One hundred and forty-two years before Andy Burnham’s announcement this week that he will introduce more vocational education for over-14s, a royal commission on British technical education, under Queen Victoria, recommended reforms to make Britain more like Germany in its schooling and workplace training. Some things don’t change.
Actually, one big thing has changed. The 1884 royal commission criticised British education as chronically inadequate in its entirety. Today, those calling for better vocational education often claim that too many people now go on to university. They claim that the social magnetism of higher education has become too great.
I don’t buy that “rob Peter to pay Paul” bit of the argument. It is a huge national strength that the UK today has a world-class university system, largely paid for by graduates themselves who mostly do well in the jobs market. Universities, in serious financial crisis, have their own problems. In particular, they have become too expensive, thanks largely to the misguided decision of the Cameron-Clegg coalition to treble tuition fees, and then to levy a high interest rate on student debt on top of that. But a policy of doing down universities would be hugely misguided. There is a reason why the UK is one of the world’s top destinations for international students and researchers.
However, even with the expansion of higher education—and the achievement of Tony Blair’s famous 50 per cent participation target—it is still the case that more than half of each year’s cohort of school leavers don’t go on to university. They need a good vocational education system, leading to good apprenticeships and jobs.
It is a thoroughly wrong-headed, upper-middle-class view of the education system—and British society as a whole—to think that for most teenagers the reason they don’t go down a vocational route is because they are fixated by the glamour of student life. The dangerous magnet attracting working-class teenagers isn’t higher education, but rather opting out of education entirely. Rates of absenteeism from secondary schools rose dramatically during the Covid pandemic and are still alarmingly high. More than a quarter of secondary school students are recorded as missing more than 10 per cent of their classes. About a third fail to get a Grade 4 or above in GCSE English and maths, which means that they leave school with few if any worthwhile qualifications.
Just pause on those figures for a moment. The proportion of school leavers failing to achieve basic qualifications is about the same—above one-third—as the proportion of those who go on to university. It is completely nonsensical to think that this crisis of school failure is caused by too many pupils being too attracted to higher education.
Far better school-level vocational education options after the age of 14, as proposed by Andy Burnham based on his Manchester “MBacc”, are clearly part of the answer. This involves schools offering GCSE or BTEC options in subjects such as engineering, AI and other digital tech, art and design and health and social care, alongside English, maths and science. Further, we should be systematically organising work experience for pupils while they are still in secondary school.
This thoroughly worthwhile curriculum reform needs to engage government, school leaders and employers. A key requirement is a huge increase in the number and quality of youth apprenticeships. That would give school leavers a tangible and immediate route into employment.
These reforms will also help overcome the crisis of working-class teenager disengagement mentioned earlier, by making secondary school more relevant and engaging. But there is a more basic challenge here, which is for schools to work directly with parents and children’s services agencies in order to get teenagers to go to school in the first place.
