The North East of England should ask government for more than powers. It should ask for the opportunity to prove that devolution can close the gap between potential and opportunity.
Results day should first and foremost be a moment of celebration. Behind every grade is the hard work of a young person, supported by parents and carers, teachers, teaching assistants and school support staff. Whatever the result, reaching this point represents an achievement and deserves recognition.
But results day also provides an opportunity to look beyond individual results and consider the circumstances in which young people are trying to succeed.
The Sutton Trust’s analysis of this year’s A-level results makes uncomfortable reading. In London, 32.7% of A-level grades were awarded at A or A*, compared with 23.1% in the North East. Top grades were therefore around 42% more common in London than in the North East.
We should be careful about what those figures tell us. They do not demonstrate that young people in the North East are less talented, nor that teachers here are less committed. What they demonstrate is that young people are growing up in places where the conditions for turning ability into achievement are very different.
Where you grow up still has too much influence over the opportunities available to you.
Problems of place
As Chair of Governors of an inner-city, local-authority-maintained school, I see every day the commitment of people working in education and the determination of young people and their families. I also see the limits of what schools can reasonably be expected to achieve on their own.
A good school can transform a child’s trajectory and an outstanding teacher can open a door that a young person did not know existed. But schools cannot, by themselves, overcome child poverty, differences in early-years development, poor housing, pressures on family finances, workforce challenges or the networks through which young people gain access to universities, employers and professional careers — these are not simply education problems; they are problems of place.
That matters because we have spent much of the past decade talking about regional inequality while too often treating the policies in isolation that determine whether people are able to participate in economic opportunity. Education policy sits in one place, skills in another, economic development somewhere else, while the consequences of poverty and inequality are dealt with through yet more disconnected interventions.
For a young person, of course, none of those boundaries exist. Their experience is one continuous journey from early childhood through school and further education or university and ultimately into employment. The opportunities available along that journey accumulate, and disadvantage at one stage can make it harder to take advantage of opportunities at the next.
This is where the North East’s devolution settlement gives us an opportunity to think differently.The obvious request to government would be for more powers. Those powers matter, particularly over skills, transport, economic development and investment. But I think the North East should make a more ambitious proposition: give us the opportunity to demonstrate whether a genuinely place-based approach can close the gap between potential and opportunity.
My suggestion would be a North East Opportunity Guarantee.
The whole journey
This should not become another short-term programme, taskforce or funding pot with a new name. It should instead be a long-term commitment between government and the North East to align the different parts of the system that shape young people’s prospects, bringing together early years, schools, colleges, universities, employers, local government and action on child poverty around a shared set of outcomes.
The focus should be on the whole journey. That means giving children the best possible start, ensuring that schools have the teachers and support staff they need, strengthening foundations in literacy and numeracy, providing high-quality careers advice and meaningful employer engagement, widening access to cultural and enrichment opportunities, and creating clear routes into further education, higher education, apprenticeships and skilled employment.
It also means recognising that opportunity is partly about connection. A young person should not have to wait until they are leaving school to discover what opportunities exist in the economy around them.That is particularly important as the North East develops its economic strategy.
We are rightly ambitious about the region’s potential in energy, advanced manufacturing, life sciences and other higher-value sectors. But economic development should not be regarded as something that happens separately from the development of our young people.
If major industries are being built in the North East, children growing up here should be able to understand what those industries do, what careers they offer and what routes exist into them. Employers should be building relationships with schools and colleges long before they are looking to recruit. Universities and further-education institutions should be part of that pipeline rather than being encountered only when young people begin thinking about applications.
The connection between education and economic development therefore needs to become much more deliberate.
Rethinking the case for devolution
This is also where I think the argument about devolution needs to develop. The traditional case for devolution is that decisions should be taken closer to the people they affect because local leaders understand their places better than Whitehall. That is an important argument, but it is only part of the case.
The more powerful argument is that responsibility should follow outcomes. At present, many of the factors determining a young person’s future sit across different departments, institutions and funding arrangements. Schools can identify barriers without having the resources to address all of them. Local authorities understand communities but do not control all the levers required to change their circumstances. Mayoral authorities can develop economic strategies without controlling all the mechanisms that determine whether local people can access the opportunities those strategies create. That is not a genuinely joined-up system.
A different offer to government
The North East should therefore offer government something more ambitious than another request for additional powers. We should say that we are prepared to take responsibility for closing the gap between potential and opportunity, provided we have the flexibility and resources to join up the system, remove barriers and build the relationships necessary to make it work — and then we should be held publicly accountable for the results.
That accountability matters. An Opportunity Guarantee should have a clear regional scorecard covering early-years development, attendance, attainment and progression, access to careers advice and employer engagement, work experience, apprenticeships, higher education and skilled employment. It should also measure whether those opportunities are reaching communities facing the greatest disadvantage.
The purpose would not be to create another layer of bureaucracy. It would be to establish whether the interventions we are making actually change the trajectory of young people.
That would give the North East Mayor a different proposition to take to government: not simply a request for more powers, but a request for the responsibility, flexibility and resources to demonstrate that devolution can change outcomes that matter to people’s lives.
If the North East can show over time that more young people are progressing into further and higher education, skilled employment and the industries being created around them, then we will have demonstrated something important about what devolution can achieve.
If we cannot, we should be prepared to acknowledge that too. That is what meaningful devolution should look like: not power for its own sake, but responsibility for outcomes.
The test of devolution
Results day should remain a celebration of individual achievement. But it should also remind us that individual achievement never happens in isolation. Behind every result is a family, a school, a community and a set of opportunities that have accumulated over many years.
The North East has no shortage of talent, ambition or institutions capable of making this work. What we too often lack is the ability to align them around the same purpose.
Closing that gap should become one of the defining ambitions of the region. Talent is spread across the country. Opportunity isn’t.
The test of devolution should be whether we can make that less true.
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