Some time ago I had the great good fortune to do some research with furniture makers. Rycotewood College in Oxfordshire, which specialised in furniture making and restoration (and is now part of Oxford and Cherwell Valley College), asked me to find out what employers would think if they replaced their HND with a foundation degree. It was a revelation: as always happens with the best assignments, I learned a lot.

In particular I learned about a different type of intelligence. Most of the people I met were owner-managers responsible for small workshops, typically hand-making expensive furniture. The most impressive of them told me about an order he’d fulfilled for the church in the City where Sir Christopher Wren himself used to worship. Conscious of this artistic giant looking over his shoulder, he’d designed a complete set of new pews, a task made a good deal more complex by the elliptical shape of the church: every angle had to be calculated separately.

I was in the presence of a very impressive individual, and clearly a very intelligent individual. His intelligence was different from mine – I followed a classic academic path: ‘A’ levels, history at an ancient university, trainee post with the civil service, and so on – but there was no doubting his ability, or the value of his contribution to British life and to the economy. But would he have earned an E-Bacc? – education secretary Michael Gove’s new English Baccalaureate, with its overt celebration of academic values and extraordinary omission of anything else.

Alison Wolf, with her independent review of vocational education, has done us a service by reminding us of the essential place of English and maths in the preparation of everyone for working life, and this craftsman could hardly have calculated his angles without his mathematical knowledge. But as we celebrate another VQ Day this Wednesday, let’s be clear that vocational education is not the runner-up prize for those who are too thick to do something more valuable. We need people with excellent academic ability and we need people with excellent vocational ability. And most of us need a bit of both. Our education system should reflect that.