It’s Exam Results Day and time for my annual rant about the academic/vocational divide.

For a start, the results that have been announced today in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, are not just for A Levels, but also for a number of other Level 3 qualifications, though you could be forgiven for not noticing them. News media routinely refer to A Level Results Day, with only a cursory mention of  the other qualifications.

In fact there is a variety of Vocational Technical Qualifications at Level 3 – the equivalent of A Levels – the best known being BTEC Diplomas. Overall over 250,000 students took Level 3 VTQs this year. T levels are the latest addition to this group of qualifications, but were only taken by 7000+ students.

For context, I spent a substantial segment of my teaching career running A level and BTEC courses in Computing at a large Further Education college. I also wrote many text books for these courses and was involved in syllabus design for exam boards.

Unlike teachers in most other subjects I was in a position to compare A Level and BTEC qualifications in the same subject area. I was very aware of how students can be stretched on BTEC courses, far beyond their A level peers. In fact, one of my BTEC students was selected to represent the UK in the International Olympiad in Informatics.

Over thirty years ago I had to personally contact university admission tutors to explain what BTECs were, and persuade them to offer places to some very able students.  At one point one of the Oxford colleges offered a place to one of my BTEC students, but Imperial College gave a blanket refusal to anyone coming through that route.  In contrast one university offered BTEC Distinction students entry straight into Year 2 of a Computing degree, acknowledging the level of knowledge and skills they had already acquired.

Today Level 3 qualifications across the board are integrated into the points system used by UCAS, so students can progress to University if they wish. However some still face scepticism from University lecturers about whether they will really be able to cope at degree level.

Behind all this lies the pernicious language of “academic” versus “vocational” studies, with the underlying assumption that academic studies are somehow superior to vocational ones. This clearly has its roots in the class system and from the days when bright middle class students set their sights on “the professions” and bright working class students entered apprenticeships. This was exacerbated by a school system which divided children at the age of 11, largely on class grounds, offering very different opportunities to the different cohorts. Children were either categorised as academic or as “good with their hands”. The same bifurcation existed in higher education, where “academic” subjects, such as mathematics, were offered at prestigious universities and “vocational” subjects, such as engineering, at the less well-endowed polytechnics. Other countries have a very different culture – Germany, for example, has always held engineering in the highest regard.

However, I do like to point out some of the inconsistencies in this categorisation. Some of the most highly valued “academic” courses, such as medicine and law, are vocational in nature, and we expect surgeons and dentists, in particular, to be good with their hands.

You might imagine that class based inequalities of opportunity have long disappeared along with the demise of grammar/non-selective schools systems (oh, but wait … ) and the transformation of polytechnics into universities, but sadly the perception – and the language – is still current.

As Liberal Democrats we value all forms of work that contribute to the well being of our society and local communities.  During lockdown some perceptions were wholesomely turned on their head as we recognised that essential workers included not just NHS employees but also delivery drivers and refuse collectors.  We should make clear that we value all qualifications that enable young people to participate fully in society, and we don’t place them on some kind of class-ridden hierarchy. And we can best do that by avoiding terms like “vocational” and “academic” when describing areas of study.

* Mary Reid is a contributing editor on Lib Dem Voice. She was a councillor in Kingston upon Thames, where she is still very active with the local party, and is the Hon President of Kingston Lib Dems.