Member News
17th November 2010
John Stone, the chief executive of LSN, has described the government's Wolf review as "a genuine opportunity" to focus on vocational education.
Hearing a newly elected government announce a 'sweeping review' is perhaps as predictable as the changing of the seasons. However, unlike many such 'reviews from afresh' and 'radical reforms', Professor Alison Wolf's review of vocational education for 14-19 year-olds presents a genuine opportunity to focus attention on a neglected area of public policy – an area which is critical to the life chances of young people and the success of UK plc.
Professor Wolf's review needs to achieve a great deal, and the measures of its success will be complex. She needs to formulate reforms which will ensure that practical learning will appeal to young people from a wide range of backgrounds. She needs to decide how we can establish practical learning options for young people from the age of 14, with clear progression routes into employment.
Finally, and perhaps both most challenging and important, she needs to create both public recognition of the value of vocational qualifications and an acceptance that they serve a different purpose to academic options, putting an end to attempts to dilute vocational options with academic content. All these aims require higher-quality teaching and vitally, the identification of how vocational teaching can be continuously improved.
If successful, Professor Wolf's review will ensure that highly regarded and financially rewarding careers can be accessed through vocational education and demonstrated through vocational qualifications which are held in high esteem. If unsuccessful, vocational education in the UK will remain a dumping ground for those disengaged or less able; and its current reputation as an education of last resort will continue.
The issue of practical learning for young people has long been a difficult one for governments and remains one of the key challenges facing any education secretary. Unlike GCSEs and A-levels, where content is heavily influenced by government, there is relatively little central control over the types and nature of vocational qualifications available to young people today.
Despite this, government is ultimately responsible for ensuring that the UK recovers from recession, remains globally competitive and its young people are prepared for employment and have a fair chance to achieve a successful career. This all requires a vocational education system which is effective and flexible. Professor Wolf needs to explore this disconnect, which until now, has never properly been addressed.
Lessons also need to be learnt from the previous government's attempts to reform 14-19 education, which didn't look specifically at vocational education, instead preferring – in the form of the 2004 Tomlinson Review – to take a broad look at all provision for 14-19 year-olds. Tomlinson recommended the replacement of A-levels and GCSEs with an overarching Diploma, customised for each learner, but each delivering universal employability and personal skills.
Lacking the political courage to implement a reform so radical, the Labour government instead introduced the Diploma as an alternative to GCSEs and A-levels. This new qualification became available across 14 subjects, the majority of which were previously the domain of vocational education, such as Hair and Beauty, and Hospitality.
The government insisted that the Diploma was not 'vocational', for fear that its reputation would suffer further, yet Diplomas were never going to be held in the same regard as A-levels and they cannot deliver the occupational work-readiness offered by true vocational options. Whilst the Diploma's learning experience has been enthusiastically received, and partnership-working between institutions and employers has improved, some argue that Diplomas are the worst of both worlds.
As is manifest in the Diploma, the previous government failed to recognise the essential quality and value of a purely skills-based education. They succumbed to the temptation to package-up vocational learning with additional academic content in order to create a qualification which couldn't easily be tarred with the 'vocational' brush.
Instead they should have explored how purely vocational learning could be improved to meet the needs of learners and the economy; this in turn could have raised the esteem in which vocational qualifications are held. And this is exactly what Professor Wolf needs to do now.
Whilst the coalition government's rhetoric still emphasises the gold standard of A-levels, the announcement of Professor Wolf's review is a promising sign that this government will not sidestep or neglect the thorny issue of vocational education. The way forward must be to recognise that vocational qualifications are different to their academic counterparts.
They are there to enable different people with different aims to acquire what they need to succeed on their chosen path. If Professor Wolf's review creates an environment in which this is accepted, then it will have achieved far more than many would have believed possible.
Article Comments
I wish Prof. Wolf every success with her report. I have been a great admirer of her work for several years. Her difficult task will not be made any easier by the way 'academic' and 'vocational' education has been regarded historically in this country and, in particular, by the way that the words 'school' and 'education' are treated synonymously and, indeed, confused with each other. There is a place for school in education, but it is only a relatively small part of the process of educating our young people.
Furthermore, because secondary education has, for the last century, attempted slavishly to follow the education provided by the independent (public) and grammar schools, academic prowess has come to be seen as 'first rate' and academic success is regarded as the greatest good and everything else, by default, as 'second rate', a failure.
Young people who are not successful at academic subjects but who are good at making things or organising others towards constructive ends or creating new fields of enterprise, though their efforts may be appreciated, are not held in the high esteem afforded to the academically successful, the Prime Minister, the Governor of the Bank of England, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the First Sea Lord, the Trustees of the BBC, the Secretary of State for Education and all the people who decree what is 'success' and what is 'failure' in school.
Since the 1960s (Shirley Williams and Circular 10/64) we have endlessly tinkered with the structures and systems of our secondary schools without ever really asking ourselves what is education for? Why do we move children at eleven from their primary schools where they know all the other children, all the teachers and the teachers know all the pupils and their parents to vast, impersonal and often threatening secondary schools just when their brains are undergoing huge changes? Why do we insist that they all learn the same things at the same age at the same speed regardles of their individual states of development, aptitudes and abilities?
Prof. Wolf must ask the question (as I'm sure she knows): are schools capable of teaching all the young people in their care, post 14, the miriad different permutations of subjects at the speed suited to each (in each subject) that would represent real education and real choice for all?
It's time we thought about abolishing school from age 14 altogether and allowing young people to go to teachers (not school teachers) to learn what suits them best individually rather than, in the words of one retired scondary school teacher, ...[spending] every day wastefully being forced to learn much of what they do not want to know.
It is the institution of school with its limitations on resources, up to date knowledge of technical and other advances that holds many of them back. We need to wrest education away from schools and put it back into the hands of the community as a whole where it used to be and where it belongs.
John Harrison
18th Nov 2010 at 11:00 am
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