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Middle-class distinctions

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Iain Mackinnon

22 Apr 2008 | 15:33

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Articles more than one month old can be viewed only by CIPD members or PM Subscribers.

You read it here first! (Or, at any rate, in the printed pages of PM). I said in an article in January that we would have our first “VQ Day” this August – and so it will be (well, nearly; it’s now to be in July). And I hope that the launch at a Parliamentary reception this Thursday, 23 April, will open a new era for vocational education in Britain.

VQ Day itself will be on Wednesday 23 July, so there’s plenty time for businesses, and unions, and the education world, to make their own plans to celebrate vocational education. Edge – the education charity whose striking ads you must have seen (remember the picture of the two mortar boards, and the question: “why do we value them differently?”) – has done great work to ensure that this celebration gets off to a professional start. You’ll be able to see their marketing materials on the dedicated website – www.vqday.org – from this Thursday.

I hope there will be some debate, too, because while there is much to celebrate – not least the work of students and those who teach them – there’s also a good deal that still needs sorting. Maybe I could start us off: the problem is class, isn’t it?

I fly off for ten days in Cuba later this week. I confidently expect that my pilot will have a vocational qualification – indeed, I’d be rather alarmed if he didn’t. I feel the same about the surgeon who recently carried-out a hip operation on my mother-in-law; she needed vocational excellence to get it right, not book learning.

But these are wholly respectable vocational qualifications, just as my father’s were – he was a GP – and just as my daughter's is, she’s a barrister.

The snobbery about vocational educations is with craft skills, and what Jane Austen’s characters would shudder to describe as “trade”. It’s not about income, and never was. The archetypical plumber who brings home £70,000 a year may well be earning much more than his graduate neighbour in a public-sector role – but it’s just not the same is it?

If I’m right, it’s a worrying analysis because it goes right to the heart of our national character. Can we really change?

Related article
Read Iain Mackinnon's Learning centre from 10 January 2008

Comments

1. At 13:45 on 23 Apr 2008, Paul F Waller wrote:

Interesting comparisons between vocational skills and the skills of a surgeon or an airline pilot.Prior to becoming a practising pilot or surgeon, both professions require the individual to undergo a rigorous academic based grounding in the subjects before being allowed any 'hands on' activities. The single problem of 'vocational' learning is that in some cases while what is achieved is good, the ability to replicate that success in different environments and different situations is suspect. It is no good being successful at 'delegation' if one is unsure of why or how that success was achieved or indeed, being able to transfer that learning to a different but related situation. A good academic grounding together with controlled experimentation followed by on the job development and assessment is surely the right way forward. In other words, a blended process is surely necessary if one is to achieve both understanding and practical competence.
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2. At 10:34 on 25 Apr 2008, Ian McNulty wrote:

Paul F Waller's notion that that all professions need to undergo "rigorous academic based grounding in the subjects before being allowed any 'hands on' activities" seems to make sense. But does it really? Or does the opposite proposition - that without a firm grounding in practical 'hands on' experience, academic knowledge is mostly meaningless and can be positively dangerous - make even more sense?

So which proposition is correct? Which one is the cart, and which the horse that needs to precede it?

The industrial revolution was preceded by the Scottish Enlightenment, which held, in the words of founding father, David Hume, that no amount of academic knowledge "will ever be able to take us behind the daily experiences or give us rules of conduct that are different from those we get through reflections on everyday life."

Was it just coincidence, or was the placing of the horse of practical empiricism before the cart of academic dogmatism a necessary precondition of the events which generated much of the wealth needed to support our current levels of academic activity?

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