Empowerment through vocational education

We need to be ambitious for our young people. The noblest ambition that we can have for our youngsters is to ensure that our educational system gives them the empowerment that will help them find the employment they desire and that will make them economically independent.

We live in a society that believes in equal opportunities for all its citizens. This means giving young people the tools to prosper in a world in which increasingly education makes a critical difference to their future lives. This is even more important in the context of an economy undergoing constant and often unpredictable change.

For more than half of our students who have finished their secondary education, the vocational education route is often the most viable. Vocational education is wrongly perceived by some parents, employers and even students themselves as being ‘a poor relation of academic learning’. However unfair this may be, the stakeholders in our educational system need to review why this perception exists and take measures to give vocational education the merit that it rightly deserves.

I miss the in-depth clinical studies prepared by experienced independent consultants in education that look at this important field not just from the perspective of academia, but from the different dimensions that make education so important in our society. So, I often have to rely on studying reports by foreign experts that review educational systems in other countries with broadly similar educational setups to ours. One such study was prepared by Alison Wolf, a professor of public sector management at King’s College London. She recently completed a review of vocational education for the Department for Education.

The first thing that strikes you about this report is the absence of political spin and marketing hype that so often characterises reports that are less than clinical in their approach. I found the Wolf Report interesting because, despite the fact that the way vocational education is managed in the UK and Malta is rather different, there are certain organising principles for reform that should be applicable wherever vocational education is provided.

The first principle is that a good vocational education system must treat business by steering students into courses that lead to employment in good quality jobs – and not in a dead-end of precarious work despite the acquisition of paper qualifications. In reality, this principle also applies for academic education which, like vocational education “should provide for the labour market and the educational progress of young persons on a wide front, whether immediately or later in life”.

The second principle is that we should be honest with our people. This means providing them with useful information so that they can make their educational choices and decisions with the benefit of knowing what these choices are likely to imply. The wrong choice of training is often one of the worst risks taken by our insufficiently informed students and their parents.

The fallacy that one qualification is as good as another is dangerous. It can be partly managed by the government making information easily available to students and their parents about the consequences of particular choices, or which courses are of high quality.

As the Wolf Report insists, this goes beyond “providing general career guidance and advice to individuals to which everyone signs up happily”. This is about how we define successful performance in our educational institutions and the way we report results to the public.

The third principle that must guide us is the need to have a simplified system aimed at providing young people with good and accurate information about courses and the prospects that the attainment of certain qualifications opens to those who undertake particular studies. We need to manage our scarce financial and human resources in a way that offers different solid and viable courses without multiplying the number of options simply to increase variety and choice.

There is not much point in being nostalgic about past systems many of us went through in our youth. Recreating the 1960s education system will get us nowhere as today’s economy and labour market are so different. The large number of low-paid, low-skill jobs available 50 years ago no longer exist. Today, employers expect much more from the young people they employ and it is up to our educational system to ensure that our students are prepared for the real world of work.

In a future article I will discuss some of the recommendations made by the Wolf Report for vocational education reform.

jcassarwhite@yahoo.com