This is a crucial history lesson that current policymakers seem determined to ignore. We’ve already seen what happens when you try to force 'parity of esteem' through accountability league tables—you end up with schools gaming the system by awarding three-day computer certificates instead of investing in rigorous technical pathways. The fundamental issue isn't a lack of respect for vocational learning; it's forcing comprehensive schools to act as FE colleges without the scale, staff, or specialist infrastructure.
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.
I totally agree with you that this is the key issue. I personally think that if we made it a national priority, we could aim over a period of 5-15 years to genuinely raise standards such that 90-95% of students meet the current grade 4 standard. That is very ambitious but not completely unrealistic.
I'd also say that if you don't think it's possible, then it's possible that the "GCSE at 14" model is a better solution.
I do think it is possible - if hard - and I think it should be our priority.
I adore the ambition! But I do wonder if that's what we've already tried and found hard to shift the dial? I'd say we've had a pretty big focus on academic standards, evidence-based practice, and putting focus and resource into these (at the expense of other things)....but we didn't improve outcomes. The National Reference Test basically hasn't shifted.
Maybe there's more/ different we could do - but I do also suspect that, for some children, they do just need something different.
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.
The route for schools, LAs or parents to arrange 14-16 provision in FE colleges does already exist, albeit not used very often and variable across the country. There were around 10,000 14-16 year olds in FE colleges in 23/24 (around 3,500 of these were home educated the rest of the time; the remainder were a mix of AP via either school dual-enrolment or LA EOTAS provision, and full time direct entry). AoC did a report on this cohort a couple of years ago: https://www.aoc.co.uk/research-unit/research-projects/the-educational-provision-for-14-to-16-year-olds-in-further-education-in-england
I wonder if some sort of expansion of this approach would fulfil the same aims without requiring schools to reskill.
That’s really interesting. How are the two funding streams and pay scales reconciled? Also what happens in rural areas where the FE college is ten miles from the school?
It's generally one or two full days in the college, so either they get in however they would at post-16, or schools arrange transport. For students who are EHE the rest of the time, the college can claim 16-19 funding pro-rata for the part time hours; for direct entry they're also funded from 16-19 pots. For school/LA AP it will be individual arrangements I guess (I know more about the home ed side). FE college pay is also under 16-19 rules.
This is one that used to offer EHE places (I know several children who previously attended 2 days a week for a vocational course + Maths and English GCSE) but has now concentrated on 1-day a week school arrangements for vocational courses only: https://www.reaseheath.ac.uk/14-16-students/
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.
Good article, and it's made me think about a few things, so apologies if this comment is a bit rambling and unfocussed 🙄
My father left school at 14 (in 1943) and did a 7-year apprenticeship with the local carpenters, so it's certainly possible to do vocational training at this age. We're not going back to those days though, so that anecdote doesn't help us a lot.
Did we not lose something with the removal of the CSE/GCE split at 14+? Someone with a CSE grade 1 (equivalent to O level grade C) or 2 (D I think) could feel they had achieved something whereas if they'd taken an O level they would have been classed as a failure, or in the modern GCSE world being pushed down by those with higher grades.
I was lucky, really, in that I was regarded as academic (grammar school, O/A levels, tier 1 university) but after graduation I did a job which didn't really require a degree, and around 50% of entrants joined after A levels and did longer on-the-job training. I might have been happier had I not gone to college, but I'm grateful for what I've learned and that in those days I didn't have to take out a life-encumbering loan to do so.
To take your point on the electrician training (which is close to my original career in electronics): yes, there is some need for algebra and trig., but I think the difference between students that we lazily class as "vocational" or "academic" is that the former will learn what they can see they need to do the job, but lose interest when presented with more abstract stuff such as Euler's identity, whereas the latter have more curiosity. After a few years experience in the field, I think you'd struggle to tell which was which in the workplace. But at the age of 14, it's possible some students' interests might be widened, and perhaps they will want to transfer to the "academic" track. I have a feeling that most won't, though.
You don't need new qualifications. Ask schools to deliver at least one GCSE equivalent Level 2 course that would normally be only be found at the local FE college. For example, Level 2 Carpentry & Joinery. Provide the funding. It's not impossible (remember woodwork?). Give some young people the opportunity to do something at 14 that at the moment they can't do until 16. That's not dropping standards.
Couldn't agree more. I have a nephew who struggled at secondary school. He did get L4 GCSE maths but not English. He ended up on a dead-end course at F.E. college. Eventually he was offered a place on a carpentry course. He comes from a family of builders so was used to using tools. Suddenly, for the first time in his life he's coming top of the class . A sense of achievement and self worth that he'd never experienced in school. He got a Gold level Duke of Edinburgh award but the school appeared not to have noticed that. He's been offered a place on the next level for carpentry which he's thrilled about.
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.
CS Fast Stream is super competitive, with around 100 candidates applying for each available place. Why on Earth would they lower their entrance bar? Also, those roles are generalists and require high aptitude and a wide knowledge of various areas. 18 year-olds right out of school are simply not at that level yet.
Civil Service does have an apprenticeship scheme for school leavers where they allow time and training for 18 year-olds to develop.
I'm hugely saddened by opinions that suggest that pursuing a trade is somehow missing out. Being a mechanic, a plumber, a taxi driver et al are skilled trades. They aren't second rate because they don't require a HE qualification.
I agree with you, but the fact remains that being a doctor, lawyer, etc. has more social status. I think this is the real issue raised by the article: parity of esteem would mean fixing attitudes entrenched in the class system. It's not fair to ask schools or universities to fix that - it is fair that they try to get everyone the best education according to their ability and ambitions.
I wonder which trumps? Esteem or quality of life? Or money? I have friends who work as plumbers and electricians and they earn extremely good money and can organise their hours to suit themselves. Ask anyone who's tried getting a plumber to come out at short notice. I absolutely wouldn't expect schools or universities to heal themselves that's up to governments. Every educational establishment should endeavour to support their learners in the best way they can. Not sure about how abilities or ambitions can be defined. I say that as someone who failed the 11 plus yet went on to gain a first in English from a not too shabby university. My parents I think had anticipated that I might not get into grammar school so tried to get me into a local girls private school. There was an entrance exam. I was probably about 10 years old. It was the usual formal stuff. I do recall that on one section you had to underline which words were nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives etc. Back then it was the norm at primary schools to use more simple terms such as naming words, doing words, describing words so I didnt comprehend the vocabulary being used. Feedback from my attempt was that although I seemed to be a nice little girl I appeared to have no knowledge of the English language. This would be essential for learning French. As you can tell it left an impression. I went on to study Spanish and French at O level and French at A level.
I’ve come across the assumption a lot that kids who are struggling with GCSEs might be better off learning a trade instead and I’ve wondered if that’s necessarily the case. Interesting read, thank you.
Something I’ve wondered in the past is whether or not it would be possible for children who are struggling with GCSE content to take fewer. Most employers and colleges who specify GCSEs seem to want five including maths and english as a minimum; could some children, for whom 8/9/10 GCSEs are a huge ask not do a smaller number? It would enable them to concentrate more on those subjects and therefore maybe give them a better chance of decent grades, but wouldn’t disadvantage them when it came to getting a job later on? I’m sure there must be a reason it doesn’t happen (or maybe some schools already do this - I’ve only worked in primary so don’t know; my big kid’s school had them all doing eight GCSEs and in my day we were supposed to do nine or ten) - to do with how to manage a group who needs extra teacher support for a smaller number of subjects perhaps?
Of minor interest perhaps. I did ‘business technology’ at GCSE back in 1993 but the subject also included a lot of Pitman and similar board tests on typing. I don’t know about the qualifications, but it was learning to type that opened a lot of doors when I was first looking for work. I have an undergraduate degree but my 83wpm meant I was never out of work ‘between jobs’ - I could walk into a temping agency and walk straight into an office. I suspect it’s all different now but perhaps there are some other employer-demanded skills that can be learnt alongside GCSEs.)
When I was at school in the 1970s (at a small grammar school later converted to comprehensive), almost everyone did 8 O levels, and those who stayed on did 3 A Levels. Of the O levels, 4 were mandatory (English Lang/Lit (2 separate subjects), Maths and French) and 4 were ones you chose. I'm not sure when, or why, the GCSE evolved to require double figures of subjects.
I think a better option would be to scrap GCSE altogether. I'd go for something similar to other countries that offer an end of secondary school diploma. This would confirm that each student completed the courses and assignments. The one glitch of course is that legally compulsory education carries on until 18. A nifty bit of legislation that keeps the 16 to 18s of the unemployment stats while they all too often waste their time on pointless FE courses. Or alternatively hang out with their mates.
I am attaching an article of mine published in the Guardian in November 1992 which was a response to a government White Paper: Choice and Diversity: A New Framework for Schools, which advocated academic and vocational streams post 14. The piece was entitled Slaves to a Spurious Division. Although clearly dated, and before digitisation, I still believe that the key points I made in the article are as valid now as they were then.
Great piece, you’ve articulated the major missing piece that I’ve not heard much in conversations about this policy.
I was speaking to a teacher in Birmingham about this policy last week and we were saying how there’s a real gap between vocational courses that are just classroom-based with the exams stripped out, and ones that actually invest in proper facilities. He mentioned a UTC (in Aylesbury if I remember correctly) that specialises in health and social care. They use high-fidelity manikins so the students can practice hands-on personal care, not just study it on paper. If we’re going to offer vocational routes, they need the equipment and investment to match the academic rigour of other paths as you’ve argued; rather than the fallback for children who “aren’t academic.” Otherwise it’s vocational in name only.
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.
There's a lot I agree with here, including about the damage done by false 'equivalences', that 'parity of esteem' isn't a helpful framing and the fact that just because someone's not good academically doesn't mean they'll be talented at technical matters.
I'm a little more optimistic than you that there are a decent number of kids out there, totally switched off by school, who can and will memorise the electrical handbook if told they need to for a specific job (I've certainly seen it happen, in various cases).
But more importantly, I do think we need to do more for the large chunk of the population who are currently failing - and for whom 'wait decades as we inch up the GCSE pass rate' isn't a good option - those who can't attain either GCSE English and Maths, or the 'highest value' technical qualifications such as the ones you set out. Whether these children go into gainful employment - ideally with some, even if limited, hope of progression or down the road to unemployment, welfare or worse makes a tremendous difference, to them and in terms of the costs to society. And halting this isn't necessarily about qualifications, but about engaging them in the workplace, building those wider employability skills (turning up on time, working with colleagues) and so forth, by spending 1 to 2 days a week in an FE college or the workplace during this period, alongside a greater focus on English, Maths and maybe a little else in the classroom.
Slightly off topic, but is there any evidence that a small increase in PISA scores in the range achieved in most West European countries makes any medium-term difference to a country's GDP, GDP per capita, or any other measure ?
I think it is fair to say that the structure of the country's economy matters too. EG the Soviet Union had a pretty good education system, but it wasn't enough to save its economy.
In a less extreme way, the current Labour govt are attempting to blame the UK's NEET problem on the education system. But it probably has more to do with it having become a lot more expensive to hire young people.
This feels strikingly familiar in the United States, where we are arguably further along in confronting many of the same problems. We have spent decades expanding CTE pathways, yet their quality still depends heavily on which courses schools can offer, whether they can find teachers with genuine technical expertise, and whether employer partnerships provide authentic training rather than simply satisfying a program requirement.
The strongest programs can produce meaningful employment and earnings benefits. But many pathways still introduce students to an occupation without actually qualifying them to enter it, leaving students to pursue a four-year degree anyway because the pathway alone has insufficient labor-market value.
That seems central to the “parity of esteem” problem: academic and vocational routes cannot simply be declared equal. They must offer comparable rigor, expertise, and credible opportunities at the end.
This is a crucial history lesson that current policymakers seem determined to ignore. We’ve already seen what happens when you try to force 'parity of esteem' through accountability league tables—you end up with schools gaming the system by awarding three-day computer certificates instead of investing in rigorous technical pathways. The fundamental issue isn't a lack of respect for vocational learning; it's forcing comprehensive schools to act as FE colleges without the scale, staff, or specialist infrastructure.
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.
I totally agree with you that this is the key issue. I personally think that if we made it a national priority, we could aim over a period of 5-15 years to genuinely raise standards such that 90-95% of students meet the current grade 4 standard. That is very ambitious but not completely unrealistic.
I'd also say that if you don't think it's possible, then it's possible that the "GCSE at 14" model is a better solution.
I do think it is possible - if hard - and I think it should be our priority.
I adore the ambition! But I do wonder if that's what we've already tried and found hard to shift the dial? I'd say we've had a pretty big focus on academic standards, evidence-based practice, and putting focus and resource into these (at the expense of other things)....but we didn't improve outcomes. The National Reference Test basically hasn't shifted.
Maybe there's more/ different we could do - but I do also suspect that, for some children, they do just need something different.
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.
The route for schools, LAs or parents to arrange 14-16 provision in FE colleges does already exist, albeit not used very often and variable across the country. There were around 10,000 14-16 year olds in FE colleges in 23/24 (around 3,500 of these were home educated the rest of the time; the remainder were a mix of AP via either school dual-enrolment or LA EOTAS provision, and full time direct entry). AoC did a report on this cohort a couple of years ago: https://www.aoc.co.uk/research-unit/research-projects/the-educational-provision-for-14-to-16-year-olds-in-further-education-in-england
I wonder if some sort of expansion of this approach would fulfil the same aims without requiring schools to reskill.
That’s really interesting. How are the two funding streams and pay scales reconciled? Also what happens in rural areas where the FE college is ten miles from the school?
It's generally one or two full days in the college, so either they get in however they would at post-16, or schools arrange transport. For students who are EHE the rest of the time, the college can claim 16-19 funding pro-rata for the part time hours; for direct entry they're also funded from 16-19 pots. For school/LA AP it will be individual arrangements I guess (I know more about the home ed side). FE college pay is also under 16-19 rules.
This is one that used to offer EHE places (I know several children who previously attended 2 days a week for a vocational course + Maths and English GCSE) but has now concentrated on 1-day a week school arrangements for vocational courses only: https://www.reaseheath.ac.uk/14-16-students/
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.
Good article, and it's made me think about a few things, so apologies if this comment is a bit rambling and unfocussed 🙄
My father left school at 14 (in 1943) and did a 7-year apprenticeship with the local carpenters, so it's certainly possible to do vocational training at this age. We're not going back to those days though, so that anecdote doesn't help us a lot.
Did we not lose something with the removal of the CSE/GCE split at 14+? Someone with a CSE grade 1 (equivalent to O level grade C) or 2 (D I think) could feel they had achieved something whereas if they'd taken an O level they would have been classed as a failure, or in the modern GCSE world being pushed down by those with higher grades.
I was lucky, really, in that I was regarded as academic (grammar school, O/A levels, tier 1 university) but after graduation I did a job which didn't really require a degree, and around 50% of entrants joined after A levels and did longer on-the-job training. I might have been happier had I not gone to college, but I'm grateful for what I've learned and that in those days I didn't have to take out a life-encumbering loan to do so.
To take your point on the electrician training (which is close to my original career in electronics): yes, there is some need for algebra and trig., but I think the difference between students that we lazily class as "vocational" or "academic" is that the former will learn what they can see they need to do the job, but lose interest when presented with more abstract stuff such as Euler's identity, whereas the latter have more curiosity. After a few years experience in the field, I think you'd struggle to tell which was which in the workplace. But at the age of 14, it's possible some students' interests might be widened, and perhaps they will want to transfer to the "academic" track. I have a feeling that most won't, though.
You don't need new qualifications. Ask schools to deliver at least one GCSE equivalent Level 2 course that would normally be only be found at the local FE college. For example, Level 2 Carpentry & Joinery. Provide the funding. It's not impossible (remember woodwork?). Give some young people the opportunity to do something at 14 that at the moment they can't do until 16. That's not dropping standards.
Couldn't agree more. I have a nephew who struggled at secondary school. He did get L4 GCSE maths but not English. He ended up on a dead-end course at F.E. college. Eventually he was offered a place on a carpentry course. He comes from a family of builders so was used to using tools. Suddenly, for the first time in his life he's coming top of the class . A sense of achievement and self worth that he'd never experienced in school. He got a Gold level Duke of Edinburgh award but the school appeared not to have noticed that. He's been offered a place on the next level for carpentry which he's thrilled about.
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"!
CS Fast Stream is super competitive, with around 100 candidates applying for each available place. Why on Earth would they lower their entrance bar? Also, those roles are generalists and require high aptitude and a wide knowledge of various areas. 18 year-olds right out of school are simply not at that level yet.
Civil Service does have an apprenticeship scheme for school leavers where they allow time and training for 18 year-olds to develop.
I'm hugely saddened by opinions that suggest that pursuing a trade is somehow missing out. Being a mechanic, a plumber, a taxi driver et al are skilled trades. They aren't second rate because they don't require a HE qualification.
I agree with you, but the fact remains that being a doctor, lawyer, etc. has more social status. I think this is the real issue raised by the article: parity of esteem would mean fixing attitudes entrenched in the class system. It's not fair to ask schools or universities to fix that - it is fair that they try to get everyone the best education according to their ability and ambitions.
I wonder which trumps? Esteem or quality of life? Or money? I have friends who work as plumbers and electricians and they earn extremely good money and can organise their hours to suit themselves. Ask anyone who's tried getting a plumber to come out at short notice. I absolutely wouldn't expect schools or universities to heal themselves that's up to governments. Every educational establishment should endeavour to support their learners in the best way they can. Not sure about how abilities or ambitions can be defined. I say that as someone who failed the 11 plus yet went on to gain a first in English from a not too shabby university. My parents I think had anticipated that I might not get into grammar school so tried to get me into a local girls private school. There was an entrance exam. I was probably about 10 years old. It was the usual formal stuff. I do recall that on one section you had to underline which words were nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives etc. Back then it was the norm at primary schools to use more simple terms such as naming words, doing words, describing words so I didnt comprehend the vocabulary being used. Feedback from my attempt was that although I seemed to be a nice little girl I appeared to have no knowledge of the English language. This would be essential for learning French. As you can tell it left an impression. I went on to study Spanish and French at O level and French at A level.
I’ve come across the assumption a lot that kids who are struggling with GCSEs might be better off learning a trade instead and I’ve wondered if that’s necessarily the case. Interesting read, thank you.
Something I’ve wondered in the past is whether or not it would be possible for children who are struggling with GCSE content to take fewer. Most employers and colleges who specify GCSEs seem to want five including maths and english as a minimum; could some children, for whom 8/9/10 GCSEs are a huge ask not do a smaller number? It would enable them to concentrate more on those subjects and therefore maybe give them a better chance of decent grades, but wouldn’t disadvantage them when it came to getting a job later on? I’m sure there must be a reason it doesn’t happen (or maybe some schools already do this - I’ve only worked in primary so don’t know; my big kid’s school had them all doing eight GCSEs and in my day we were supposed to do nine or ten) - to do with how to manage a group who needs extra teacher support for a smaller number of subjects perhaps?
Of minor interest perhaps. I did ‘business technology’ at GCSE back in 1993 but the subject also included a lot of Pitman and similar board tests on typing. I don’t know about the qualifications, but it was learning to type that opened a lot of doors when I was first looking for work. I have an undergraduate degree but my 83wpm meant I was never out of work ‘between jobs’ - I could walk into a temping agency and walk straight into an office. I suspect it’s all different now but perhaps there are some other employer-demanded skills that can be learnt alongside GCSEs.)
When I was at school in the 1970s (at a small grammar school later converted to comprehensive), almost everyone did 8 O levels, and those who stayed on did 3 A Levels. Of the O levels, 4 were mandatory (English Lang/Lit (2 separate subjects), Maths and French) and 4 were ones you chose. I'm not sure when, or why, the GCSE evolved to require double figures of subjects.
I think a better option would be to scrap GCSE altogether. I'd go for something similar to other countries that offer an end of secondary school diploma. This would confirm that each student completed the courses and assignments. The one glitch of course is that legally compulsory education carries on until 18. A nifty bit of legislation that keeps the 16 to 18s of the unemployment stats while they all too often waste their time on pointless FE courses. Or alternatively hang out with their mates.
I am attaching an article of mine published in the Guardian in November 1992 which was a response to a government White Paper: Choice and Diversity: A New Framework for Schools, which advocated academic and vocational streams post 14. The piece was entitled Slaves to a Spurious Division. Although clearly dated, and before digitisation, I still believe that the key points I made in the article are as valid now as they were then.
https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:EU:88902f27-c079-4728-8a86-bbd0f9c814d0
Great piece, you’ve articulated the major missing piece that I’ve not heard much in conversations about this policy.
I was speaking to a teacher in Birmingham about this policy last week and we were saying how there’s a real gap between vocational courses that are just classroom-based with the exams stripped out, and ones that actually invest in proper facilities. He mentioned a UTC (in Aylesbury if I remember correctly) that specialises in health and social care. They use high-fidelity manikins so the students can practice hands-on personal care, not just study it on paper. If we’re going to offer vocational routes, they need the equipment and investment to match the academic rigour of other paths as you’ve argued; rather than the fallback for children who “aren’t academic.” Otherwise it’s vocational in name only.
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.
Worth noting the celebrated case of a taxi driver winning the BBC's Mastermind in 1980 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Housego
His specialist subject was the Tower of London. This would also be my choice!!
There's a lot I agree with here, including about the damage done by false 'equivalences', that 'parity of esteem' isn't a helpful framing and the fact that just because someone's not good academically doesn't mean they'll be talented at technical matters.
I'm a little more optimistic than you that there are a decent number of kids out there, totally switched off by school, who can and will memorise the electrical handbook if told they need to for a specific job (I've certainly seen it happen, in various cases).
But more importantly, I do think we need to do more for the large chunk of the population who are currently failing - and for whom 'wait decades as we inch up the GCSE pass rate' isn't a good option - those who can't attain either GCSE English and Maths, or the 'highest value' technical qualifications such as the ones you set out. Whether these children go into gainful employment - ideally with some, even if limited, hope of progression or down the road to unemployment, welfare or worse makes a tremendous difference, to them and in terms of the costs to society. And halting this isn't necessarily about qualifications, but about engaging them in the workplace, building those wider employability skills (turning up on time, working with colleagues) and so forth, by spending 1 to 2 days a week in an FE college or the workplace during this period, alongside a greater focus on English, Maths and maybe a little else in the classroom.
This is a really useful piece, thank you for writing it Daisy!
Slightly off topic, but is there any evidence that a small increase in PISA scores in the range achieved in most West European countries makes any medium-term difference to a country's GDP, GDP per capita, or any other measure ?
Hanushek & Woessmann's work is normally cited as showing it does make a difference.
https://hanushek.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/publications/Hanushek%2BWoessmann%202011%20EconPol%2026%2867%29.pdf
I think it is fair to say that the structure of the country's economy matters too. EG the Soviet Union had a pretty good education system, but it wasn't enough to save its economy.
In a less extreme way, the current Labour govt are attempting to blame the UK's NEET problem on the education system. But it probably has more to do with it having become a lot more expensive to hire young people.
This feels strikingly familiar in the United States, where we are arguably further along in confronting many of the same problems. We have spent decades expanding CTE pathways, yet their quality still depends heavily on which courses schools can offer, whether they can find teachers with genuine technical expertise, and whether employer partnerships provide authentic training rather than simply satisfying a program requirement.
The strongest programs can produce meaningful employment and earnings benefits. But many pathways still introduce students to an occupation without actually qualifying them to enter it, leaving students to pursue a four-year degree anyway because the pathway alone has insufficient labor-market value.
That seems central to the “parity of esteem” problem: academic and vocational routes cannot simply be declared equal. They must offer comparable rigor, expertise, and credible opportunities at the end.