The current chorus of disquiet - whether from students seeking revolution or from those for whom all students are revolting - has positioned UK education policy more firmly centre-stage than any previous political rhetoric about the importance of education.

And, like the primary school's modernised nativity play, what a wonderful stage that can be - with walk-on parts for lamentations of lost manufacturing enterprise, of scorn for the arts and for strident calls for STEM - more science, technology, engineering and maths.   'We are', chant the chorus of complainants, 'losing our way'.

And this educational angst is not just apparent in the UK.  The USA, according to the latest ITIF report, is also having a crisis of confidence in the cleverness stakes.   There’s nothing like a threat (in their case losing perceived world leadership to China) to bring on political pains.

The main complaint, of course, is that the need for economic grow is poorly served by a lack of well-educated technologically-aware entrepreneurs.   In my own UK analysis of major companies the most telling factor is their ‘Capacity to Innovate‘ - a test that for most incumbents would be more easily measured as their reluctance to innovate.

Given the interesting option of doing things in an entirely differently way most incumbents would rather obstruct progress until change was inevitable and only then switch on their brain-power when any further lack of action becomes a clear threat.

It looks as if one of those scary/awakening moments may just have happened last week at a US conference for a global gathering of very senior Telco executives. 

Faced with doom-laden strategic projections they overwhelmingly admitted to the urgent need to ‘transform the way we do things around here’ - leaving the vote for 'fine-tuning' in the shade at 8%. 

 And such crises of confidence are hardly surprising.  A succession of reports show that far from holding on to their market share the Telco’s are, at best, trying to grab hold of the side of the chute as they slither down the playground slide. 

This chart (from a White Paper by 'Heavy Reading') shows that across Europe incumbent telco's have taken only a 33% share of the FttX market in the face of enthusiastic market entry by smaller competitive telco's (26%) and utility companies and municipalities, or some combination of these non-traditional players (41%).

The 'Heavy Reading' report, with its dire projections for the UK, is further supported by more-recent work from AD Little -' The double squeeze on incumbents'. 

In the UK, the telecoms sector heavyweights appear to have bet heavily on having a friendly assist from either the regulator or the government or both - certainly the regulatory environment does not encourage fresh de-regulatory thinking.   Such 'steady as she goes' policy positions seem extraordinarily unfit-for-purpose - particularly in the context of calls for greater community engagement and in the current climate where student unrest is just the latest indicator of a widespread lack of respect for the establishment.  Which brings us neatly back to the state of community action - or local engagement as our Big Society backers would have it - and the intellectual capacity of citizens

For those who seek revolution to undermine the establishment, or for those who, more constructively, seek to protect their communities (and local economic growth) from the cowboy antics of the big beasts of the corporate jungle, now is time to demonstrate that your own woeful lack of STEM education (or apathetic subservience to neoclassical economic fundamentalism) is in truth no barrier to radical innovation.

The ITIF report referenced earlier makes the point that instead of calls for ‘more STEM education for all’, policy developers should look at ‘all STEM for some’ on the blindingly obvious grounds that if students are not motivated to be scientists or engineers no amount of extra resources and yet more boring obligatory maths and physics classes will switch them on.  Far better to focus scarce resources on the willing.

And, in like manner, if (in these straitened economic times) there is any slender public funding around for transformation of local access networks, it would be as well not to spend a single penny of it on the indolent and arrogant who (a) can’t be fagged to get out of bed until their house is burning down or (b) compound their reluctance by serving up some mediocre compromise that serves only to preserve their market stranglehold.

There is no room, no time, no patience left for compromise.  When we are so far behind, claiming that we are ‘nearly there’ is, in the context of wider economic priorities, 'not good enough’.  Once again the much lauded uniquely British explanation of ‘muddling through’ simply will not do.

_________________

This editorial was written for members of the CMA whose aggregate expenditure on networked products and services exceeds £13bn per annum.

Business consumers (particularly small businesses) will be, by far, the group most seriously impacted by competitive failure in future-proofed access networks.

Readers of this editorial also viewed 'Next Generation Thinking' and 'The Incumbents Curse' .