It is now broadly accepted that one of the factors holding back the progress of vocational education in England is the association between different types of education and social class; the snobbery that sees academic education as being for the elite whereas vocational programmes are for the masses. While this fault is now both widely recognised and indeed often decried it is also remarkably persistent – at the same time as championing apprenticeships, for example, the government is acting to remove vocational qualifications from school league tables thus signalling their second-rate status. Schools that have sought to motivate pupils by giving access to more practical types of learning, often in association with a local FE college, are chastised for offering ‘soft options’ and lacking rigour.
There are positive moves, however, and many in FE have welcomed new initiatives to introduce studio schools and University Technical Colleges (UTCs), which allow pupils to undertake a vocational specialism alongside other elements of the national curriculum. Individual colleges have put considerable energy and expertise into helping such institutions take off and are working closely with other partners to integrate them into the local educational system, providing progression for pupils of all levels of attainment. It is therefore deeply disappointing to read the condescending comments of Charles Parker, Chief Executive of the Baker Dearing Trust, reported in the TES on 27 July 2012:
UTCs are controlled by employers and Universities… he said. While FE colleges have been agile in making approaches and getting groups together, the UTCs are legal entities that will never be controlled by FE colleges.
Yes, colleges are agile; but its quite clear from these comments that doing the heavy lifting bringing local consortia together to sponsor a UTC doesn’t count for anything compared with the social status of a university. The fact that many of our colleges offer degree level work, have close and active links with local employers and know far more about teaching vocational subjects to 14–19 year olds than any university because they do it themselves is clearly of little consequence compared with a royal charter. FE colleges are obviously the wrong sort of institutions to be associated with in public.
I would like to think that Mr Parker’s remarks have been taken out of context or ‘mis-spoken’ as the Americans say but the UTC movement has form in this regard. Under the headline ‘UTCs teach Engineering not Hairdressing’ a letter to TES in October 2011 was emphatic in asserting that ‘in no shape or form is hairdressing offered as a topic of learning’. In UTC land there are clearly second class subjects as well as second class institutions.
It doesn’t help matters when Ofsted refers to some of the FE colleges sponsoring UTCs as mediocre. Universities’ status protects them from such glib and patronising commentary but the universities sponsoring UTCs are not all members of the elite Russell Group, indeed far from it. The list of institutions sponsoring UTCs ranges in practice from the truly distinguished to the pretty average but it speaks volumes that it is the FE colleges that are singled out for public abuse.
Colleges have rolled their sleeves up and helped with the development of UTCs and studio schools because they believe in giving vocational education and the young people who participate in it a higher status. There are many across the country who share that aim. It would be tragic, therefore, if instead of helping to overcome prejudice these new institutions simply serve to perpetuate it in a new and different form.
Andrew Morris summarises a recent talk at the House of Commons by Dr Pasi Sahlberg, Director General of the Centre for International Mobility and Cooperation at the Ministry of Education in Helsinki.
“Back in 1970 Finland was not a high-performing country; it ranked well below the OECD average and even further below the UK. But in that same year a huge problem of inequity was identified and understood as the underlying cause of multiple social problems. Reducing it became a political priority.”
”Over the following forty years Finland’s educational performance has risen steadily, exceeding the OECD average during the 1990s and rising subsequently to the top. Over the same period the OECD average itself has gradually risen while the performance of England (and other countries) has actually fallen. The cause is clearly attributed by Sahlberg to Finland’s pursuit of different policies, not simply to better implementation of similar policies. The key policy driver was an attack on inequity itself…”
Click here for the full think-piece, and here for a copy of Dr Sahlberg’s presentation.
What are your thoughts? Let us know via the comment box below.
Ian Nash writes:
Following David Cameron’s pledge this week to rip-up employment red tape in the name of better delivery, where does this leave the promises, in Lord Lingfield’s interim report on professionalism in FE, to maintain teaching standards in colleges and training organisations?
Click here for the full think-piece.
What are your thoughts? Let us know via the comment box below.
What does it cost to open a 14-19 University Technical College? If you are Lord Baker, Education Secretary to Margaret Thatcher, it’s upwards of £20m. If you are from Cleveland and Redcar College you get the same for £30,000 – the research grant they won from the Learning and Skills Improvement Service that multiplied into a huge range of support from local business and industry.
Let’s make another funding comparison. Accolades were rightly awarded to John Hayes, FE and Skills Minister, for wresting £210m from the Treasury, against all the odds in the recession, for adult safeguarded learning. But local authority advisers I spoke to when researching an essay for the Parliamentary Skills Group book, Open to Ideas, pointed out that it was nothing compared with the £600m dished out for free schools, over which they have no say despite the impact on local education provision.
And what do free schools bring? We have Eton launching a free sixth-form in Newham where there is already an FE college, sixth-form college and school sixth forms, all judged by Ofsted as “good” to “outstanding”. The new providers blithely suggest there is a shortage of good “academic” sixth-form places. They would not say this had they consulted those on the ground who know the picture.
And there is worse. Daily Express journalist Toby Young and the head teacher, Katherine Birbalsingh – darling of the 2010 Tory party conference where she chose to rubbish her comprehensive school – both plan new academically elitist schools where there will be no skills teaching under the age of 16. Despite the fact that overwhelming evidence points to such a curriculum as incomplete to the point of negligence, they are setting-up these establishments as free schools with the blessing of Education Secretary Michael Gove.
Even worse, the language Young and Birbalsingh use in the media and any other platform they can reach, denigrates skills learning as second rate, and is akin to casting people who pursue it as “rude mechanicals”. College managers have already spoken to me of the negative impact such moves are having on young people and hopeful apprentices coming through the system.
Everyone at a Parliamentary Skills Group seminar which I addressed this week was of a like mind – stop seeking so-called parity of esteem between academic and vocational learning (a false distinction in any case) and, instead, imbue a lifelong love of skill and craft in all, whether for work or pleasure, from the earliest possible age.
The word “lifelong” is key here. With numbers of NEETs now topping a million, there is much heart-searching over how to tackle this seemingly intransigent problem. As a result, “schemes” such as the work programme are tacked onto the system with mixed outcomes, which at best fall well short of desired targets, as all such schemes have shown repeatedly for decades.
But a Niace-sponsored two-year inquiry into the future of lifelong learning suggested a more radical solution. Considerable national and international evidence was drawn on to show that a greater concentration of resources onto adults (even at some cost to the earlier ages) created role models and had a disproportionally positive effect in encouraging the young to remain in education and training.
It may seem counter-intuitive but the inquiry report in September 2009 called for a redistribution of 1% of cash (£1 billion) from under-25s to the over-50s. Given demographic changes it could be managed, despite the recession, with no cuts in real terms to per capita spending on the young. Provision would also more directly reflect spending on lifelong learning in countries much higher than the UK in OECD success ratings such as Norway.
Whether such a policy ever stood a chance of being tested is a moot point; Gove would never wear it. And there’s the rub. Despite the Departments for Education and Business, Innovation and Skills sharing a minister, there appears to be little synergy and a lot of waste, notably by the DfE. It seems as if they don’t talk to each other.
When I suggested this at the seminar, there were firm nods and comments in concurrence from college and business representatives. Other speakers warned that policies “may cut against each other” with unintended and damaging consequences. After the meeting there were further expressions of irritation and anger that DFE money went on vainglorious projects to flatter the incorrigible like-minded egoists, Baker and Gove, while BIS projects were comparatively starved of cash.
At the outset the Coalition government promised a seamless and truly lifelong education service with necessary skills at its heart. With further cuts looming, have we really achieved the fiscal sustainability across all departments we desire? If not, what do we cut and what do we keep?
This is an extended version of a viewpoint first carried in FE Week
Ian Nash, The Policy Consortium
Sally Faraday and Carole Overton consider Vocational teaching and training – is there a better route to improving learning?
New research into effective teaching/training and learning suggests that differences between ways of promoting academic and vocational learning are exaggerated and that the same good practice characteristics are to be found in both.
Click here for the full thinkpiece
What are your thoughts? Let us know via the comment box below.
A wise old principal (well, David Gibson actually) once told me that the trick was to see new stuff coming over the horizon, but the trickier part was to notice when it had gone past and disappeared over the other horizon. It was ever thus.
Among the shifting policy and funding priorities and the mysteries of the EFA, the YPLA, the SFA, the NAS and HEFCE and the awkward and painful departmental fence straddling of John Hayes, what are we to expect in the coming year? Steady as she goes? Some more surprises? Who knows?
Well, I may have the answer. Plenty of pundits have pontificated in the newspaper columns about the prospects for the UK in 2012. But who do we believe? I came across a Canadian ‘commentator’ recently who predicted in 2007 that 4.5 billion of us would be dead by 2012 as a result of global warming. I did write to him to complain about my disappointment, but he hasn’t responded. Perhaps he didn’t make it.
My turn. This is good stuff, so you had better pay attention! The 1992 FHE Act came into effect on 1 April 1993. It dawned on me some years ago that this means that all FE colleges were born under the sign of Aries. Stay with me, this is useful. So, horoscopes are the answer. And, of course, like the erudite pundits in the broadsheets, but more puzzlingly, they tend to take different views. This is odd because the stars cannot lie, can they?
There is some consensus about Arian attributes. Arians:
…are always looking forward, they are leaders in ideals and pioneers of advanced thought. They have great mental energy but are inclined to be very headstrong and impulsive. They are always prophetic, and love to predict things that will happen … They are always full of new schemes and plans, ever exploring and originating. They are fond of constant change, loving novelty, romance and speculation and nearly always live in a world of theory. They are very highly strung, sometimes hyper-sensitive and are remarkable for their perception.
Flattering, isn’t it? I have two star signs and if Capricorn is dodgy I turn to Aquarius for better news.
Generally, I favour Russell Grant because he is so mercilessly jolly. And we all need jolliness these days.
The first half of 2012 is ideal for increasing your income in a variety of ways. Be sure to put a percentage of your earnings into savings, as this period of abundance won’t last forever. Still, it will be hard to resist luxurious temptations; go ahead and splurge on a couple of items [new media studio?] that will afford long lasting pleasure.
You’ll be taking a closer look at relationships for the majority of 2012. Between January and early October, you’ll be carefully evaluating your closest alliances [Ooh, merger time]. Any partnership that feels outmoded, burdensome, or toxic will fall by the wayside [I think we know what he means . Don't hesitate to go into therapy, join a support group, or expressing your frustrations through artwork [VPs only]. Paring down debt will become another priority in the last two months of the year.
In the interests of E&D I ought to report that Claire Petulengro says that something awful is going to happen on 17th November. You won’t get that information from the SFA till about January 2013.
So who do you believe: Gove, Cable or Grant? Read the tabloids, you can’t go wrong. Happy New Year!
Nick Warren, The Policy Consortium
January 2012
What do you think? Share your thoughts with us below.
This month, Ian Nash looks at the ‘State of confusion’ – the world of FE as seen by the media
“Everyone knows what a further education college is. Or do they? When 1,000 members of the public were asked which colleges on a given list were FE, they were very confident. And yet three-quarters (75%) got it wrong. While many people may not have the foggiest what an FE college is, it doesn’t stop the media and many of the general public slagging them off as low-standard, poor quality and a waste of time.”
Click here for the full thinkpiece.
WHAT DO YOU THINK? Feel free to share your views in the comment box below.
This month, Nick Warren considers ‘More plumbing, less pilates’ – The effects of ‘Mickey Mouse course’ accusations on the public reputation of FE/HE.
“‘Mickey Mouse courses’ at universities and in FE are the stuff of Daily Mail legend and are accusations recklessly bandied about by politicians who should know better. But why don’t they know better? And how is the public reputation of FE/HE affected by such claims?”
Click here for the full thinkpiece.
WHAT DO YOU THINK? Feel free to share your views in the comment box below.
For this month’s think-piece, Peter Davies, Mick Fletcher and Maggie Greenwood look at HE in FE colleges under the new fees regime – a cloud with a silver lining?
“The arrangements that are being put in place by the Coalition Government for the 2012-13 intake of students represent the most radical change in HE funding for many years. The authors believe that these widely contested reforms offer substantial opportunities for for further education colleges that are significant providers of HEFCE-funded higher education, and their students. However, there are also considerable threats if these opportunities are ignored or pursued insensitively.”
The full think-piece is available here.
What are your thoughts? Share your views through the comments box below.
For this month’s think-piece, Ian Nash asks Big Society or Big Business? Is there a future for the voluntary sector?.
“Thousands of charities, voluntary organisations and small private bodies dependent on state funding are being forced to lower their ambitions or close down, undermining the Prime Minister David Cameron’s plans for the volunteer-driven Big Society.
The evidence from inquiries by the Policy consortium suggests three main causes:
• First, cuts draconian cuts are being imposed by cash-strapped local authorities facing 28% cuts from central government over four years;
• Second, central government schemes and minimum contract levels currently at £500,000 exclude smaller organisations;
• Third, colleges and other providers are delaying plans for tendering and bidding for work because of delays in the clarification and introduction of new funding arrangements.”
The full think-piece is available to read here.
What do you think? Share your views by replying below.