“I repair” was Claudia’s striking opening sentence when she started to explain her job to me. Claudia isn’t a tailor, or a car mechanic; she’s a teacher at an adult education centre in Austria, helping young people in the early part of their working lives who’ve tried and failed to find work. We met two autumns ago as fellow participants in an EU-funded study trip to look at projects for young people struggling in the labour market.
Claudia’s job is to re-motivate her students, to help them to identify what skills they have to offer, and to add to those skills so they can find, and keep, a worthwhile job.
I thought of Claudia last week as the furore developed around Michael Gove’s announcement that he is to slash thousands of vocational qualifications from the list of those which count in school league tables. I thought of her because I think she’s doing a different job to those who teach vocational skills in schools – and, therefore, needs different tools to do her job.
Michael Gove is following Alison Wolf’s advice to cut out vocational qualifications that lead nowhere, but which have been accepted as equivalent to one or more GCSEs in school league tables.
Though his supporters were no doubt very pleased that the Daily Mail chose to headline this as “Thousands of ‘Mickey Mouse’ courses will no longer count towards GCSE league tables”, the government has not gone for a crude “academic good, vocational bad” approach. The process of winnowing wheat from chaff has not been completed yet, but a good number of vocational qualifications have clearly won the secretary of state’s approval.
The other potential misunderstanding is that this announcement is purely about schools, and not about the many organisations – including many British equivalents of the one that employs Claudia – which work with young people after school to “repair” damage done.
Michael Gove wants schoolchildren to get a strong foundation at school, but Claudia is repairing, not building. She needs to re-motivate young people who feel written off by the education system as failures and give them back their self-belief, so they can start again. That’s at least as important to them as building a CV in the formal sense of adding skills and qualifications – so Claudia uses what tools she can, even if they might not pass muster in school.
One of Claudia’s British counterparts has used windsurfing to re-motivate disengaged young people. Not teaching them how to windsurf, but teaching them how to teach others: they get an instructors’ certificate. Suddenly they move from the bottom of the pile to a respected place in society. Instead of always being the recipient of someone else’s help, it’s them offering the help. They’re back in society being useful. And I imagine a number go on to collect other qualifications that passed them by when they were at school.
I have no doubt that Michael Gove would approve. And no doubt at all that windsurfing will stay off the school syllabus.
Ian McKinnon makes a sound observation about the need to `repair` the motivation and lack of skill acquisition by young people who have left the full-time education process. However, I do take issue with the implication that this failure is the fault of the schools. We have an unfortunate and lingering culture in Britain which places too much emphasis on academic achievement and undervalues the worth of practical and vocational skills. In their focus on achieving academically, schools are simply responding to the pressure that this culture has placed on Polticians who in turn respond by focussing their attention on academic attainment above all else. As a good example, take David Beckam whose skills are clearly of a more physical rather than `academic` nature and yet David has been able to `achieve` a lot more than many of us who possess superior academic skills. He is one of many examples. The fault lies with the sustained and politicised attacks that are made indiscriminately on what is perhaps one of the hardest and most dedicated professional tasks, namely Education. If politicians, the press and other `opinion leaders` spent more time addressing the need to `appreciate` what our education system is there for and what it does achieve, we would not have the need to `repair` the lost souls who have apparently been `victimised` by it. Until this country learns that a balance of skills (and commensurate rewards both financial and cultural) is what leads to a balanced employment market we will continue to experience these disparities in the apirations and attainments of our young people.
Robert Phillips (Chair of Governors and Senior Lecturer in Management)
I feel for any young person who not only has had to work hard to achieve well in these now discredited vocational exams, but is also being compared with those who did not, in these or others that have survived the ‘winnowing’. What a set of negative mixed messages to send out to our future pension providers…
Hi Robert,
I write the words and the sub writes the headline! I hesitated when I saw it, as you obviously did, but decided not to challenge it because it is a plain fact that the ‘damage’ which needs to be ‘repaired’ happens at least ‘at’ school (except, of course, for those who truant). I was deliberately avoiding any notion of blame, and focusing attention post-16, but I’m entirely with you in your comments on the over-emphasis of the national curriculum on academic matters, and the value of vocational education. (Is it a coincidence, do you think, that the term ‘NEET’ came to prominence at much the same time as the national curriculum was introduced?)
Where I think Alison Wolf has made a particularly valuable contribution is in saying that regardless of what path one takes, everyone needs a sound grounding in Maths and English.
What’s plain silly is to try to divide the world into academic sheep and vocational goats. Most of us need to be both!