Policy Research Media Morhamburn

Scotland often strikes you as a confused wee mass of contradictions and ironies; famously hospitable, yet infamously aggressive; rooted in history yet so popularly ignorant of it; the home of mass, comprehensive education, yet economically stultified.

It is this last one which struck me, when I came across a recent report on the Scottish labour force.

Apparently, Scotland leads the UK in terms of its qualifications profile. Gaun yersel, you might think; that most noble of Scottish traditions, the lad o’ pairts is alive and well; our Enlightened history not as dead as the news would sometimes have you believe.

But hold on, before we indulge in too much self-congratulatory back-slapping, there is a ‘but’; the Scottish paradox if you will.

This educated workforce is not being reflected in the economic outputs of Scotland, where our productivity is lower than the rest of the UK.

It seems our conscientious approach to education is somewhat lacking when it comes to putting it into practice in the labour market; assiduous students, idle workers?

So how can this be? Is hard work not one of the main tenets of our national Presbyterian psyche? Is it not what made Clydeside the workshop of the world?

I don’t know what the reason is for this; I suspect it is a complex mix of a number of interrelated factors; industrial decline, ageing workforce, poverty, deprivation etc. The report looks at whether the lower than average use of IT is a major factor in the discrepancy.

There is also the large public sector elephant in the room. Could this be the reason, absorbing high numbers of graduates into a sector that has often been accused of having low productivity – as highlighted, for example, by the recent Nuffield report on the NHS?

Education was long regarded as a Scottish virtue, perhaps even the Scottish virtue.  And yet, while we remain ‘well educated’ something somewhere is getting in the way of us turning education into output.

Maybe we are still stuck in Enlightenment mode, seeking knowledge for knowledge’s sake – the pursuit of truth through reasoned analysis remaining more important than economic gain?

Or maybe we do have an overly molly-coddled and imbalanced economy that is preventing us from fulfilling our economic potential?

Either way, it is a debate worth having, especially as now is the time when we can do something about it.

[The views expressed by Morhamburn people in their blogs are theirs and theirs alone. they do not represent the thoughts of the company as a whole or our clients. If you have a comment to make on any blog, please email info@morhamburn.com and we’ll put the printable ones up on the website]