Last week the House of Lords Select Committee on Social Mobility released its Overlooked and left behind: improving the transition from school to work for the majority of young people report. The report follows a 9 month inquiry in the senior chamber, and makes a series of conclusions and recommendations for the government.
The committee feels that “Non-academic routes to employment are complex, confusing and incoherent. The qualifications system is similarly confused and has been subjected to continual change”. It also notes that non-academic routes don’t guarantee entry into quality employment and are poorly understood by employers.
The report also highlights the inequality between vocational and academic routes, saying that only half of young people (those who attain 5 or more grades A-C at GCSE) are served by the system. Glaring funding differences underpin this inequality.
The starkest recommendation is that the national curriculum should stop at age 14, and that a new 14-19 stage should be developed to offer learners a tailor-made route into work. The route would combine a “core element with either academic or vocational elements”. A single Cabinet Minster should hold responsibility for the ‘transition framework’; it’s reasonable to assume that this means 14-19 year olds.
There’s a warning that the college area reviews “could pose problems for young people who live in more rural areas where distances between colleges are more substantial and travelling to college is therefore more difficult and costly.”
The report makes a number of recommendations around careers advice and guidance, including face-to-face careers advice independent of schools or colleges, and more work experience for young people. The importance of good quality guidance would be even more important in a system where young people would be required to make career-oriented choices at 14 years old. The report advises that the government should commission a cost-benefit analysis of increasing funding for careers education in school, as well as independent careers guidance external to schools in the context of social mobility.
The difficulty here is that some recommendations put forward are, to say the least, still rather broad ideas – and it’s hard to foresee them getting any meaningful political traction. The proposal to end the national curriculum when learners reach 14 could provide more opportunities to work with young people who wish to take a non-academic route, but this juxtaposes the government’s push towards the Ebacc performance measure for schools. Similarly the Sainsbury Review is also ongoing and could result in changes to the vocational system.
A single minister in control of the 14-19 space would certainly help to make the system clearer and reduce the siloed operations and bureaucratic nightmare of navigating between the Departments for Education and Business, Innovation and Skills, but would take considerable change to government structures and education policy.
It’s also interesting that the report mentions potential unwanted consequences of the area reviews, and seems to justify some of the fears in the sector. Our main concern is that aspects of the report are an unfair representation of the current system, presenting vocational routes as messy and low value while suggesting that by virtue of simply existing, academic routes are straightforward and offer significantly more value. This isn’t the picture of Further Education that many of us recognise, and suggests that more changes could be on the horizon.
However, these recommendations may not be acted upon. Even if they are, it’ll be when we know the outcome of the Sainsbury Review, which should provide us with a much clearer picture of the future for technical and professional education.
NCFE, in conjunction with the Campaign for Learning, will soon be launching its own White Paper, University or Apprenticeships at 18: Context, Challenges and Concerns, in which we examine the aspiration for learners to progress to university or an Apprenticeship and articulate that this ambition fails to capture the complexities of the education, training and the labour market for the 18 year old age cohort.
In doing this we hope to provide informed and evidence-based insight into the option facing learners within the current system, and provide meaningful recommendations to support their choices and career aspirations in post-compulsory learning.
What are your thoughts on the recommendations in this report? Do you agree?
