Page:The Wolf Report.djvu/10

Review of Vocational Education – The Wolf Report  know the likely consequences of particular choices, or which courses and institutions are of high quality. Making that information available to everybody is the government’s responsibility. Too often, it, and its agencies, have failed at this task.

At issue here is not simply good general careers guidance and advice to individuals, to which everyone signs up happily. It is also, and fundamentally, about how government oversees and reports on performance.Vocational education has been micro-managed from the centre for decades. This is a bad idea, and not just because it is inherently ineffective. It also means that government takes direct public responsibility for success and failure, and finds it correspondingly impossible to be honest

Third, the system needs to be simplified dramatically, as a precondition for giving people good and accurate information, to free up resources for teaching and learning, and to encourage innovation and efficiency. English vocational education is extraordinarily complex and opaque by European and international standards.This is because of central government: its repeated, overlapping directives, and the complex, expensive and counter- productive structures that result.We have had over twenty years of micro-management and mounting bureaucratic costs, and it is time this changed.

Of course, good information is only helpful if people are able to act upon it. The institutional framework for 14-19 education is one in which most young people are already able to exercise a considerable degree of choice – and do. However, the review also looked at constraints on institutions’ ability to respond efficiently to students’ preferences and demand.

The wider environment

We know from well-based research studies that 30 or 40 years ago vocational routes offered young people better and more secure prospects than is the case today. It is always tempting to look back at a golden age; but trying to recreate 1960s education is not the answer. It was a different world and, above all, a different economy and labour market.

Today’s vocational education system must respond to five key labour market characteristics. First, full-time education or training to age 18 is now the dominant pattern. In England, virtually everyone stays on post-GCSE, and an overwhelming majority participate to age 18.This change has knock-on effects for the labour market and is also in part a response to (and not just the mirror image of) the implosion of the youth labour market.

This change in the youth labour market is the second critical aspect of today’s labour market which vocational education must recognise. It is quite recent and involves a 9