26 September 2003

In answering this question, I want to take the luxury of beginning with a blank sheet of paper.

I set aside the past and the history of initiatives in this area: the Certificate of Pre-Vocational Education, the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative, and the General National Vocational Qualifications.

I set aside the present: the GCSE and A levels as we know them; the national qualifications framework; the current system for the delivery of vocational qualifications by schools and colleges; the LSC, the SSCs and the 120 awarding bodies with an interest in vocational education.

And I set aside the future: the vocational qualifications remit, the Tomlinson Inquiry into 14-19 education, and the modernisation of the examination system.

In the absence of this baggage, I propose to attempt to distil the essence of how to draw vocational qualifications into secondary schools, or, to put it another way, how to encourage more young people to take subjects which equip them for employment, while also being as robust and developmental as all other subjects in both the cognitive domain and in the affective domain.

And I draw essentially on my experience in Australia, where there have been both mistakes and successes. I am fully aware that national solutions to this problem are culturally-based and not readily transferable, but the lessons I have learned the hard way might be of interest.

What conditions need to be satisfied if vocational qualifications are to be drawn into secondary schools?

I think there are five of them.

The first requirement is to stop talking about vocational qualifications, as if they are necessarily a different class of qualification from other qualifications; as if vocational subjects are necessarily qualitatively different from other subjects; as if further study and employment, to which secondary education leads, falls neatly into the academic and the vocational, leading to either a profession and or a trade.

Which of the following is vocational? Oral surgery, law, web design, stock-broking, brick-laying, writing history, navigation, being an able seaman, being a ship's captain, cabinet-making, playing first violin for the London Symphony Orchestra.

The distinction between academic and vocational, or professional and other, is illogical, unhelpful and destructive.

It is so often made simply to mask what we believe might be shameful if said directly: that I personally would rather be a stock-broker than an able seaman, and that I would rather have my child playing first violin for the LSO than laying bricks.

Now, I have just broken a taboo. We all hide our preferences behind mindless statements about parity of esteem.

But I believe that what I just said, must be said and acknowledged, if vocational education and training in schools is to be put on a firm foundation.

By hiding our individual preferences behind a fictitious dichotomy between so-called academic and vocational subjects, we blur the discussion before it begins.

And we compound the issue by chasing the hallucination of parity of esteem.

Esteem is in the eye of the esteemed, and those who esteem.

I know a cabinet-maker, a craftsman of the first order, whose work is now so expensive that only the rich can afford it, who has mentored two generations of apprentices who are now so highly successful, and selling internationally, who would never wish to be nothing else in this world.

(You have such a craftsman here of course, Viscount Linley, who I am told took furniture studies in the BTEC HND, and is himself the son of the photographer, Lord Snowden.)

I have never yet met a cabinet-maker, a photographer, a web designer, a graphic artist, a plumber, a builder, electrician who appeared troubled by problems of low self-esteem, although I know several who are greatly troubled by the need to reduce their tax bill.

When you go to Worldskills, the International Skills Olympics - held this year In St Gallen, and previously in Seoul and Montreal - you see young people from all over the world, some only 16 and still in FE colleges, whose sense of pride and self-worth has soared as a result of their prowess and achievement.

Leanne Knighton, one of the two English gold medallists this year, attended Warwickshire College in this Coventry and Warwickshire LSC.

One of the events which has always impressed me at the Skills Olympics is the joinery competition.

The first time I saw a joinery competition was a training event in Australia. Competitors were given a large sheet of paper on which was drawn, to precise scale, the rafters and beams and pillars of the interior of a pavilion with a curvilinear ceiling. A large piece of wood, about 15 feet by 12 feet had been placed in front of each competitor.

They had to study the plan, which showed a three dimensional structure in two dimensions; then, using their knowledge of geometry and their skills in drafting, mark out in two dimensions on the wood the pieces needed to erect the structure in three dimensions. Most of them spent two full days in this extraordinarily exacting task on their knees.

They then had to cut the pieces from the wood and erect the structure, and for four full days they were under the close scrutiny of judges with clipboards following every step.

This year, in St Gallen, there was an absolutely stunning performance by Lee Fawcett of the United Kingdom, to win his Gold Medal. He created, in the way I described, a complex beechwood door, window and steps, against very stiff international competition especially from Korea.

The coordination of mind, hand and eye which is characteristic of all vocations is extraordinarily demanding in this particular competition

A soft option? Hardly. A subject for those without higher order skills in reasoning? Certainly not.

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So, the first necessary condition to draw vocational education into secondary schools is to stop talking about it as if it is something different.

The second condition is to structure vocational education on the basis of a curriculum that has its roots deeply in contemporary industry.

The so-called academic subjects in secondary school have their curriculum basis in the mainstream of university teaching and research. We want the work young people are doing in these subjects, no matter how elementary or introductory, to be grounded in the mainstream (say) of physical science or Romantic poetry. We want to know that it leads somewhere.

In the same way, I believe it is important to ensure that vocational subjects are genuinely vocationally based, not peripherally vocationally related. No matter how elementary or introductory, they should offer real engagement with the content, skills, demands and experiences of an occupation. Students should put their feet on the first rung of an occupation, just as they put their feet on the first rung of the ladder that is chemistry or French.

The curriculum underpinning vocational education in schools should be one that is verified by industry. Of course, the program taken by 14 or 15 year-olds will come nowhere near making them job-ready, but the introduction must be real. It must be founded on a curriculum that is as rock-solid as that which teaches you to appreciate Shakespeare.

That means that industry must be drawn into shaping the school curriculum in a range of vocational areas, just as universities have been the genesis of the curriculum in other areas.

Countries throughout the western world are wrestling with ways in which this can be achieved, some more successfully than others.

In Australia, the schools most successful in attracting students into vocational education are those that shape their curriculum, according to the age of the students, on the basis of the national training packages. These are unitised, credit-based, industry-derived training programs, which specify knowledge, skill and competencies at successive levels of qualification within each vocation. Such schools have been much more successful than those which have offered vocationally related programs outside the framework of the training packages.

A particular attraction in those schools which use the packages is that students can count the vocational subjects towards their Higher School Certificate at the end of their thirteenth and final year of schooling, while also qualifying for a National Vocational Qualification at Certificate I or Certificate II level. As more than half of the universities will allow the vocational subjects to be counted for admission, these young people have a choice of two clear pathways.

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So the second condition is that whatever is offered in vocational education in schools must genuinely be the first rung on the ladder; it must be validated and valued, regardless of whether that particular ladder is eventually climbed.

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The third condition concerns quality of teaching.

Those of us whose schooling was based on the traditional academic disciplines can all identify at least one teacher who ignited the fire of learning in us, in English, or history or mathematics or some other area.

My experience has been that the presence of teachers with similar inspirational qualities is critical to the attraction and retention of young people to vocational education in schools.

In Australia we made some mistakes in this area. In an effort to promote the growth of vocational education, we retrained substantial numbers of teachers in areas of teacher over-supply - such as industrial arts - to be teachers of vocational subjects such as hospitality and retailing.

With some conspicuous exceptions, it was pretty unsuccessful. Many of the teachers were disaffected; none of them had industry experience; in the main they attracted to their classes similarly disaffected children.

We then turned to some solutions.

One was to bring teachers from further education, with industry experience, into secondary schools to teach vocational education.

Another was to move groups of secondary students into further education colleges for part of the week.

And a third was to make it attractive for people from industry to enter the teaching workforce in schools or further education colleges on a part-time basis, subject to some concurrent training as a teacher, and under the supervision of the head of a faculty.

These things contributed substantially to a real lift in the profile of vocational education in schools, which began to attract the brighter students rather than just those who could not cope with the academic stream.

In particular, faculties in schools and colleges have been rejuvenated by part-time vocational teachers who are also running their own businesses or are employees of national or multi-national companies. They bring with them state-of-the-art knowledge, currency as practitioners, and high credibility with industry – and they have had a real impact on the appetite of young people for vocational education.

So, the third condition is that the teachers of vocational education must be highly skilled professionals in their own fields, as with teachers in other areas of secondary education.

The fourth requirement is that the operation of schools and colleges needs to change to the degree necessary to deliver vocational education for secondary students, and needs to establish effective work-based learning arrangements with industry.

My experience has been that it is extraordinarily difficult to introduce a vibrant vocational education program in schools in the absence of greatly increased flexibility in school and college timetables, in the shared use of industrial standard facilities, and in sharing teachers with a background in industry. It also requires access to the workplace for at least limited periods of genuine on-the-job teaching and learning, rather than work experience.

The significant progress made in NSW really came only in 1997, when the schools and the technical and further education colleges were brought together under a single Department of Education and Training.

That made it possible for the facilities of schools and colleges to be managed as a single resource: the most progressive head teachers and principals of nearby schools and colleges took the opportunity to develop complementary timetables, which permitted the movement of students between school and college. This was particularly important in providing school students access to industry-standard kitchens, workshops, laboratories, studios, design centres, information technology facilities and other highly specialised facilities, which in some cases were mainly used by technical and further education after normal school hours.

The amalgamation also made possible the introduction of a common industrial award for schoolteachers and FE lecturers. This did not mean that they had common conditions in terms of salary and hours, but it did make promotion and transfer possible between schools and colleges as well as working part of the week in a school and part in a college.

The result in curriculum terms is that significant and growing numbers of students in years 10,11,12 and 13 are now spending three days a week in school, one day a week in an FE college, and one day a week in the workplace as a paid employee. In years 12 and 13, the three days in school are spent on traditional academic study; one day at the FE college, and the related day in the workplace, leading to a National Vocational Qualification over two years. All five days contribute to completion of the Higher School Certificate.

The response from industry was very supportive We negotiated with the Toyota Motor Company for every Toyota dealer in NSW, and subsequently across Australia, to take four school students for one day a week for two years, enrolled in NVQs in automotive practice, small business, and sales and marketing. Every country town of any size has a high school and a Toyota dealership. The benefit from the dealers' point of view was that they were able to select from a competitive pool of motivated young people; they received a government subsidy so the investment was of benefit; and they were able to grow young people into the business, recruiting them at the end of the two years.

A similar scheme was then set up with Woolworths, with young people taking an NVQ in the bakery trade or in meat processing being employed in by bakers and butchers in the supermarkets; and there are thousands of other placements with small business.

Across the state, teachers report that the self-esteem, motivation and application of previously disaffected young people has soared through involvement in this program. It has become fashionable to wear the Toyota uniform or checked baker's trousers to school.

At the same time, the workplace has been critical to the acquisition of key skills for employability. Bosses, relating to 15 year-old paid employees, have proved far more effective in transmitting the employability skills of working in teams, problem solving, customer relations, punctuality and attendance, than teachers relating to disaffected students.

So the fourth requirement, in my view, is new organisation arrangements and operating models.

The last of the five conditions is for government to recognise that drawing more young people into vocational education is not solely or even mainly a curriculum issue. Significant industrial issues are involved in relation to the teaching workforce; there are issues relating to the duty of care for students; and significant investment is required to provide incentives for business and industry to commit to effective participation. I won't dwell on that final point, but it is perhaps even more critical than the others.

So, drawing vocational qualifications into secondary education is a huge challenge. Deployed to address it are the Tomlinson Inquiry, the Skills Strategy, and QCA's remit to improve vocational qualifications. The goal is the building of the national stock of human capital, the pillars of which are participation and skill.

I have drawn on my experiences in Australia, which has faced a similar problem of raising the status of vocational education and training in schools. Even taking into account cultural and other differences, I believe that the five conditions apply here. In a nutshell, the status of vocational education will be raised if we stop talking about it as something qualitatively different from academic education, and see it as a genuinely vocational first step for young people in schools. It must be taught well, and supported by those in business and industry. And it needs new approaches to delivery, and clear support from the government and the rest of us, in tackling a task which is so vital to the future health and welfare of this country and its citizens.

Ken Boston