Vocational Qualifications
A history and a suggestion
In the olden days people left school at fifteen or sixteen and got jobs; passing exams and going to university was a minority pursuit. As university access expanded and opportunities for unqualified school leavers dwindled, the question of ‘what does school offer the kids who fail exams?’ became a problem the government decided to solve.
The solution they hit upon was vocational qualifications and as it was the first attempt at solving this problem they assumed it would work brilliantly. Introducing National Vocational Qualifications in 1986 Lord Young of Graffham said “Far from causing a divide, this proposal will heal the divide that exists today among those who benefit from the school system and those who do not.”. Five years later in the white paper Education and Training for the 21st century, which paved the way for the General National Vocational Qualification (GNVQ), John Major said: “we will end the artificial divide between academic and vocational qualifications, so that young people can pursue the kind of education that best suits their needs.”
Parity of esteem on the spreadsheet
The term vocational education suggests learning how to do a particular job, but that has never been practical to do at a mass scale in school. Job training typically requires resources and space beyond what’s available; where schools do try to go down this route it tends to be a limited (and sexist) offer along the lines of bricklaying or hairdressing. GNVQs were the first iteration of a qualification deemed vocational but deliverable within the constraints of a secondary school. Taught in classrooms, their final grades were awarded for a pile of externally moderated coursework. Those who said this was really just an academic qualification minus rigorous assessment could be dismissed as snobs; the value of a GNVQ (4 GCSEs) was indisputable where it mattered, in school performance measures.
New Labour tried to improve vocational education by getting schools to specialise in one area. The 14-19 Diploma envisioned each school choosing one subject “line of learning” with students leaving their main school for their diploma lessons at whichever different school had racked up their preferred line. Even in places where transport links between neighbouring schools exist (a tiny minority) this was still barking mad. Only a few schools were brave enough to try it and it was scrapped as soon as the next government came along.
The Big Bad Wolf
That government, the Conservative Lib Dem coalition, commissioned Alison Wolf to review vocational qualifications and her report, released in 2011, was a change from the ‘if we say it it will be true’ magical thinking that had come before. While recognising that there are high value vocational courses at Level 3 (A Level equivalent) it showed that many vocational courses have zero or negative impacts on the earning potential of their students. For students aged 14-16 the value of the qualifications on offer was dubious and certainly well below that claimed for them in school accountability measures. The Wolf Report stated, quoting professor Lorna Unwin, “There is only one real Level 2. Maths and English A*-C.”
The impact of Wolf on this age group was therefore defensive, it aimed to stop vocational qualifications crowding out academic ones by limiting performance table points to one qualification per student. However, it did not propose any changes to the qualifications to make them better, probably scared off by the fact the Diploma had been such a binfire.
Today, as far as 14-16 vocational education goes, we’re living in the world Wolf settled for. It’s rare for students to take more than one vocational qualification but 40% of them take at least one. The most popular of these is OCR National award in Sport (41,444 entries in 2025), followed by level 1/2 award in Hospitality and Catering s (39,416 entries) and BTEC First in Health and Social Care (36,310 entries). For each of these the assessment is broadly similar - an exam of about an hour and a couple of controlled assessments (extended writing tasks done under supervision in the classroom.). There are vocational elements like cooking / playing sport but the key test, and the focus of two years of study, is how you write about doing these things.
What are they for?
You might argue that if English is one half of all that matters at age 14-16 then the fact that these are academic qualifications made easier is a good thing, but that assumes that all students work diligently towards the goal of academic improvement and the limiting factor for the low achievers is how much time they have to practise. Time is not the limiting factor though - it’s motivation. School is a dispiriting place if you’re in the 35% of kids who don’t get grade 4 in English and Maths; having the bit of the curriculum that’s supposed to be different be more of the same adds to the disillusionment.
This is not a weakness of the specific design of these qualifications, it’s an inevitable consequence of them being qualifications. Once you’ve decided an external body will moderate students’ work and be able to justify why student X gets a Merit and student Y gets a Distinction then the work in question can’t be a meal or a sporting performance, it has to be durable and comparable so it has to be written down.
Sport, cooking and care giving are all highly valuable activities to improve at, whether or not you go on to do them professionally, likewise running a business or producing digital content. Remove the straitjacket of external assessment and there is scope for schools to be far more creative in how they develop these skills, while breaking up the monotony of academic struggle for kids who find reading and writing difficult and off putting. These kids don’t need more reminding that this one thing they struggle with is really important; they need to know there are other things they can excel at, that failure as a writer does not have to mean failure as a person.
The promise of vocational qualifications for 14-16 year olds was that they represent a different kind of learning from, and equally valuable alternative to, academic study. The reality is that they are a watered down version of GCSEs with little value as stepping stones to jobs or further study. Meanwhile the opportunity cost of their assessment practice is that the chance to carve out a space in the curriculum genuinely separate from academic study is wasted. Scrapping them won’t do any harm to the kids who, in Lord Young’s words, do not benefit from the school system, but if you trust that system to innovate without tying its hands behind its back, an alternative approach could give them a source of pride and achievement away from the written word and save them from despair at the challenge of academic study.