DEVELOPMENTS IN EDUCATION AND VOCATIONAL TRAINING IN BRITAIN: BACKGROUND NOTE ON RECENT RESEARCH.

Prais, S.J.

S.J. Prais [*]

The past decade has seen fundamental policy initiatives at a national level intended to improve vocational skills and to raise school-leaving standards -- particularly in mathematics. These initiatives centred on:

(i) the formation of a National Council for Vocational Qualifications with the object of re-designing, and imposing fundamentally greater coherence into, our previous 'jungle' of vocational qualifications, thereby raising their level of recognition both by employers and by potential trainees, and consequently encouraging a greater volume and higher levels of training to accredited standards of qualification;

(ii) the specification of a National Curriculum for schools, stipulating the main subjects to be taught, the standards which teachers need to aim for in respect of the majority of each age-group, and associated nationwide attainment-tests to be taken by all pupils at several stages in their schooling. A detailed teaching scheme, the National Numeracy Strategy, was laid down nationally for teaching primary-school mathematics (based on the Improving Primary Mathematics scheme developed in Barking and Dagenham together with NIESR using a Continental model) together with a similarly detailed scheme for teaching basic literacy.

Both initiatives, being at a national level, represented significant departures from a previous almost laisser faire approach in which the central government's Departments of Education and of Employment (under their changing structures and titles) were content to concern themselves only with very general organisational matters and financing, and their officials could claim (even boast) agnosticism in relation to the (desired and actual) content and standards of schooling and of vocational qualifications. Such details were to be settled locally by schools, by local educational authorities, and by the industries directly concerned. The new moves to central government intervention were motivated by increasing worries as to Britain's industrial competitiveness, by poorer employment prospects -- with the growing technological complexity of industry -- for the less-skilled sections of the workforce, by limited progress in narrowing social disparities, and by the contrasting examples of other countries' success in m odern industrial training, in school-leaving attainments, and higher economic productivity.

In reaching wider understanding and clearer estimates of the gaps between Britain and other leading industrial countries in these respects, the National Institute's comparative studies played a not insignificant part. A series of site-visits to matched samples of plants in Britain and the Continent was undertaken, including five sectors of manufacturing (metal working, wood furniture, clothing manufacture, food manufacture, chemicals), distribution (retailing) and services (hotels). The countries compared, beginning in the 1980s with Germany, subsequently included sample studies in France, the Netherlands, the United States and Switzerland. Nationwide statistics of vocational qualifications had previously indicated that, broadly speaking, 2-5 times as great a proportion of the workforce on the Continent as in Britain had attained vocational qualifications at craft-level, following a three-year apprenticeship; the site-visits were able to identify the consequences for more efficient working, such as: fewer pla nt-breakdowns, fewer product-rejects, lower manning-levels, greater responsibility by those at operator level for the smooth running of the plant, while those at foreman (first-line supervisor) level had more time and energy for introducing improvements in working methods.

Vocational qualifications on the Continent had wider 'currency' than here. That is to say, they were better understood and respected both by employers and trainees: they required practical tests based on apprenticeship experience at the workplace, combined with written tests on more general/theoretical aspects associated with obligatory part-time college attendance. Passes in both kinds of test are essential for Continental qualifications, and both kinds of tests rely on external examiners who do not know the candidate. British vocational qualifications have for long been at some distance from Continental practice in these respects; and developments in the past decade sponsored by a new National Council for Vocational Qualifications have -- in the present writer's view -- unfortunately served to increase the gaps.

A clear obstacle to Britain's ability to train a greater proportion of school-leavers to craft-level in technical occupations has been the lower mathematical standards of average school-leavers, as made very evident by a series of international tests in mathematics set to large samples of 9 and 14 year-old pupils (conducted at intervals of about a decade since 1964 under the auspices of the IEA -- the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement), and confirmed by National Institute teams' visits to Continental schools with the participation of English school inspectors and teachers.

After a decade of the new national policy initiatives, their results were assessed at the beginning of this year by the Department of Trade and Industry in the following terms: 'The UK has ... only half as many people qualified to level 3 [the 'craft level'] or above as Germany ... The deficit is even greater when considering that Continental Europe takes longer to gain qualifications, particularly vocational ones' [meaning, presumably, that Continental vocational qualifications are now at last recognised by the Department as being, on the whole, more thorough: SJP]. While Britain has recorded increases in recent years in the proportions of the population holding qualifications at Levels 2 and 3, the DTI noted that 'this increase has been mostly in terms of general [educational] qualifications and not in the vocational qualifications thought necessary for the labour market'. On general educational skills -- literacy and numeracy -- the DTI's assessment noted that 'although all countries have problems of poor literacy, the UK ... performs worse than most ... The UK's performance in numeracy skills was, if anything, even worse' (quotations from the DTI's UK Competitiveness Indicators: Second Edition, 2000, pp.30, 32-3).

Of course it should not be expected that deep-rooted problems of this kind can be resolved in a single decade. But whatever has been achieved positively so far, worries continue to be expressed from time to time that in some important respects the country has gone backwards. For example, the new vocational qualifications in England (which, remember, 'do not take as long to gain as on the Continent') do not require college attendance to acquire understanding of the general aspects of the skills of an occupation, nor do they require the degree of externality of examiners as on the Continent. Vocational Qualifications in Britain have also become more specific (i.e. less general and less transferable between employers), whereas on the Continent the number of accredited qualifications has been reduced, and they have become more general and thus -- and this is important for the attractiveness of vocational qualifications to the trainee -- more transferable. Perhaps the central point, which seems not to have been su fficiently well understood by officials responsible for reforms in vocational training in this country, is that the wider benefits of vocational certification (the 'external economies' arising from a system of national standards) require both unquestionable objectivity, by relying fundamentally on external examiners, and a wider mix of occupational skills for each certificated training-route that goes well beyond the needs of a single employer.

With regard to schooling attainments in mathematics: there has undoubtedly been significant progress at primary school ages in arithmetic (on which international comparisons have long drawn attention to British schooling deficiencies), but doubts remain as to whether real progress has been made in increasing the number of our school-leavers who are sufficiently competent in mathematics to proceed to technical courses at technician or craft-levels, and to university entrance in mathematical subjects -- including engineering and teacher-training. Mathematical under-achievement at schools in this country has now led to such great shortages of mathematics teachers that radically new measures will need to be adopted to put things right.

The Review has invited a number of specialists to assess progress made in this country, to consider recent researches in this area, and indicate policy priorities. The three articles on training are published in this issue and two remaining ones on education will be published in January.

(*.) National Institute of Economic and Social Research.