When I was a child, my grandmother used to make up little fairy tales for me. The characters would be loosely based on people in our family and part of the fun was working out who was who. One of them went a little bit like this.
Once upon a time, there was a very poor family who didn’t have enough food to eat. All the children of the family went hungry. One day, they all heard the sound of a big car outside their house. What could it be? It was their dad. He had just passed The Knowledge and he had driven home in his black cab. From that day on, the family always had enough to eat, and they all lived happily ever after.
The story was loosely based on my grandfather. He had grown up very poor in the East End in the 1930s. He did The Knowledge in 1947 and drove a black cab for the next 50 years – and as a result, his family never went hungry.
Why am I writing about this now? Because my grandmother was telling me a fairy story where the hero was a vocational qualification.1
The Knowledge of London
“The Knowledge” is the famously demanding test that London’s black-cab drivers must pass, requiring them to memorise thousands of streets and routes across the capital. It is so tough that in 2011, researchers found that studying for it actually changes the structure of your brain.
And whilst it might seem a bit odd to make up a story about it, my grandmother’s respect for The Knowledge was not unusual. It had a semi-mythic status in East London when I was growing up as a tough course that gave you a great standard of living. It’s a good example of a vocational qualification that enjoys incredibly high status and esteem.
There are other examples. My mum and dad both have City & Guilds qualifications, in hairdressing and electrical installation. I have a PGCE. Qualifications like these don’t just give you earning power; they also give you status, self-worth, and a sense of competence. Even when you’re not using them to make a living, they are useful life skills. My mum still cuts my dad’s hair, my dad fitted a new fuse box in the first flat I bought, and friends still ask me for advice about how to teach their children to read.
I think vocational qualifications are great, I think we should have more of them, and I think in many cases they are more rigorous and challenging than university degrees. People might be surprised to hear me make this argument, as I have a reputation for favouring a traditional, knowledge-based education. But I don’t think there is any contradiction. In fact, I think there are a lot of overlaps between quality vocational education and knowledge-based teaching and assessment. It is really striking, after all, that The Knowledge is called The Knowledge – not The Skill!2
But that doesn’t mean we need more vocational qualifications at 14
Given how positive I am about vocational qualifications, you might expect me to be very positive about the UK government’s new proposal to introduce more vocational qualifications at age 14.
I am not.
I think it’s a bad idea. There is a world of difference between what you can achieve by taking a City & Guilds or a degree apprenticeship or The Knowledge, and what it is possible to do in our current school system at ages 14 to 16.
There are a number of specific structural reasons that make it really hard to deliver high-quality vocational training at scale in comprehensive schools to 14-year-olds, and I will explain them later.
But what is more powerful than any explanation is that we have very recent evidence of the education system trying to do this – and failing badly.
What went wrong with vocational education at 14 in the recent past
Starting from about 2000, the English school system went all in on a particular interpretation of school-aged vocational education which caused a lot of problems.
Between 2004 and 2010, the number of vocational qualifications taken in schools up to age 16 increased nearly 40 times - from 15,000 a year to 575,000 a year. If doing more vocational qualifications makes you better prepared for work, then by 2010 England should have had the most work-ready generation in its history. But there is no evidence that it did, because a lot of these newer vocational qualifications didn’t have the same labour market value of the qualifications I discussed above.
Although there were these big differences in labour market value between different qualifications, the government attempted to enforce equivalence by fiat using equivalence tables, which declared that very different qualifications were worth the same for the purposes of school league tables. This caused some huge distortions. In perhaps the most egregious case, about 20% of students ended up taking the European Computer Driving Licence, a vocational qualification that was equivalent to a GCSE but that could be completed in three days.
The big increases in vocational courses did not include what many people think of as the classic vocational GCSE - Design & Technology. Across the same 2004-2010 period that vocational courses in general exploded, the numbers taking DT GCSEs fell by about a third (from about 450k to 290k). One possible reason for this is that DT GCSEs are expensive to deliver and hard to scale. Schools ended up choosing courses which could be taught to large mixed-ability groups in a classroom with limited specialist equipment.
I would say that the underlying error which caused a lot of these problems was that policymakers were never completely clear about the purpose of vocational school education. Was it to provide a clear pathway to the 15-20% of jobs in technical sectors for the 15-20% of students with the most interest and aptitude for those jobs? Or was it to provide an alternative to GCSEs for the 30-40% of students struggling to get five good GCSEs?
A lot of the time policymakers would assume that these two purposes were basically the same. Their thought process seemed to be as follows: students who struggle with academic learning will be “good with their hands”. So we can therefore get the 30-40% of students struggling to get five good GCSEs to do vocational courses instead. We’ve then conveniently solved two problems: we’ve solved the problem of disaffected teens turned off by academic learning, and we’ve created a pipeline of future technical specialists.
The problem is that there is not a one-to-one match between these two cohorts. Of course, we can all think of a student who hates the classroom but comes alive in the workshop. But that is an anecdote, not data, and to the extent we have relevant data, it suggests that academic aptitude and being good with your hands have a modest positive correlation, not a negative one. And a lot of the most valuable vocational courses have quite challenging academic demands: the electrical installation course requires knowledge of algebra and trigonometry, plus mastery of a wiring regulations handbook that is twice as long as Pride and Prejudice. Of course there will always be individual exceptions, but it is difficult to imagine many students with grade 2s in English & Maths thriving on such a course.
So the problem is that if you do see vocational courses as being an alternative for students with low academic attainment, it will often make it harder to run the kinds of vocational courses that have the greatest labour market value. You also won’t help the low-attaining students: in many cases, they might benefit more from stronger support in the English, Maths & Science GCSEs that underpin vocational success.
What I am describing above is not a hypothetical prediction of how “vocational at 14” might go wrong. It is exactly how the system went wrong within very recent memory. So if you are advocating for vocational qualifications at 14, I think it is incumbent upon you to explain how you will stop all these problems happening again.
The detail on what the government is proposing is thin on the ground, but there are already some worrying signs that they could be about to repeat the mistakes of the past. Andy Burnham has said “I want an education system based on parity between academic and technical”, suggesting equivalences could be making a comeback. Lucy Powell has said “we must recognise that an over‑focus on academic outcomes has left too many young people behind”, reinforcing the idea that vocational qualifications are for students struggling with GCSEs. There have also been briefings about new qualifications like a GCSE in AI, which again worries me that we are going down the route of cheap classroom-based courses.
Can’t we just do “vocational at 14” better?
Are there any ways we could make vocational courses at age 14 work? It is going to be very hard for some big structural reasons. High-quality vocational courses require specialist teachers, expensive equipment and deep employer connections. Establishing these three things is not just about cost; it’s about scale. It’s not realistic to expect 3,000 comprehensive schools to build and staff a trainee nail bar for the one student in three years who wants to be a nail technician.
FE colleges have the scale to do this because they are much bigger institutions than schools and they are able to specialise in certain areas. Given the structural challenges, I think we’d be better off getting FE colleges to focus on vocational qualifications, and schools to focus on teaching a relatively traditional slate of GCSEs.
GCSEs are often referred to as “academic” courses, but I think that is misleading. GCSEs in English, maths, science, history and geography are not academic in the way a degree in English Literature is academic. I think they are better thought of as foundational qualifications that provide students with skills and knowledge that help them understand the world and that provide the basis for more advanced academic and vocational study. That is why broadly similar foundational subjects appear in the compulsory curriculums of many countries.
The only way I think you could make vocational at 14 work at scale is if you completely restructured our system so that everyone took their GCSEs aged 14, secondary schools became 11-14, and FE colleges expanded to 14-19. That is an enormous amount of upheaval! By all means advocate for that if you want to, but would the benefits really justify the upheaval? Would we not be better off working within our current system to help both schools and FE colleges get even better at their primary purposes?
So what about parity of esteem, then?
As I said at the start, I do have some sympathy with the idea that a lot of vocational qualifications are more challenging and valuable than a lot of degree courses. So maybe in that sense, we do have a problem in that some vocational courses don’t get the full credit they deserve, and some degrees get more credit than they deserve.3
However, where I find the “parity of esteem” phrase misleading is that it assumes all vocational courses are the same. I don’t actually want The Knowledge and the European Computer Driving Licence to have parity of esteem, because one of them deserves more esteem than the other.
We shouldn’t give a course esteem just because it is badged as vocational, just as we shouldn’t give a course esteem just because it is badged as academic.
High-quality vocational courses and pathways deserve esteem. And while they might not get as much esteem as many people would like, they do still get some esteem. The Knowledge is esteemed. City & Guilds Electrical Installation is esteemed. The PGCE is esteemed. Medicine is esteemed. The Rolls-Royce apprenticeship is esteemed. Securing a place in a Premier League academy is esteemed. Qualifications and pathways which deliver negative wage returns are just not going to be esteemed in the same way, whether they are vocational or academic.
So I guess my challenge to the people who will end up developing these new qualifications is as follows.
The Knowledge is a vocational qualification that is so esteemed people made up fairy stories about it for their grandchildren.
The European Computer Driving Licence ended up being the punchline in jokes about dumbing down.
What are you going to do to make these qualifications more like the former – and less like the latter?
Technically it’s a licensing requirement rather than a regulated vocational qualification. But you can take the point.
It’s also really striking that whilst knowledge-based multiple-choice tests are often dismissed as being “artificial” and “inauthentic” by many universities and academics, they are a core component of a lot of vocational course, where it turns out they are actually quite good at assessing some of the highly specific and fundamental knowledge that is the basis for authentic and real-world skills. Universities, by contrast, have attempted to justify the economic value of what they teach with reference to a very extreme concept of “transferable skills” which downplays the importance of domain-specific knowledge – and which has little support in the scientific literature. I think it might actually be structurally more likely for vocational courses to use sensible pedagogy & assessment, because they are closer to reality and reality is the best teacher. There’s a lot more I could write about this, but it’s probably a separate post.
Sam Freedman has suggested that student preference for degrees over vocational courses is not due to snobbery or lack of esteem for vocational courses, but because degrees give you access to more and better paid jobs. I would agree with that to a large extent, because there are a lot of careers and professions that you simply cannot access unless you have a degree. However, I think the degree is being used by employers as a signal - as a cheap and easy way for them to filter candidates. I don’t think it is being used as evidence that you have relevant skills and knowledge. Therefore, I think it is not contradictory to argue that a specific degree course could provide a greater wage premium than a specific vocational course whilst still being less rigorous, less pedagogically sound, and less good at imparting valuable skills & knowledge. I’ve written about the signalling and graduate premiums in more detail here.
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.