Vocational schools are not to be sneered at

When I was 16 I failed all my O-levels, bar a grade C in English Literature, and concluded I wasn’t academically bright. Instead of retaking my O–levels, doing some A-levels and trying to get a place at university, I decided to pursue a career as a tradesman and enrolled on a residential work experience course. It was a bit like a boarding school, except it offered students a technical and vocational education rather than an academic one.

It was a miserable period of my life. The stench of failure hung over the institution like a toxic cloud and my fellow students and I were treated as if we were semi-delinquents who might at any moment go off the rails. I was apprenticed to a succession of skilled tradesmen, but they regarded me with suspicion and had little or no patience for teaching me the rudiments of their professions. Hardly surprising, given the premise of the school. In effect, the local education authority was telling these proud working men, most of whom were exceptionally competent, that their livelihoods were last-ditch alternatives for students of below-average ability.

After six months of this purgatory, I opted to go back to school and ended up at Oxford. My life turned out OK, and until recently I preferred not to think about the whole sorry episode. But when I unexpectedly found myself with some time on my hands at the beginning of the year, I decided to investigate this neglected basement of England’s education system and see if I could think of ways to improve it. The result is a report for the Centre for Policy Studies entitled ‘Technically Gifted: Only selection can save Britain’s technical and vocational education system’, published this week.

After immersing myself in the history of this sector dating back to the beginning of the last century, I concluded that the reason nearly all technical and vocational schools have failed is because the authorities have always regarded them as only fit for students who cannot cope with the standard diet of mainstream subjects.