Review of Vocational Education – The Wolf Report
dramatic change in teenagers’ options. Even twenty years ago, there were very large numbers of jobs available for 16 and 17 year olds. Today, this is not true, for a variety of reasons including changes in employment-related regulation and employers’ assumptions about school leavers’ skills. In this and other respects, the English labour market is more and more like that of our major European neighbours.
Third, employers nonetheless continue to value and reward employment experience and not just formal credentials. Good apprenticeships are valuable as much for the general skills they teach as for the specific ones; and employment of any sort has value for people’s later careers and chances. Even though formal credentials are seen as increasingly important, they are not, in fact, all-determining. Work experiences still offer an alternative progression route, while many formal qualifications are not worth having at all.
Fourth, good levels of English and Mathematics continue to be the most generally useful and valuable vocational skills on offer. They are a necessary precondition for access to selective, demanding and desirable courses, whether these are ‘vocational’ or ‘academic’; and they are rewarded directly by the labour market throughout people’s careers.
Fifth, young people change jobs very frequently, within a labour market which is also in constant flux. So students need general skills; and the educational system needs to respond quickly and flexibly to change. All five of these developments need to inform vocational as much as academic curricula.
The way forward
Today’s labour market conditions bear very hard on young people. Underlying structural trends have been made worse by recession. We need to ensure that students have every opportunity to gain the most important and generalisable skills, including those gained in employment. This means making certain that institutions focus on students’ demands and needs, not those of government agencies, and that the funding and oversight regime for 14-19 year olds helps institutions to be fle ible efficient and directly responsive to labour market changes. Government should focus on its key roles of monitoring and ensuring quality, and providing obective information, and withdraw from micro-management.
To that end, the Review proposes some major changes. Funding should be on a per-student basis post-16 as well as pre-16 and institutions should be expected to offer and provide coherent programmes of study within broad parameters, rather than being funded on the basis on individual qualifications. Post-16, English and Mathematics should be a required component of studyg prorammes for those without good GCSEs in these subjects. Programmes will vary in how they organise this, depending on the
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