{"id":585,"date":"2016-07-14T18:35:04","date_gmt":"2016-07-14T18:35:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.breslinpublicpolicy.com\/?p=585"},"modified":"2016-07-29T18:35:15","modified_gmt":"2016-07-29T18:35:15","slug":"memo-to-justine-greening","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.breslinpublicpolicy.com\/news\/memo-to-justine-greening\/","title":{"rendered":"Memo to Justine Greening"},"content":{"rendered":"

The past few weeks have seen the publication of a number of reports in the related and overlapping but distinct fields of lifelong learning, adult education, Further Education and vocational education. As readers of RSA blogs will already be aware, my colleague at the RSA, Mark Londesborough, has edited, in partnership with the Further Education Trust for Leadership, an excellent and thought-provoking collection of essays, Possibility Thinking: reimagining the future of Further Education and Skills<\/a><\/i>, Deirdre Hughes and Sally-Anne Barnes of the University of Warwick Institute for Employment Research have published an important report, Adult Education: too important to be left to chance<\/a><\/i>, for the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Adult Education, and David Sainsbury and his team have published their report on the future of technical education, Report of the Independent Panel on Technical Education<\/a>, <\/i>which has been welcomed by ministers, even if any promise to support Sainsbury\u2019s reforms is, to say the least, qualified.<\/p>\n

This level of interest in these too often forgotten sectors and areas of educational endeavour is welcome and runs concurrently with my own work in drafting a new paper in the RSA\u2019s Power to Create<\/i> series on the future of lifelong learning, which will be published in the autumn, and which is prefaced by an article in the current RSA Journal<\/i> which sets out some of my initial thinking. At the core of the analysis I offer is a career-long belief that lifelong learning is not something that follows <\/i>schooling, often as a corrective to its perceived or actual failures, but rather that schooling is a critical and statutory juncture on every individual\u2019s lifelong learning journey. Whatever the qualifications outcomes – and these are vital – a schooling that does not give us the power to create, to learn, un-learn and re-learn, to have an appetite for new learning and the capacity and desire for new learning has failed us – not at 16 or 18, but for a lifetime.<\/p>\n

In this post, I want to focus on one theme that will feature strongly in my own paper, how we regard different types of learning. As such, and with apologies to the authors of the other reports and collections cited above, I want to focus on Sainsbury. He and his colleagues, are absolutely right in what for me are their three key observations: (1) that the current chaotic range of routes and qualifications is near impossible to navigate both for learners and employers; (2) that too many vocational qualifications are, well, insufficiently vocational and lead, at best, to the margins of particular job markets rather than into careers; (3) that careers education and guidance needs a complete overhaul. In suggesting a more focused set of work and college routes across fifteen occupation areas, it offers a clearer set of route ways than offered thus far, and one that post-16 and adult learners have a chance of navigating.<\/p>\n

A missed trick and an old problem?<\/b><\/p>\n

Sainsbury\u2019s is a meticulous, timely and reasonably comprehensive piece of work but you\u2019d be right to detect just a smidgeon of \u2018faint praise\u2019 in my tone; why? Because I fear that it misses a trick and contributes to a problem.<\/p>\n

The missed trick is the perennial one about the status of this area of learning (and the areas of employment that it leads to) in our national mindset – that the academic and vocational are separate planets, and that one is more highly regarded than the other. Sainsbury acknowledges this but little more, and the decision to rebrand \u2018vocational\u2019 learning as \u2018technical\u2019 learning hardly moves us forward. Sainsbury, effectively, accepts the status \u2018status quo\u2019 and seeks to fix the problem of poor provision within this paradigm. We deserve and should expect more; indeed, as I shall argue later, the language of \u2018technical\u2019 over \u2018vocational\u2019 may further ghettoize this area of learning.<\/p>\n

The problem is that in not addressing this status quo, and by suggesting that at 16 young people choose between<\/i> the academic and the vocational, Sainsbury reinforces the distinction, even with the bridging mechanisms that he argues should be created between the two. Of course, this is better than casting the divide at 11 (as with the Grammar-Secondary Modern model) or at 14 (as there is a tendency for Kenneth Baker\u2019s University Technical Colleges to do) but the central reality remains the same: as long as the academic domain is ascribed a higher social and cultural status than the vocational (sorry, technical), the technical curriculum is one that young people are more likely to fall onto or \u2018end up on\u2019 than choose.<\/p>\n

Back to school?<\/b><\/p>\n

Critical to grasping this nettle, is the need to acknowledge that the seeds of this divide run deep and are reinforced, if not sown, during the years of compulsory schooling. As I have grown tired of remarking, as long as we \u201cthrow the naughty boys a car engine\u201d as a sop to their unruly behaviour at Key Stage 4 and before, we\u2019ll never generate the huge numbers of engineers and scientists that, as a modern society and competitive economy, we need. And posh voices on Radio 4 arguing that (1) too many young people are going to university today, and (2) an apprenticeship is just as valuable as a degree won\u2019t cut it; why? Because you can bet your bottom dollar that the speaker is degree educated, and that their<\/i> children are likely to be too. Unfortunately, the message, whatever the truth in it, is about as believable as Jamie Redknapp in a Marks and Spencer suit; fundamentally the discussion is about other<\/i> people\u2019s children, \u2018ordinary\u2019 people as our new Prime Minister might call them.<\/p>\n

So, how might we move forward? How might we rebalance the academic-technical divide? Well, we have some idea of how not to:<\/p>\n