This is a really excellent piece and the distinction you draw between low academic achievers and those with a technical rather than academic aptitude is a really important and rarely-seen one. I 100% respect what you are saying here.
But.
Now I know that the GCSE exam is designed so that 1/3 will score below 4, but at the same time the data set is big enough to accommodate massive local variations without impacting that figure. And the people I talk to on the ground say that, leaving aside children with very complex special needs and those with highly chaotic home lives, 90-95% of children, given full attendance, could be got up to grade 4 standard. Similarly the biggest non-SEND indicator of low attainment is disadvantage.
The reality for many of the children in the schools where I work (as governor and trustee) is that the current curriculum is setting them up to fail. For me the key principles of curriculum design for the 2/3 not bound for university are ‘what will get them to come to school?’ and ‘what will get them jobs?’ And I believe that a sensible admixture of qualifications in non-academic subjects - child development, food tech, health and social care - is the best way of achieving this. (The creative subjects are great for question 1 but less so for question 2.)
I completely take your point about specialist facilities but plenty of vocational subjects don’t require this. Again in my (small, rural) schools the issue is one of recruiting and paying teachers.
In sum - for many children, by 14 the academic ship has sailed and we need to be realistic (even, dare I say, pragmatic) about how to deliver an education that will make a genuine difference to their future lives.
I am sympathetic to being realist and pragmatic. In my ideal world we improve English & Maths attainment so that we "move the mean" of the attainment distribution for everyone. But clearly that is not going to happen overnight and I take the point that there are 14 year olds in school at the moment who are struggling. I am sympathetic to individual schools who want to come up with a different plan for a small minority of those students, maybe involving some kind of partnership with FE colleges. I think there should be ways we could think creatively about this that don't involve creating a lot of new "GCSEs in AI" or resurrecting equivalences, and that's what I would like to see the govt do.
Ms Spearing, your well-reasoned examples suggest it’s disadvantage that “sets children up to fail” so I’m interested in why that’s so often attributed to “curriculum.” As a child who grew up with economic disadvantage (though massive privilege in being surrounded by avid readers) I find it dispiriting that without that mitigating factor I might have been channeled into just what might get me to come to school and, eventually, get a job.
Tilting at the windmill of curriculum reform and tinkering with assessment has become the default “look, squirrel!” because addressing the roots of disadvantage is so hard. Children who fail because they face housing insecurity need initiatives that support families to lead dignified lives, not another suite of qualifications meant to establish parity by fiat.
Thank you for this reply. My work is in schools so the lever I can pull is in education. I couldn’t agree more that the roots of disadvantage lie elsewhere. And I am involved with some initiatives to reach out to families before their children start school to help them have the best start in life. But in the schools I work with we have big attendance issues from Y8 onwards and if we don’t address those then we can’t do anything.
Really enjoyed this. I met a Y9 kid at a school in Ipswich who was in isolation for missing a detention. When I asked him what his plan was for life he said he wanted to do farriery, and college will let you in without GCSEs. He was coolly rationale. Lots of people will have lots of stories like that, including people that they grew up with who hated school and now have successful lives. That’s why this policy, especially when vaguely expressed, is so seductive.
The actual policy lever here is likely to be including technical (and/or vocational) qualifications in performance measures, perhaps even P8. That *will* nudge schools to offer more, but it *doesn’t* create a parity of esteem. So what does create esteem.
I think one thing, which is uncomfortable is simply scarcity. If you know that everyone has something then it is just less significant. The second thing is where the experience of completing the qualification is regarded as worthwhile and instructive (I’m thinking of things like Duke of Edinburgh).
On your third footnote, I agree that the graduate bar is largely a lazy way to filter, and Kaplan argues that degrees ostensibly signal for conscientious, compliance and intelligence, but that data suggests that academic credentials correlate with none of these particularly well. So alongside this debate on tech/voc at 14, I think there should be a serious debate about which professions have a graduate bar, and why, and challenging that.
I completely agree about the graduate bar. Teaching has actually just gone "non-graduate" - you can do a teaching degree apprenticeship. It's not that well known - I would love to see Teach First do something more about it and actively recruit 18 year olds with good A-levels, just as the big milk round accountants do.
Also Civil Service Fast Stream. Make it non grad, actively recruit 18 year olds with good A-levels, think hard about the academic content a civil servant DOES need, as opposed to assuming that whatever they do at uni will give them transferable skills.
The problem, I have felt, lies in the assumption that one GCSE-based accountability framework should determine the curriculum for every 14–16-year-old. We seem so far out of step with most countries in having a 16 year old exam system.
Success measures could reflect educational purpose. Rather than forcing academic and vocational qualifications into a single currency, accountability could recognise different forms of success. Academic pathways might primarily be judged by progression to advanced academic study, while technical pathways could legitimately include progression to apprenticeships, higher technical education, skilled employment and sustained participation. This is consistent with OECD recommendations that vocational systems should be evaluated against their intended objectives and labour-market outcomes, rather than solely academic proxies.
However, so many of your points are completely valid within our current system that to actually improve it would take brave politicians as it would require consensus delivered over different parliaments…which is not going to happen.
This was really excellent and sharply demonstrated some of the challenges with “parity of esteem”.
What I still can’t square, in this piece and Sam’s piece, is what we do with the third of kids who don’t pass their GCSEs every year? Despite “increasing standards” in schools we’ve seen very little change in the National Reference Test, suggesting standards haven’t really gone up?
We obviously need something for those kids that gives them the best chance of making the next step well. I agree that’s not low value vocational quals, but it’s not the system we’ve got now either.
This is a really excellent piece and the distinction you draw between low academic achievers and those with a technical rather than academic aptitude is a really important and rarely-seen one. I 100% respect what you are saying here.
But.
Now I know that the GCSE exam is designed so that 1/3 will score below 4, but at the same time the data set is big enough to accommodate massive local variations without impacting that figure. And the people I talk to on the ground say that, leaving aside children with very complex special needs and those with highly chaotic home lives, 90-95% of children, given full attendance, could be got up to grade 4 standard. Similarly the biggest non-SEND indicator of low attainment is disadvantage.
The reality for many of the children in the schools where I work (as governor and trustee) is that the current curriculum is setting them up to fail. For me the key principles of curriculum design for the 2/3 not bound for university are ‘what will get them to come to school?’ and ‘what will get them jobs?’ And I believe that a sensible admixture of qualifications in non-academic subjects - child development, food tech, health and social care - is the best way of achieving this. (The creative subjects are great for question 1 but less so for question 2.)
I completely take your point about specialist facilities but plenty of vocational subjects don’t require this. Again in my (small, rural) schools the issue is one of recruiting and paying teachers.
In sum - for many children, by 14 the academic ship has sailed and we need to be realistic (even, dare I say, pragmatic) about how to deliver an education that will make a genuine difference to their future lives.
I am sympathetic to being realist and pragmatic. In my ideal world we improve English & Maths attainment so that we "move the mean" of the attainment distribution for everyone. But clearly that is not going to happen overnight and I take the point that there are 14 year olds in school at the moment who are struggling. I am sympathetic to individual schools who want to come up with a different plan for a small minority of those students, maybe involving some kind of partnership with FE colleges. I think there should be ways we could think creatively about this that don't involve creating a lot of new "GCSEs in AI" or resurrecting equivalences, and that's what I would like to see the govt do.
Totally agree. I also think that employer partnerships are really valuable in helping children to see how they might fit into the world of work.
Ms Spearing, your well-reasoned examples suggest it’s disadvantage that “sets children up to fail” so I’m interested in why that’s so often attributed to “curriculum.” As a child who grew up with economic disadvantage (though massive privilege in being surrounded by avid readers) I find it dispiriting that without that mitigating factor I might have been channeled into just what might get me to come to school and, eventually, get a job.
Tilting at the windmill of curriculum reform and tinkering with assessment has become the default “look, squirrel!” because addressing the roots of disadvantage is so hard. Children who fail because they face housing insecurity need initiatives that support families to lead dignified lives, not another suite of qualifications meant to establish parity by fiat.
Thank you for this reply. My work is in schools so the lever I can pull is in education. I couldn’t agree more that the roots of disadvantage lie elsewhere. And I am involved with some initiatives to reach out to families before their children start school to help them have the best start in life. But in the schools I work with we have big attendance issues from Y8 onwards and if we don’t address those then we can’t do anything.
Really enjoyed this. I met a Y9 kid at a school in Ipswich who was in isolation for missing a detention. When I asked him what his plan was for life he said he wanted to do farriery, and college will let you in without GCSEs. He was coolly rationale. Lots of people will have lots of stories like that, including people that they grew up with who hated school and now have successful lives. That’s why this policy, especially when vaguely expressed, is so seductive.
The actual policy lever here is likely to be including technical (and/or vocational) qualifications in performance measures, perhaps even P8. That *will* nudge schools to offer more, but it *doesn’t* create a parity of esteem. So what does create esteem.
I think one thing, which is uncomfortable is simply scarcity. If you know that everyone has something then it is just less significant. The second thing is where the experience of completing the qualification is regarded as worthwhile and instructive (I’m thinking of things like Duke of Edinburgh).
On your third footnote, I agree that the graduate bar is largely a lazy way to filter, and Kaplan argues that degrees ostensibly signal for conscientious, compliance and intelligence, but that data suggests that academic credentials correlate with none of these particularly well. So alongside this debate on tech/voc at 14, I think there should be a serious debate about which professions have a graduate bar, and why, and challenging that.
I completely agree about the graduate bar. Teaching has actually just gone "non-graduate" - you can do a teaching degree apprenticeship. It's not that well known - I would love to see Teach First do something more about it and actively recruit 18 year olds with good A-levels, just as the big milk round accountants do.
Also Civil Service Fast Stream. Make it non grad, actively recruit 18 year olds with good A-levels, think hard about the academic content a civil servant DOES need, as opposed to assuming that whatever they do at uni will give them transferable skills.
That would do a lot for "parity of esteem"!
Worth noting the celebrated case of a taxi driver winning the BBC's Mastermind in 1980 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Housego
The problem, I have felt, lies in the assumption that one GCSE-based accountability framework should determine the curriculum for every 14–16-year-old. We seem so far out of step with most countries in having a 16 year old exam system.
Success measures could reflect educational purpose. Rather than forcing academic and vocational qualifications into a single currency, accountability could recognise different forms of success. Academic pathways might primarily be judged by progression to advanced academic study, while technical pathways could legitimately include progression to apprenticeships, higher technical education, skilled employment and sustained participation. This is consistent with OECD recommendations that vocational systems should be evaluated against their intended objectives and labour-market outcomes, rather than solely academic proxies.
However, so many of your points are completely valid within our current system that to actually improve it would take brave politicians as it would require consensus delivered over different parliaments…which is not going to happen.
This was really excellent and sharply demonstrated some of the challenges with “parity of esteem”.
What I still can’t square, in this piece and Sam’s piece, is what we do with the third of kids who don’t pass their GCSEs every year? Despite “increasing standards” in schools we’ve seen very little change in the National Reference Test, suggesting standards haven’t really gone up?
We obviously need something for those kids that gives them the best chance of making the next step well. I agree that’s not low value vocational quals, but it’s not the system we’ve got now either.