Institution news
The report: ‘From school work to real work: How education fails students in the real world’ highlights concerns raised elsewhere, around careers guidance and technical education. For example, that 61% of respondents wished they had pursued technical skills rather than academic ones.
With the Government’s Industrial Strategy under construction (‘Developing Skills’ is one of ten ‘pillars’ of the strategy), is the time right to challenge some of the entrenched cultural features of our education system that have resulted in UK reliance on imported technical skills rather than develop home-grown talent?
The Baker-Dearing Trust promotes University Technical Colleges (UTCs) in which 14-19 year olds experience a combined technical, practical and academic education. Though UTCs themselves currently make up only a small proportion of the school population (around 0.5%), there are aspects of the model and its philosophy that could be emulated more widely.
The need is greater still, as we gear up to leave the European Union, for the UK to raise its game. How will we otherwise generate the highly skilled, technically trained workforce to underpin our industries, build new infrastructure and secure our future economy?
The report suggests that one of the issues is that industry and education talk different languages, and that this keeps workplaces and schools apart. A recent Guardian editorial highlighted our historical failure to make so-called vocational education mainstream.
The piece showed that the UK’s desire to embrace academic achievement as the only real measure of school success is a real challenge to the Government’s drive for more apprenticeships and technical education.
The Institution’s published letter to the editor warns that our education system has to change how it engages with technical learning and how our cultural bias against it will not alter by a few anecdotal pieces of good news alone.
We need to change the stories we tell our children; for example how highly skilled technicians are seen as the real experts in industry and how many rise to the top. Technical and academic education must be seen (and felt) as existing on the same continuum within a revamped careers education embedded within our schools.
But we also need to challenge some notions of choice in our education system. Currently it is too easy for young people to close down their subject options too soon – often before they understand what it is they are giving up. Is it time to restate the logic of a broader based baccalaureate education system to 18?
This would mean a majority would at least study a technical subject (certainly to 16) along with arts, humanities, science and more. This is, after all, the system adopted by most of our successful economic competitors.
The Baker-Dearing Trust recommends that educators and employers should work together to address the widening skills gap in STEM so that it gives students skills they can use in their working lives, not just in the classroom. For this very reason, the Institution conceived and developed the STEM Insight programme with our partners to influence classroom culture. Through investing in the professional development of STEM teachers, the Institution is bringing knowledge of the world of work closer to the school experience. Before it’s too late, we clearly need to do more to ensure that all students understand how “school work leads to real work”!