Now that I’ve cleared the backlog that accumulated while I was away, I must say I’m a little surprised by the two responses my earlier piece on VQ Day provoked. In my behind-the-scenes advice to the organisers of VQ Day I’ve been at pains to say that vocational education should not be presented as better than academic, or set up in any way in opposition to it. It’s simply different. And valuable in its own right.

So I’m uncomfortable with Ian McNulty’s metaphor of horses and carts, which implies that both vocational and academic are needed: one is no use without the other. And I’m uncomfortable with Paul Waller’s more explicit claim that what’s required is blended learning, because neither academic or vocational on their own will do the job.

I see the case for both with my original example of airline pilot - and maybe my example has led us off into an exploration which favours the academic - but what about humbler occupations? I worked with a health and safety adviser years ago who’d originally been trained as a welder. I know – because he told me – that he was pretty vague about the science behind it all, but he could strike an arc and do the welding required of him. For work as a welder, that’s fine isn’t it? Of course, if he was to get interested in exploring new techniques of welding, he could do with some academic understanding – though even then, many of the great advances have started with plain observation, and any of us can manage that, whether we’re academically-trained like Alexander Fleming, peering curiously at some unexpected mould, or William “Strata” Smith (celebrated in Simon Winchester’s book: The map that changed the world), curious about the stones he played with as a farm boy, and building that curiosity into insights which helped create the new science of geology.

Isn’t it the case that most welders are employed to weld, and wouldn’t be any better at their jobs if they did know the science?