Technical and Vocational Education

Part of Opposition Day — [4th Allotted Day] – in the House of Commons at 5:07 pm on 9 July 2014.

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Photo of Graham Stuart Graham Stuart Chair, Education Committee, Chair, Education Committee 5:07, 9 July 2014

What an excellent list of characteristics that was, and it is a great pleasure to follow Ian Austin. I welcome today’s theme, because too often we focus on the part of our education system in which there are the fewest problems—the more academic routes. We should spend more of our time on the vocational routes that the majority of the population go through, which, as hon. Members have said, are harder to navigate. Those routes need to be made more navigable, and need to be linked closely to the needs of employers and the long-term earnings potential of the people who take them, whether they are young or not.

The Education Committee will soon launch its dedicated inquiry into apprenticeships and traineeships for 16 to 19-year-olds, so this debate is of particular interest to me and the rest of the Committee. Too often, vocational courses have been the Cinderella element in our education system, and denied the limelight given to academic qualifications that are sometimes perceived as more glamorous and socially transformative. This is a timely opportunity for the House to discuss how to change that.

Under the previous Government, getting as many young people as possible into university sometimes appeared to be an end in itself, regardless of whether that was necessarily a good deal for those young people, employers or wider society. I do not think that Ministers then thought of it that crudely, but that was the message that went out. It is important that we get the message right, so that the next generation has the right signals to make choices that will make the biggest difference to them.

It is regrettably true that overall, youth unemployment rose by 40% under the previous Government, and it did not go down in the boom years. That challenge was not new to the Labour Government, but there was a long-standing problem. Other countries such as Austria, Germany—famously—and the Netherlands had the same social problems and challenges, but managed to have fewer people ending up in unemployment, but even in the boom years we had high numbers of people in unemployment.

When I sat on the Children, Schools and Families Committee in the last Parliament, I used to challenge Ministers and ask them what counted as educational success. Was it the PISA—programme for international student assessment—tables, for example? One crude proxy would have to be ensuring that the educational system did not leave anyone completely behind, trapped in poverty for life and without a job. That is exactly what we had. It so important for whoever is in government after next May that we get this right.

It is a priority to work out how to improve the offer made to the hundreds of thousands of young people who take vocational courses and enter the workplace every year. As I say, if anything, they face greater complexity than those who take academic courses. The Government inherited a remarkable 3,175 equivalent qualifications on offer in schools for 14 to 16-year-olds alone. As Alison Wolf reported, some of them were not worth the paper they were written on, so it was right to change that.