1st March 2012 9:00
By Blue Tutors
One of the news articles on our site this week was about a report stating that some of the new vocational qualifications, popular at academies, are too easy, and not up to the standards of GCSEs. Obviously the difficulty of a qualification is important; we would like our students to be pushed at every stage of their education, so that they can do as well as possible, but the problem with the vocational qualifications seems to be that the government are attempting to objectively compare every student, which isn’t possible, and is disappointing.
There is currently a lot of emphasis on English and Maths at GCSE, and how important it is for every student to achieve good results in these subjects; employers have said that someone’s English and Maths ability has a strong bearing on their employability. There always has been an emphasis for students to achieve at least a grade C in their English GCSE and maths GCSE, but with the current review of the curriculum, it is stronger than ever.
The problem seems to be that the targets the government sets for schools encourages the schools to behave in a certain way. If it is easier for a student to do well in a vocational compared to their GCSEs then the student will study for that vocational course, and moreover, the school will push the student to study the vocational course.
The first problem with this is that we are trying to compare academia with vocation, and we shouldn’t. There really is no reason to do this because it is generally easy to identify the difference. What would be the problem with the government publishing league tables showing how a school’s students have performed in academic subjects, and how well they have performed in vocational courses. One wouldn’t compare a plumber with a solicitor in terms of success because both have followed their own path. They could be compared on salary, but neither profession is necessarily better paid than the other.
The sad result of the government’s attempts to categorise all under 16 courses in the same way is that some people will always feel that their education has been under-valued. Currently those people are the vocational students who are being told that they have done well, but on an ‘easy’ course.
The larger problem with the current situation is the ease with which students can drop every academic subject other than maths and English. Particularly because the students encouraged to do so are often at poor performing schools where if a student does have an aptitude for academia, it may not have been noticed yet. Pushing vocational qualifications on under-privileged students is simply perpetuating the academic gap between them and their counterparts at ‘better’ schools.
In most other countries students don’t choose a vocation until they’re 18 and old enough to realise that the decision they make will have a large influence on the rest of their life. Many university courses in Europe and the rest of the world assume that the students will follow a certain career, or at least in a particular sector. However, before 18 students must take a variety of academic subjects to prepare them not just for a career, but for life in general. In the UK we have always allowed students to specialise from age 16 (when choosing A Levels), which is probably too early, but certainly aged 14 is too early for a student to be choosing a vocational qualification.
Our goal should be to produce well rounded people who have every option available to them when aged 18, not to create young adults who have been blinkered down a narrow path to a career which they may later decide that they don’t want.