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| Can we end the academic/vocational apartheid? Significantly today, the core National Curriculum does not include vocational education, says Roy Blatchford Click here for a print version of this article. There’s a new education initiative on the block. Or there will be once teachers in secondary schools have spent time poring over the small print. September 2008 sees the launch of the new diplomas for 14 year olds, diplomas in anything from retail, sport, manufacturing and hair and beauty, to catering, engineering and travel and tourism. This academic year teachers themselves are starting on their own challenging training in order to be able to teach the diplomas successfully. Then they must set about the altogether more demanding task: selling the diplomas to parents and students. Are these diplomas set to transform how the nation views vocational education, or are the mistakes of previous educational reform to be repeated? Is this a moment in time to challenge once and for all the apartheid between ‘academic’ and ‘vocational’ which bedevils our language and our practice. Vocational education has long been a cause of concern in this country. Ever since the 1944 Education Act, when the proposed technical schools were not developed on the scale envisaged, successive policy initiatives have never been more than partially effective. Significantly today, the core National Curriculum does not include vocational education. John Newsom, a distinguished educationist, wrote 40 years ago: ‘”Vocational” is a dangerous but indispensable word. It rightly means all that belongs to a man’s calling. That itself is no doubt an old fashioned word, but at least it suggest that there is more to a job than money.’ For many of us, leaving school or college and pursuing a vocation meant taking up a calling: to teach, to nurse, to be an architect, to be a minister of the church. There may be others who interpret ‘vocational’ as learning a skill or a trade. Perhaps it is time for those of us who are charged with shaping the future for our young people, to think of vocational education as preparing equally to be a careers adviser, a social worker, an electrician, a pilot, a vicar, a car designer or a hairdresser? After all, what trades and professions value alike is the ability to get things done to the highest standards. We find ourselves confined by language and its historical associations. ‘Trades’ and ‘professions’ are such an example. We need to bury the vocational/academic apartheid which so bedevils our curriculum and examination frameworks within schools, further and higher education. This cannot be done overnight. It needs the concerted attention of policy makers, teachers, universities, inspectors, business leaders and, not least, students and parents. We currently have too many secondary schools, particularly those in challenging circumstances, where, on any one day, upwards of 20% of fifteen and sixteen year-olds are absent. They have voted with their feet. Another 20% are there in body, but not with their minds. It is a forlorn tale of the disappeared and the disengaged. About one student in 20 leaves school with no GCSE grades of any kind. Fewer 16 year olds in the UK continue their studies at school or college than is the case in most other European countries. A recent survey for the charity Edge suggested that 35 per cent of parents think vocational learning ‘is for people who do not do well at school’. Here is where we must be radical if we want to effect lasting change. As secondary teachers and schools across the country prepare for the coming of the diplomas, government should insist that all students, including the most able academically in both state and independent schools, would benefit from access to high quality vocational and skills education. That way the nation will invest in the diplomas whole-heartedly. Only when Winchester, Roedean and Manchester Grammar run courses in retail and catering will they be truly valued. The new diplomas offer a rare opportunity to end a long-standing apartheid. Roy Blatchford is the Founding Director of NET |
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