a prediction for a single category of technology. We know from our two decades’ experience of digital technologies that key technologies have a tendency to converge and that, when technologies do converge, the pace of technological change speeds up and the uses of the technologies become more diffused throughout different areas of social and economic life. For example, the convergence of IT and telecoms has meant that the same technologies are now used for work, consumption and entertainment and the same services (voice, internet, video) can now be provided through several different technologies – mobile, optical fibre, co-axial cable TV, fixed radio and satellite.

Current predictions indicate that technological convergences in the next two decades may prove even more dramatic as scientists from different disciplines perceive complementary lines of development. For example, the prospects for robotics and advanced automation will include improving robotics with the addition of more ‘human’ capabilities: eyesight, intelligent interaction, integration in a language system and mobility in open spaces. In industrial biotechnology, it is predicted that we could be using biological processes in the transformation of materials that at present require high energy and pollutant-emitting processes (Sager, 2001). When these two trends converge we will see the development of biological-computer interfaces (Cliff et al, 2008) and eventually of NBIC (Nano-Bio-Info-Cogno) convergence, with the time horizon for such convergence of biotechnology, robotics and nanotechnology estimated to be 2025 (Sager, 2001; Peláez and Kyriakou, 2008).

It must be stressed that these are technical predictions: whether these possibilities are taken up and disseminated will depend on the social and contextual factors indicated above.

5.3 The technology/need interface

This raises the question of whether the task of prediction should start from the science/technology end or from the social need/market end? Is it a question of problems searching for solutions or solutions looking for problems to be solved? Realistically, it is safe to assert that it has always to be a combination of both. An interesting approach to mapping this comes from the French Foresight exercise which used socio-technical grids to identify what were going to be key technologies.

Here (Table 3) the grid example is showing the relationship between fuel cells and economic developments on one side and technical/scientific developments on the other. The grid represents the recognition that, as discussed above, the path of technological development is the result of an interaction between social-economic need, the state of technological knowledge and the critical developmental issues that must be overcome. The underlined category is described as the ‘flag’: in identifying a flag for a key technology we can either flag the social need (column 3) or the technology need (column 4). In other words we cannot start with applications (Column 2) or even sectors for application (column 1) as these are unlikely to be causal in their operation. Similarly, while critical technology points (Column 5) are also seen as key to development, the areas of scientific domain (Column 6) are too far removed to be causal in their operation.

Where we can identify a need but, as yet, there might be a range of technological solutions, the flag stays in column 3. Once a clear lead is taken by one of the technologies (as in this example) the flag shifts to column 4. The process produced a list of ‘key technologies’ which were key either for their attractiveness (a potentially favourable application of some kind) or their effect on competitiveness, or were seen as key with primary reference to the dynamics of technology.

Table 3: Identification of key technologies: the example of fuel cells

[Source: from Durand, 2003]

Biotechnology, new materials and ICTs were seen as the three ‘enabling’ technologies whose presence is evidenced across a wide number of traditionally separate product sectors, although ICTs were pervasive in the technology mapping in that they seemed to colonise the entire field. Biotechnologies were the second major area but with a longer ‘wavelength’ and less immediate effect and penetration power into other fields. (This may be a little faster in the UK as we have been ahead of other EU member states in developing specialist biotechnology companies, particularly in biopharmaceuticals, diagnostics and agri-environmental areas (DTI, 1999)).

5.4 The difficulties of defining sector boundaries

Our task in this paper is to predict where such key technologies will be deployed (in other words, Column 1 in the grid) and here it becomes even more difficult. Our experience of IT diffusion has demonstrated how a common technological base allows the blurring of once-discrete employment areas – supermarkets now act as banks, for example, and TV companies supply phone and internet services. This often makes it difficult to identify those new employment sectors which will require different skills from those which are current in the sector from which they emerge. Few people in the 1980s foresaw the expansion of call centres, and call centre work as a distinctive area of employment did not immediately show up in the employment figures, as banking call centres were counted as banking employees and utilities call centres as utility employees.

This suggests that, in thinking about potential future economic activity, traditional economic and employment segmentations are often misleading. For many years we have popularly used classifications which derive from the traditional threefold division of the workforce into:

Primary (such as agriculture, lumbering, mining and other extractive processes)

Secondary (industrial manufacturing, engaged on transforming raw materials into products), and

Tertiary (engaged in providing not products but services, such as transport, finance, and retailing).

This classification is first credited to the New Zealand economist A.G.B. Fisher, writing in 1935, but was later refined by Colin Clark in 1940. The coming of the information revolution prompted some 1980s authors to suggest the addition of a fourth category of

Quaternary or information workers, involved in the transmission, processing and receiving of information.

This concept has more recently been replaced by that of knowledge workers, who are said to take their identity from the existence of a Knowledge Economy. Most current predictions are predicated upon the existence of the knowledge economy, a frequently vague concept which has, however, been usefully operationalised by the Work Foundation:

‘The knowledge economy is a story of how general purpose technologies have combined with intellectual and knowledge assets – the ‘intangibles’ of research, design, development, creativity, education, science, brand equity and human capital – to transform our economy’ (Brinkley, 2008, p9).

The Knowledge Economy (KE) is seen as comprising technology and knowledge-based industries reflecting R&D intensity, high ICT usage, and the development of large numbers of graduate and professional workers. The Work Foundation correctly observe that these characteristics cut across most sectors and industries, at the same time blurring the traditional boundaries between sectors such as manufacturing and services and enabling the emergence of previously marginal sectors such as the creative industries. In this, technological development is seen as a supply-side enabler of the KE (Brinkley, 2008).

Eurostat continues to use sectoral boundaries for measurement purposes and sees the KE as comprising high to medium tech manufacturing and communications and a knowledge service sector broken down into four groups: high tech services (R&D and computing), financial services, market-based knowledge services (communications, travel and business) and other knowledge services (education, health, recreational and cultural services). Table 4 shows that using this break-down, the composition of the knowledge industries in Europe (EU15) in 2005 was as follows:

Table 4: Europe’s knowledge industries (2005)

[source: Eurostat, quoted in Brinkley and Lee, 2006]

The role of knowledge, however defined, reminds us of the importance of soft technology. Soft technology, when interpreted into the jobs people do, translates as service employment and most predictions agree that services will constitute the heart of the economies of the 21st century.

In their analysis of the service sector, Miozzo and Soete (2001) have shown how ICT has allowed services to be produced in one place and consumed simultaneously in another. This has increased service transportability, changing modes of delivery and contributing to a new technical division of labour. ICT applications are particularly apparent in key sub-sectors in services, namely:

a) information network services (finance, insurance, telecoms) which involve large-scale information processing, and

b) physical network services (transport, travel, and wholesale and retail distribution) which involve support for logistics and route planning (Miozzo and Ramirez, 2003).

What is significant here is that this has restructured not only the service sector but has affected all other economic activities. The service content of many manufactured goods has increased through an expansion in ‘front-end’ employment such sales, technical help, product development and marketing. Many producer services, which were historically internal to large organisation (accounting, advertising, distribution), are increasingly externalised so that those knowledge-intensive activities previously classified as manufacturing are now service activities. As the authors comment:

‘Contrary to the alleged ‘de-industrialisation’ of industrialised countries, technological change is leading to a ’splintering’ and ‘disembodiment’ process whereby goods spring from services, and services, in turn, from goods’

(Miozzo and Soete, 2001).

This analysis of the blurring of traditional economic boundaries very much coincides with the current policy model of High Value Manufacturing (HVM). The IfM/DTI report on HVM points out that, whereas the traditional definition of manufacturing was the transformation of raw materials into finished products (the basis for the old Standard Industrial Classification of jobs), today there is blurring of boundaries between production and services. The broad definition behind HVM sees manufacturing as a broad cycle of activities from R&D, production, logistics and services to end of life management, all within a socio-economic context (Figure 1).

Figure 1: A Broad definition of manufacturing

[Source: DTI/IfM, 2006]

What this means is that production and manufacturing are not the same: production becomes only one activity of a manufacturing company (and indeed production itself may be outsourced); a high technology company like Rolls Royce actually obtained half its revenue from services in 2004 (DTI/IFM, 2006).

5.3 Diffusion and public attitudes

The diffusion of the kinds of converged technologies indicated above may take longer than the very rapid diffusion of ICT over the past two decades. For one thing the developmental time-frame for biotechnology is much longer and slower paced, but for another thing it may involve a greater degree of organisational learning on the part of management and employees: whereas many of the younger generation of IT workers saw working with IT as a logical extension of their home and school IT experience, the diffusion of biotechnology into working life may require the diffusion of values promoting acceptance.

This was recognised a decade ago in the DTI’s report on biotechnology (DTI, 1999), where one of the major variables affecting whether diffusion was ’steady , fast, slow or failed’ was seen to be consumer and manufacturer attitudes and acceptance/rejection of biotechnology (the example of GM crops was clearly to the fore at this time).

6.0 Exogenous factors

6.1 The economic, financial and physical environment

Contemporary work arrangements have been made very insecure and volatile by the accelerated pace of technical change and by the volatile nature of world economic systems (see Taylor et al, 2005). While foresight exercises attempt to systematically relate key technologies to the major challenges faced by society such as environment, education, health, security, working conditions, there will clearly be some that we cannot accurately predict and which will inevitably skew the direction of technological and economic development. The full consequences of climate change, for example, we can only guess at, although there have been calculations of the effect on the world’s growing zones and consequent arguments in favour of GM as a means to combat future agricultural crisis. Similarly the moment when ‘peak oil’ is reached is bound to affect where the links in global supply chains become located as higher transport costs may cancel out lower production costs.

6.2 Transnational flows

However, much of the discussion of new employment sectors is still bounded by notions of a national economy: this no longer corresponds to economic reality. New products will be manufactured and new services provided but where will this take place in terms of employment? As the current international financial crisis demonstrates, we are locked into transnational flows of finance, capital, goods, services and labour.

While we have become familiar with this as it applies to production supply chains, less commented on has been the degree to which mergers and acquisitions have created international service conglomerates providing a diversified range of services (such as management and computer services) which are traded across national borders and subject to FDI. These organisations have become increasingly diversified as the incremental cost of adding additional information-based services is very low but at present such advanced and specialised business services remain highly concentrated in developed countries. Future trade is as much likely to involve the ‘movement of people as carriers of expertise as much as the movement of material objects’ (Miozzo and Soete, 2003).

We may have to reverse our thinking about the role of ‘labour intensive’ and ‘capital intensive’ processes. According to a recent Japanese view, labour intensive processes will be knowledge-intensive, requiring a high education base and will be retained in the advanced economies, while capital intensive processes will be those subject to automation and will be located in Asia and Eastern Europe (Fukutani, 2008).

7.0 Implications for education and skill development

Another caveat in prediction making is to avoid the common assumption that technological change will entail a qualitative paradigm shift from the work we know today. In other words, to avoid the tendency to focus on the new and ignore those continuities with the present and the past (Baldry et al, 2007). Thus, in talking of future or emergent high tech or knowledge intensive sectors of the economy we should remember that this by no means implies that all jobs in those sectors will be empowered and knowledge-based. Recent work on local labour markets has shown that by the early 21^st century many ICT-based jobs were low skilled and relatively low paid (Warhurst et al, 2006; Baldry et al, 2007).

Having said this, the pointers toward a greater economic reliance on a range of knowledge-based service sectors have several implications for the future of the educational system. We can envisage alternative educational scenarios.

One issue that has already been noted is the relationship between the highly remunerated knowledge/technology sector of the labour market and the relatively lower paid non-knowledge sector, forming the so-called ‘hour-glass’ workforce. Several current predictions on work futures see this as inevitable or remaining for the foreseeable future:

‘Affluent workers at the top of the glass will continue to buy restaurant, care and other services from people on low pay at the bottom’.

(Moynagh and Worsley, 2005, p2).

If this pessimistic view holds true this, in turn, has implications for the education system. A polarised education system which, to a greater extent than even is the case at present, places its priorities and resources towards ‘meeting the needs of the economy’ by supporting the brighter pupils while consigning those who cannot play the educational game to the uncertainties of the low-pay sector, would simply continue and promote acute social divisions within society.

Conversely, an educational system that was genuinely aimed at developing the potential and worth of all young people may be out of kilter with the labour market unless we revise our approach to job design. Otherwise we may witness the sort of mismatch between skills and jobs that we have seen in some areas of call centre employment: call centre managers in some customer-facing services like to hire graduates because they have better language and social skills, yet the stressful and repetitive nature of call centre jobs are not what graduates expect to do with their intellect, and the flat organisational structure offers no career prospects, contributing to very high turnover rates.

It is also clear from the discussion in this paper that the idea of our education terminating at the current conclusion of secondary or tertiary education (in other words, essentially nothing after age 22, and for most young people a lot earlier) is unlikely adequately to equip future citizens for the volatile and rapidly changing world they will inhabit. New challenges – whether from technologies, climate change, or the exhaustion of finite resources – will require frequent new learning.

These points raise more philosophical questions which lie outside the remit of this paper:

• Is the primary job of an education system to meet the ‘needs’ of the economy?

• If so, do those needs include both design engineers and care-home staff, both biotechnologists and baristas?

• If not, how do we educate our citizens so as to empower them with control over their learning throughout life?

• What kinds of jobs would such learning-empowered citizens expect to take up and find personally fulfilling?

References

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This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

The study comprises 190 interviews with senior managers in 20 MNCs in three sectors, electronics and IT, automobiles and finance, and senior policy makers. Where possible, interviews within companies were triangulated between head office (in the United States, the UK, Germany and South Korea) and their subsidiaries in China, India and Singapore over time. The timing of the interviews is important because it enabled us to gauge what has turned out to be very rapid change within MNCs over a period between 2004-2007. Of the interviews 65 were with policy makers in the seven countries within which these multinationals operated. This enabled us to examine current changes in the ways in which these companies use skills, as well as the relationships between them, and the national education and training institutions that provided some of the skills they utilise.

The Analysis

The analysis focussed on three inter-related dimensions to the changing nature of skill and work. Firstly, the nature of skills and reward are fundamentally changing, creating significant divisions in what were once considered middle class careers for graduates. Instead of a career ladder, it is clear that corporations are distinguishing between those they consider the talented who are, typically, fast tracked into senior managerial positions and those that are considered worthy, loyal and committed but who do not have the key ingredients for leadership positions. Beneath them are workers who engage in routine work. There are two reasons for these changes. The first concerns the ideology of the war for talent, in which corporations seek to identify outstanding talent because global corporations now need a range of skills in leadership positions that were not in demand when corporations were embedded in national economies. These new skill sets that only the small minority of ‘talented’ have are therefore highly rewarded. In contrast, much of the work that has been considered knowledge work is now routinised under a process akin to Taylorism, hence we term it digital Taylorism. In turn this requires much lower skill sets, and far lower rewards. Alongside digital Taylorism standardisation of judgements about human beings and their performance have also been introduced.

These changes in the division of labour, skills and reward can only be understood within the context of economic globalisation. Here there are two general points to make. The first is that electronic technology has enabled three key processes that have transformed the nature of work. Here, the standardisation of knowledge work, through digital Taylorism, is perhaps the most important because standardisation is required in order to transfer particular forms of knowledge work offshore. Equally it has enabled the development of packages by which worker performance can be judged by corporations on a global scale. Finally, it has enabled what has been termed the 24 factory, in which corporations can develop projects which follow the sun, thereby reducing the time it takes from innovation to invoice. The notion of ‘factory’ is a little outdated because, as we shall see, it applies as much to high level research and design as to more routine tasks.

The second major development which has a direct bearing on graduate jobs concerns the increase in large numbers of highly qualified graduates in Russia, China and India. This has led to a global auction in high skilled jobs since typically graduates from these countries will work for anything between a third (R&D work) to a tenth (computer programming and system analysts) of the wage in the United States or Britain. The pressure of competition has meant that TNCs are seeking to cut costs and the arbitrage of high skilled work is one way in which it can be done.

It should be said that there are clearly differences in the competitive strategies of China and India. China has used MNCs as a way of gaining intellectual property through the rather weak implementation of IPR law and through the ways its corporations have learnt about organisation, management and the production of quality goods and services. However, it would be wrong to think that China has simply ‘borrowed’ the competitive strategies of western MNCs; its corporations are now developing their own low cost innovation strategies which threaten to disrupt global competition as we know it (Zeng and Williamson, 2007). India, in contrast, has used its maths and IT talent to develop a strategy whereby its service industries establish shop fronts to win projects in Western nations and then cut costs by undertaking the projects in India. However, it would be a serious mistake to see China focussing on a cheap manufacturing strategy and India as adopting a cheap service industry strategy. Both are now home to cutting edge R&D institutions which relate to both manufacturing and services.

In the following a more detailed account for these changes is given.

Dividing Graduate Work: The War for Talent

Corporations typically rate their management workers according to sets of what appear to be clearly defined competences. Often referred to as A, B and C players, the A players are believed to be crucial to the future of the company. Every effort is made to retain this group through generous compensation, interesting assignments, and career development:

You have just got to decide that those people are our future and whether they are kind of A players or they are kind of high potential people lower in the organisation, those are the people that we are going to pay, you know, whatever.

The B players are the ‘engine house’ of the company, they get things done and need to be treated with dignity and paid at a competitive rate. It includes ‘engineering talent’ with extensive experience but ‘they usually are folk that don’t really want to lead the charge’. The C players are those that they expect will leave through lack of skill or commitment. Beneath these categories are the routine knowledge workers, as discussed below.

The A category managers are those who are seen as exceptionally talented and as the quote above suggests, will be highly rewarded. We are told that such inequalities are justified because ‘Talent is the new oil and just like oil, demand far outstrips supply’.