Levelling Up Education: what place-based education could look like

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Earlier this year, the government published its much anticipated white paper, Levelling Up the United Kingdom, which outlined 12 interventions deemed necessary to tackle the regional inequalities that have grown in recent decades. In this blog, Dr Eric Lybeck argues that, at root, the government and its economists see this imbalance, not as the result of austerity, but as a productivity gap: between the parts of the UK that have benefited from a ‘high tech, high skill, high wage’ economy in recent decades – and those ‘left behind’ places that need to catch up. This framing inevitably leads to education and skills being at the heart of the proposed solutions. Yet, the purpose and the values of education, and the possibilities, or the limitations, of a refashioned industrial policy have not been considered.