Rishi Sunak made two big economic announcements last week. One was scrapping the Manchester leg of HS2 and instead supposedly committing to a slew of other transport projects across the north. The second was a broadening of the A-level curriculum, an increase in the hours of teaching in sixth forms and the integration of vocational qualifications into the new “advanced British standard”, as he christened the new qualification for 18-year-olds.
I have a lot of sympathy. There was never a strong economic case for spending tens of billions on HS2 if the alternative was to spend a similar amount on smaller but crucial transport infrastructure. Your eyes may have glazed over as he ran through the list of projects he now wants to see go ahead — upgrading roads, increasing rail capacity and cutting times between Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Bradford and Hull — but you’ll likely get a bigger bang for your buck spending £36 billion on those than on HS2. Or, to put it in economists’ speak, the benefit-cost ratio will be higher. Of course, it would have been better not to start from here, but he’s probably right. It’s brave to recognise when a cost is sunk and to stop pouring good money after bad.
We also know we need to reform the curriculum post-16. We have been stuck with an absurdly narrow set of A-levels for generations. Review after review has called for something more like what the prime minister has proposed, with maths and English taught to all and a broader set of subjects to be studied. We also are an outlier in how few teaching hours our sixth-formers get. I was rather less enamoured of the idea that vocational qualifications should be rolled into the same structure in an effort to net that chimera, “parity of esteem”.
