Vocational education: failing our future

Academic education is not the only route our children can take towards a better future — nor should it be. Yet it appears we are letting them down when it comes to the alternative. Education is the silver bullet for a progressive society, and with around 2.5 million 14 to 19 year olds in the UK engaged in full or part-time study, the choices made at this stage carry enormous consequences. We are either pushing our children towards academic pursuit or offering them a poor alternative if they do not make the grades. We are strangling a vital resource for our own future.

Traditionally there are two educational routes: A-levels followed by university, which record numbers of students are currently pursuing, or vocational education. Vocational education for 14 to 19 year olds ranges widely, from highly competitive engineering apprenticeships to courses designed for disaffected and underachieving young people. But the vocational system, in the main, appears to be geared to catch and fumble rather than improve and launch.

According to the Wolf Report published by the Department for Education, over 350,000 14 to 19 year olds are poorly served by current vocational training, failing to progress into stable paid employment or higher-level education. Professor Alison Wolf of King's College London, asked to produce the review by Education Secretary Michael Gove, reports stark insights into the state of vocational education, calling it 'a failure of our education system'.

Wolf makes a number of recommendations based on three core principles: that academic or vocational study should provide genuine pathways to the labour market and to further education; that people should have access to accurate and useful information to make informed choices; and that the system needs dramatic simplification as a precondition for everything else.

Specific recommendations include allowing Further Education lecturers and professors into schools to teach those 'best suited'; shifting regulation away from qualifications towards the providing organisations; and removing the requirement that all vocational qualifications must sit within the Qualifications and Credit Framework.

Any recommendation that can help build better educational pathways must be taken seriously by decision-makers with any interest in a progressive future. In the coming weeks, the government will respond to the Wolf Report.