Secretary of State for Education, Conservative Michael Gove, has downgraded the value of nearly all 14-16 vocational qualifications at a stroke. I felt angry when I heard this. However, it did little to reduce my respect for Mr Gove; I had very little anyway after ‘free’ schools, and his arrogant disregard of the role of Local Authorities to support ‘failing’ schools.
But having thought about this a little more, I am left perplexed by Gove’s decision. The impact goes against so much I thought was accepted wisdom.
Industry has for many years had a concern that school leavers do not have the skills and experience to meet employers’ needs. Back in 2004 the Tomlinson Report had suggested new ways forward. This opened up opportunities for more vocational education, and was cautiously welcomed by industry.
Clearly some vocational courses don’t have the academic rigour of one GCSE, let alone several. But there are others that are academically challenging and both fill an educational niche and meet industry’s needs.
For example, young people from here in Derby have, for the last two years, had the opportunity to go to the new JCB Academy in Rocester on the Staffordshire/Derbyshire border. This worked with exam board OCR , major local businesses like Rolls-Royce and Toyota and universities including Cambridge and Warwick to develop new Engineering and Business Diplomas. They integrate learning ‘horizontally’ across traditional subject areas, and were judged to be worth several GCSEs each.
Now Gove’s decision has shattered the specialist curriculum at the JCB Academy– the reason d’etre for their existence – declaring that their core specialist elements are worth only 1 GCSE each.
Will industry be as willing to participate in government initiatives in future if support in return is so fickle?
The Tomlinson Report was also generally well-received by the Liberal Democrats. And key elements of its new vision for 14-19 education were included in our 2010 manifesto. Some of these also found their way into the Coalition Agreement, such as
- We will improve the quality of vocational education, including increasing flexibility for 14–19 year olds and creating new Technical Academies as part of our plans to diversify schools provision.
And
- We will create more flexibility in the exams systems so that state schools can offer qualifications like the IGCSE.
At a stroke Gove has attacked this expectation of a wider range of qualifications, and alienated at least one of the only two new Technical Academies that have so far opened. How many of the other Technical Academies in the pipeline will now withdraw from the process? Less than 12 months ago his department was welcoming these and talking up the very qualifications he’s now rubbishing.
So what next?
Schools and colleges will now not just teach children to jump through the assessment hoops on which school performance is judged, but also the schools and exam boards will offer ‘vocational’ courses primarily designed to meet GCSE expectations. Whether these will also meet industry’s needs and engage the more challenging pupils remains to be seen.
Maybe the worst point of all is the way this shows a severe lack of co-ordination between the Department of Education and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. Dave and Nick – please do something to bring these together!
* Lucy Care was a councillor in Derby from 1993-2010 and was a General Election Candidate in Derby in 2005 and 2010 She blogs at lucycare.net.
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23 Comments
I agree with Mr Gove’s decision. I don’t think he was trying to rubbish vocational qualifications, merely trying to stop people from comparing vocational qualifications to GCSEs.
My thought is that GCSEs should be for book-based subjects – languages, maths, natural and social sciences. I am even slightly puzzled that arts subjects are included; I remember some friends of mine who are good artists but got poor grades in art. How can anyone give works of art an academic grade?
Vocational qualifications obviously have their value, but to compare them on a par with book-based subjects strikes me as odd. I think Mr Gove was right to stop comparing vocational subjects to book-based subjects, but he should go one step further and create or strengthen a national standard for judging vocational subjects, i.e. what GCSEs are for book-based subjects, but without comparison to GCSEs. A revamp of BTECs, or raising their profile, for example, would help.
If you really believe the announcement by Gove “has downgraded the value of nearly all 14-16 vocational qualifications at a stroke” that is an indication they are of little value anyway.
At one point there was the idea, I do not know if it ever got implemented, that passing the driving test should be allocated a certain number of UCAS points. Well, suppose it had and that the points it was given were equivalent to 5 GCSEs. Now suppose it, along with the qualifications you write about, were re-pointed at level to just one GCSE. Would that mean passing the driving test was downgraded? No, because we know it is a test which illustrates real useful skills – however many or few GCSEs some formula says it is equivalent to, we know it means some real ability and knowledge about driving cars.
Qualifications, if they have any real value, should be about the skills they develop and assess, not about some arbitary accumulation of points. If a qualification is of real value, those who find it of value will appreciate it regardless of how many or how few points it scores on some arbitrary scale. So that is why if you get so worked up about these arbitrary points, it suggests they are the main thing that qualification has, that is, it has no real value.
That is why I find the reaction of so many of those in education to Gove’s re-reckoning of various point systems to be worrying. If the teachers themselves think education is just about accummulating meaningless points, we are lost. They should be teaching what they themselves know to be of real value, ot what some polutician has deemed to be worth some points.
I have a considerable amount of experience with vraious “vocational” qualifications. I was for a period of over ten years rthe admissions tutor for my university department (Computer Science) and we took on many school-leavers who came to us primarily with “vocational” qualifications. In general, the performance of those with those qualification was disappointing across the board – in all aspects of the subject, not just those which you might say are the more “academic” ones. That is, they did not seem to impart a measure better “vocational” skills to make up for less of the more abstract academic skills of the more traditional subjects. Rather, they seemed to lead to students who had a very formulaic approach to education, one which was very much about accummulating points, one which seemed to have far too much focus on memorising and reproducing definitions rather than exercising deeper skills.
I’ll pause there and continue in another message.
I could not agree more with the article. As a chartered engineer myself I was appalled by this decision to such a point that I read the report for myself and cannot understand how Mr Gove can have come to this decision if he had actually read and understood the thrust of the argument. My understanding is that the report is saying that qualifications should provide the entry into either further education or jobs which the Engineering Diploma patently will. The study of engineering contains so many transferable skills in science, maths, technology,design and so on that I cannot understand how, considering it requires twenty hours per week study it can only be worth 1 GCSE equivalent. Personally I would have leapt at the chance to take this course if it had been available during my school days- but not to gain one GCSE! I am afraid that as long as we have journalists , lawyers and political researchers interfering with technical education issues I have little hope of things changing. I have written to Mr Gove and my own MP Michael Fabricant (who is also a Charteres Engineer) expressing my unhappiness with this decision. Why not consult the proffessional institutions through the Engineering Council before making such a precipitious decision – and it doesn’t exactly match up with the governments aim of re-balalncing the economy towards science, technology & engineering does It?
The real problem, I feel is not that “vocational = “worthless”, as you say, but that the vocational qualifications we have were pushed through on the cheap by clueless people i..e. New Labour.
Real vocational education would be very expensive because it would involve real workplace training by people with deep experience in the skills. Not school-based training by teachers whose only real experiencde was a short training course. How many “business” qualifications are being taight by people with years of experience runnibng businesses? How many “IT” qualifications are being taught by people with years of experience as professional software developers? Very few. If it was going to be otherwise, the people doing the teaching would need to be paid the market value for their skills – which is a lot. Using my driving test analogy, it is as if there were a qualification in driving taught by people who had never driven and whose teaching was based on mugging up on the Highway Code.
Now, New Labour consisted of technically clueless people who were very easily impressed by anything that put itself across as “New”, and their cluelessness extended to having little real understanding of statistics, and so too easily impressed by simplistic measuring devices such as qualifications points systems. So they were conned by those who sold them these “vocational” qualifications on the cheap. Too many of these qualifications did seem to insist underneath of reward for “coloring in” (I don’t mean literally, but I do mean work which seemed to be more about occupying time than imparting really useful skills), or about memorising and repeating definitions.
Another part of the problem, which I have only slowly come to realise, is that teenagers lack the maturity and experience to get the best from vocational qualifications. If you have little experience of the “real world” much of what is intedned to be “vocational” seems as abstract as anything else, hence what could be of use to a more mature person degenerating into a meaningless memory test.
Yet when one tried to voice one’s concern about this, one was pushed down, accused of “snobbery”, accused of being against the idea of useful education for all. Part of the reason for this was the gullibility of New Labour in taking for granted that when presented with (on the cheap) education labelled “vocational” it really was what it said on the tin.
A big issue is the extent to what might seem “useless” abstract skills to a teenager from a poorly connected background are necessary to almost all professional careers. Consider, for example, Engineering. Try looking at the syllabus of a good Engineering degree. It is largely mathematics. Yet the idea that mathematics beyond primary school level is “useless” is commonplace in our society. It is, for example, pushed again and again by many the trendy arts graduates who dominate the media and commentariat. Sorry, but to be a proper engineer you need mathematics to at least A-level, it’s your most fundamental tool. That is why there is so much concern at pupils dropping things lie mathematics and picking up vague “vocational” qualifications – they are being fooled, deeply, they are having doors closed in their face, but they lack the maturity to see it.
The message the employers are pushing out – it is what I get every time I ask employers what they really want – is that basic reasoning and language skills are what they really want, and our school-leavers and graduates seem to lack them. These skills are best developed by sticking to the more abstract and established subjects. I don’t agree with the Tory government on many things, but on this parts of Gove’s agenda (not the rest!) I am very much in agreement.
Well done Lucy Care. A very perceptive article highlighting the total havoc that Gove is creating at education.
Where to start: forcing schools to become academies, thereby undermining local democracy; random introductions of free schools – to pander to pushy and paranoid middle class parents; downgrading of excellent academic and creative subjects to second-class status; micro-managing teaching yet claiming to want teachers to have the freedom to teach…..
The contradictions in Gove’s thinking are there for all to see – why are the Lib Dems tyrning a blind eye to this dangerous ideologue? I only wish I was exaggerating.
I simply don’t agree with the premiss of this article.
Either vocational courses teach academic subjects, in which case they can be examined using academic exams, or they don’t. If they don’t they’re testing something else which has its own value scale.
I’m sorry Ms Care, but the “devaluing” is in the eye of the beholder. Those who understand the currency of these vocational qualifications, ie the potential employers, will value them if they are a good mearue of the sort of skills they are looking to employ.
Oh, and hear hear Mr Huntbach. I couldn’t agree more!
As Tim says, it’s reasonable having separate qualifications for different types of courses, each being judged on its own merit. And in the ‘old’ days we had ‘O’ and ‘A’ Levels and HNCs and HNDs sitting side by side.
Then schools started being judged on their exam results, and put into league tables… and priorities changed.
National support for vocational courses – and the aim for pupils to leave school with some paper qualifications, mean that these vocational results needed factoring in to the tables.
Next parents choose schools with the league tables in mind, and money follows the kids…
This is where the problem really arises, and the down-grading hits home; it means that schools will offer courses not for the benefit of pupils (their future job prospects or UK plc) but for the league tables…
Industry doesn’t only need graduate engineers (and, yes Matthew, maths is an important part of a good engineering degree, but being a good engineer is a lot more than understanding maths) it also needs technicians – leaving school at 16 or 18 to do an apprecticeship. And having an appreciation of engineering can make one a better teacher, journalist, investment banker – or even a councillor!
Larger manufacturing/engineering employers know this, and would see past the GCSE equivalence label. But those league tables appeal to many parents, and keen students are less likely to go to schools and colleges which trail in the league tables. The result will be a poorer offering of school leavers with the skills and experience that industrial businesses want. And jobs may go unfilled.
The facts of supply and demand mean that if the skills aren’t available in the local workforce, then businesses will look to expand elsewhere. For global businesses, that can mean anywhere. And this is what companies like Rolls-Royce, JCB and Toyota do. But they aren’t doing so lightly; they’ve invested time and money into setting up the JCB Academy, and their employees regularly contribute to the learning experience there which, as Matthew suggests, is useful. But if there isn’t the right climate in the UK to develop their future workforce, this trend to invest overseas will continue.
Two final points.
1. Certainly, practical courses cost more than book-based ones, but that doesn’t mean we should skimp on practical education: I wouldn’ t like either my surgeon or my car mechanic to have only learnt from a book.
2. If what employers are wanting is good reasoning and language skills and they aren’t currently getting these from what is a strongly academic curriculum, perhaps this isn’t the best way for all young people to develop these skills…
@Tabman – given that Michael Gove was urged to rethink this by senior figures in Boeing, Airbus, Sony, Siemens, Alstom, Toshiba, JCB and several other employers it’s clear that employers *do* value the courses. The problem is that employers don’t choose how to train students; schools do.
Fair enough saying the engineering diploma could be on a different value scale, but it’s not: it’s being put on a value scale equivalent to a single GCSE, despite having four times the content of a normal GCSE.
What we need to get away from is this idea that kids are either academic or not. It is not binary. Kids have a mix of skills which should all be developed as far as possible. Kids should be able to do a mix of vocational and academic courses.
Matthew Huntbach’s comments may be longer than the original article, but I did enjoy reading them. He expresses my reservations, which are based on much less experience.
It sounds as if the JCB Academy is properly focused on the concept of vocational education and does an excellent job (which makes it an ad for another Gove policy that so many Lib Dems hate!). Yes I’m worried by any reform that undermines what schools like this are trying to do.
But there seems to be something else going on at other schools, whereby some pupils are being pigeonholed as less academic and put through some very low quality education under the vocational label. I expect this is the case especially in the computer science area where Matthew’s main experience is. In many cases they would have been better off persevering with more academic subjects. The points system was providing schools with an incentive to make these bad choices for their students.
What is needed is both to enhance the reputation of vocational education, and to lift the quality of its teaching. That way it will be more popular with parents and students alike, and the money will follow them, regardless of league tables. The problem with the current system is that incentivises mediocrity and that undermines the whole concept of vocational qualifications. For that reason I’m giving Gove the benefit of the doubt on this one. At least he’s trying to do something about it.
To reply to Lucy’s second point: ‘If what employers are wanting is good reasoning and language skills and they aren’t currently getting these from what is a strongly academic curriculum, perhaps this isn’t the best way for all young people to develop these skills…’
I think this is putting it politely. The government has recently passed an act into law which strengthens the teaching of a small number of selected subjects, the English Baccalaureate. The non-Ebacc subjects such as Design Technology,much praised by engineers like James Dyson, now have to compete for a much smaller amount of already crowded curriculum time. Academic pupils are being ‘encouraged’ to follow the Ebacc subjects as recent league tables evidence. This is because not a day goes by without the Department for Education issuing a press release emphasising the importance of this small number of ‘core academic subjects.’ Where then does this leave the non-academic pupil? Once again, these children are being let down by an education ministry obsessed with a narrow university- academic curriculum. As this policy does not seem to fit with Liberal Democrat policy on providing a balanced scorecard for every child to realise their potential, one has to ask why the curriculum we advocate is a million miles away from what is being actually implemented.
This is a dangerous attack line. Gove has changed how vocational qualifications affect school league tables (which are so much statporn anyway), not how they are useful in their own right or regarded by employees.
But attack this as a general downgrading, and you are spreading the message that vocational qualifications are worth less and are at risk of influencing students and employers.
Reply to Joe: Too late. The media has spread the message (responding to the angle given to them by Gove and Gibb) about hundreds of ‘worthless’ qualifications. Decent qualifications such as those offered by JCB, got caught in the crossfire and will have to work hard to recover their position.
Let’s not forget that the same happened with the introduction of the EBacc. A number of ‘equivalent’ subjects to subjects like Geography and History, have been downgraded because it suits Gove’s ideology. Personally, I believe every child should leave school with a balanced scorecard of qualifications which suit their aptitudes and potential.
I’m an ordinary party member and I thought that’s what Liberal Democrat policy was? However, Gove and Gibb are not referring our policy, even remotely, as far as I can tell.
As a GE candidate in 2010, the most frequent concern from university and sixthform students was “Will there be a job for me when I graduate?”
This was (and is) very perceptive of pupils, who in some instances are being poorly advised by schools. This is the real danger of schools being judged on academic performance, including those with sixth forms being judged on the proportion of leavers going to university (a real problem since Labour’s 50% target).
As Helen implies, pupils are therefore encouraged to do courses that they’ll get reasonable results in, to get a coverted place at university to meet school aspirations, not their own. Science and technology are seen (perversely in my view) as ‘hard’ subjects, rather than ones that provide a broad education for adulthood, like humanities. So ‘all round’ able students are more likely to be advised to do humanities than sciences.
The result over time is that society becomes polarised, with people with science/technology backgrounds working directly in these fields, and humanities/arts people populating what could/should in be general areas as well as their specialist fields.
This has been happening for decades and means that in the UK comparatively few senior managers/executives/politicians have science/technology backgrounds (even in manufacturing businesses) compared to countries like Germany. Even the science/technology professional bodies can see their members going in to these roles as ‘leakage’ rather than being pleased that people with a first hand experience in their field are now contributing to the direction of wider busines or society objectives.
In this context Gove’s action in further marginalising vocational learning (which includes those applied sciences/technology) is furthering the trend away from the UK’s economic roots in technological innovation. Manufacturing companies (and Ed’s list is a good one!) are doing their best to fight back, but the playing field is being tilted away from them yet again. We -and Gove! – should be listening to them if we care about future jobs and prosperity in the UK.
“A number of ‘equivalent’ subjects to subjects like Geography and History, have been downgraded because it suits Gove’s ideology. Personally, I believe every child should leave school with a balanced scorecard of qualifications which suit their aptitudes and potential.”
At the end of the day, pupils should study subjects that they are interested in. However Universities and employers will continue to make value judgements about the quality of those qualifications along exactly the lines that Matthew Huntbach outlines. That has not been affected by what Gove has done here.
Academic qualifications should be exactly that. The danger, exactly as when Polytechnics (which offered distinct courses and experiences to Universities) were renamed, is in trying to pretend that a GCSE in Media Studies is equivalent to English when it isn’t. Renaming someting doesn’t change what it is.
The same thing happened when CSEs were merged with O-Levels. What was the point? Only Grades A-C count for anything, exactly the same as in the O-Level days.
What we should be doing is putting our energy into devising a distinct and distinctive vocational baccaleuriat that equips school leavers with practical experience that can then be taken on into apprenticeship or further vocational training.
All this would be far easier if we had schools geared to these different routes.
There are two things going on here and intersecting in a messy way.
The first is the system has become driven by points, itself part of a larger and pervasive targets culture. This incentivises folk to manage for targets, teach to the test and so on – all of whcih are ways to game the system. It is what the old Soviets used to do; it failed then and will unsurprisingly fail again. And I think Gove is right to observe that some (not all) of the so called vocational qualifications had been ‘bigged’ up enabling headteachers to improve their league table scores by pushing students towards easier and more point-heavy subjects. Did this actually happen? You bet. I undestand that it had become a standard scam and the quickest way to improve results at a failing school and, moreover, one winked at knowlingly by New Labour because shamefully they too were driven largely by PR imperatives, by the target of a good opinion poll result rather than a determination to build a better future.
The second thing chimes more with the title of this post. In this country we have lazily come to accept a framing that says, “academic = good, vocational = bad”. This is total nonsense of course. Some vocational subjects are very academic – medicine the law, accountancy etc. What really distinguishes what succssive govts have deemed “good” and “bad” is whether they are professional or not. I am not a class warrior but it’s very hard to resist the conclusion that this is just a traditional distain for the majority that should have washed away in the tide of history but clearly hasn’t.
So, what would at last make a difference is if we conciously set out to offer a sensible destinatiion at the end of schooling that is also the transition into work for more than just the traditional professionals. Students who are not likely to go to university – a substantial majority – have too little to aim for at the end of regular school and that has to be a problem.
The competitive end of the league tables is unlikely to be affected much by this.
I have had applicants say they have X number of BTEC qualifications and it is equivalent to 4 A-Levels. Maybe in some arbitrary scale, but not to me. Let’s stop FE colleges lying to kids and telling them that vocational qualifications are a route to university. They are meant to be a route to a trade.
Lucy Care
This was (and is) very perceptive of pupils, who in some instances are being poorly advised by schools.
Yes, they are being poorly advised to take supposedly “vocational” qualifications that actually aren’t very useful even for the careers which by their titles one might suppose they would be useful for. I teach a very practical subject at university, my speciality is computer programming. My experience was that those who came to us with supposedly “vocational” qualifications in “IT” were not helped at all, were in fact hindered, by what and how they had been taught in those qualifications and how they were assessed, when it came to mastery of this practical subject. The reality was that training in logic and clear thinking and basic use of language that is done through tne more traditional subjects was a better preparation.
I am saying this not through prejudice but through actual experience. My university department could not afford, as the very high prestige ones can, to insist applicants had to have A-level Maths; to fill our places we did have to take a fair number coming through the “vocational” route. Some of those coming through this route did OK, but it was almost always only those who had AAA grade equivalent, whereas CCC in more traditional A-levels including Maths tended to be a much better marker of success. I believe enough in the power of education to say this was not just due to something innate buit actually due to what was being done by the teaching. That is, I believe there were many who had come to us through the “vocational” route who would have done much better had they gone through the traditional A-level route. What was heartbreaking was to see so many who could perfectly well have coped with the more useful qualifications not taking them because they had been advised not to – in general, the lower down the socio-economic scale the more likely this was to happen.
When I was admissions tutor we were left fairly free to choose, so I chose those I knew from experience (I plotted final degree classifications against entrance grades each year to make sure) had the best chance of doing well. In general that meant asking for higher grades in “vocational” qualifications than the more abstract ones. As a result, I turned away hundreds of applicants every year who probably would have got an offer had they been better advised by their schools. As it happens, that can’t be done now – thanks to more “league table” pressure and nonsense like the special treatment for AAB grades, current admissions tutors tend not to be permitted to make a careful choice based on all aspects as I was a few years ago, now it has to be just points, never mind in what subjects.
Lucy Care
In this context Gove’s action in further marginalising vocational learning (which includes those applied sciences/technology) is furthering the trend away from the UK’s economic roots in technological innovation. Manufacturing companies (and Ed’s list is a good one!) are doing their best to fight back, but the playing field is being tilted away from them yet again
But you just aren’t listening. This was a huge problem during the time I was involved in this sort of thing – I would keep trying to carefuly explain my case, as I have here, and I would be met with this sort of reply which paid no attention to what I was actually saying and insyead accused me of being snobbish or not wanting people to have good productive jobs. It was like banging my head against a brick wall.
I know my particular experience is with “ICT” qualifications, where some have suggested (and there has been recent action on this) that there is a particular problem, but we also took a fair number with “vocational” qualifications in “business” and these tended to be even worse. I hear similar in other disciplines, where supposely “vocational” qualifications actually don’t seem to develop or measure the really necessary skills for the vocations they are supposedly “vocational” in.
If other people have good experience with those who have gone through these qualifications, then please, let them speak, I’d love to hear it. There are huge numbers of them, and some of them may be very good, it’s just I’ve not come across any. However, it seems to me that if they really were any good at what they were meant to do, those who needed those skills would snap up those with them, regardless of some arbitrary points table.
I’ve tried to explain on pedagogic and developmental grounds why qualifications that appear to be “vocational” are not as useful as they might appear from briefly looking at their labels. However, it’s getting late and why should I bother if the response is “lah lah lah, I’m not listening because you’re just a snob”?
Let’s not mix up the typically Year 11 qualifications (GCSEs) and Year 13 ones (A levels) which are the mainstay of university entrance.
In my experience, to get good results at A level requires a different level of intellectual maturity, not just more knowledge – and a university education takes this thinking a step further. This is one reason why Matthew (and others) will find that the quality of candidate varies dependent both on the qualification and grade that they have achieved. Employers know this too – if they want an electrician, a graduate electrical engineer is not over-qualified, but wrongly qualified.
However, from the parents’ perspective, the GCSE equivalence and league table position becomes a short-hand for a school’s competency. By seemingly talking down the school, the non-GCSE courses it promotes are also devalued. Thus we risk ending up with only electrical engineers who can design control systems, and no one competent to install them!
The longer term knock on effect can be seen in this article http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16789111 where it’s explained that: “The decision [by Rolls-Royce] to choose Singapore as a regional manufacturing hub [by investing £355m] was made easy by a few factors… However, the biggest pull was the promise of a steady supply of highly skilled labour, through partnerships with local universities and polytechnics.”
“Thus we risk ending up with only electrical engineers who can design control systems, and no one competent to install them!
As I said in my earlier comment, we just don’t take TRADE vocational training seriously (as opposed to PROFESSIONAL vocational training which we do take seriously). So for the academic youngster heading ultimately to university the proximate objective while still at school is clear – get good A levels. But for the less academic (or those with a disrupted home life etc) the alternative is … ? So about 20% finish up leaving school functionally illiterate. Is there a connection? You bet!
There are, to be sure, lots of courses but always with the reasonable suspicion that they are as much about massaging results to generate statporn as they are about quality education. So here starts a spiral of decline and mixed motives that ends in “vocational” being reduced to a synonym for “bad”.
And what is the political establishment’s response to this entirely tractable problem? Why, to ignore it of course and to invent new and creative ways to muddy the water to obfuscate their own failure. Vocational qualifications will work when and only when politicians start thinking in terms of their value to students (which in turn means also to employers) and not of how much they contribute to leage tables according to some meaningless and arbitrary scoring system.
Until then it’s deckchairs on the Titanic or, as Matthew say, “Lah, Lah lah…”.
I have to confess that I have no experience of University Admissions But I am a Chartered Engineer with 35 years experience in industry followed by 24 years as a County Councillor, a shool governor of 4 schools plus a PRU. My perspective is not constrained by academic value judgements however genuinel felt. Shools prepare our young people for life, hopefully a successful life. There is a wide spectrum of ability which can generate success and a narrow academic standard is not helpful in defining it: indeed it is a demotivatoional factor for many young people. Tomlinson knew this and that is what his excellent report sought to address. Gove simply doesn’t understand but that is hardly new is it? The workplace and society needs a range of abilities and a work ethic, pride in achievement and determination to succeed but hey what has that got to do with Gove?