Is the one lesson from history that we don’t learn from the past? The plan to introduce a system of ”vocational GCSEs” is fatally flawed. Immediately this will create two tiers for students, families and employers.
” was John Newsom’s landmark report in 1963 to the government of the day, with its title signalling that the needs of half of the school population were not being met at age 15.
Three of its principal recommendations read:
- The school programme in the final year ought to be deliberately outgoing - an invitation into the adult world of work and of leisure.
- The school should resist external pressures to extend public examinations to pupils for whom they are inappropriate.
- Extended workshop and technical facilities should be provided whether wholly within the schools or jointly with further education.
These recommendations - about preparing for adult life, about examinations, about collaboration between schools and colleges - have resonated down the years.
Technical schools, established in the 1960s, were never given a chance to flourish, though, withering in the wake of prime minister Harold Wilson’s infamous pledge that comprehensive education would offer a grammar school for all.
Fast-forward four decades.
The Tomlinson Report of 2004, which promised significant reform to better balance the academic and the vocational, failed to gain the support of the prime minister at the time, Tony Blair.
In 2005 the secretary of state’s 14-19 Education and Skills White Paper wearily acknowledged that vocational education had often failed to command the confidence of employers, higher education and the general public.
Vocational versus academic education
Down the decades, the UK education system has seen waves of acronyms rise and fall: , , , Diplomas, T levels and V levels.
None has fundamentally addressed , the term I used to describe this vital element of the 14-16 school population.
Newsom, in the vocabulary of his time yet with some foresight, observed:
”‘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 suggests that there is more to a job than money.”
There must be many of us for whom - on a personal level - leaving school or college and pursuing a vocation meant taking up a calling to teach, to nurse, to be an architect or minister of the Church.
There may be many others who readily and properly interpret “vocational” as learning a skill or a trade.
We find ourselves confined by the historic associations of language. “Trades” and “professions” are such an example. We need to bury the vocational-academic divide and its either/or vocabulary that so bedevils curriculum and examination frameworks.
A newly installed prime minister with a Cambridge English degree has appointed an education secretary with a degree in chemistry from King’s College.
They sit in an Oxbridge-dominated Cabinet. Can these leaders prompt the required step change to champion the profile of all education and training pathways in a way that has eluded their predecessors for nearly 70 years?
Can they move beyond tired political rhetoric to trigger sustained change and come anywhere close to embedding systems that are bread and butter to the Germans and the Swiss? Alan Milburn’s eagerly waited report may tell us.
If thoughtfully led, this can be done through the concerted determination of educational professional associations and examination boards in tandem with employers and trades unions. It will take time.
But starting with “vocational GCSEs” risks repeating the past.
Roy Blatchford chaired The Forgotten Third commission, which was set up by the Association of School and College Leaders and published its in 2019
