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Every other journal has found an Olympics link – and PM should be no different! I’ve seen way too little of the Olympics action this time round as so much of it is screened during the day when I’m working, so I was particularly pleased that the women’s quad sculls was shown on Sunday morning when I could watch it.

Why that race in particular? I couldn’t know in advance what a thrilling race it would turn out to be, and what a disappointment for the rowers who just missed gold. No, my interest was that the eight members of the British women’s rowing team, including Annie Vernon in the quad sculls, had trained at Ealing, Hammersmith and West London College, which I chair. They trained not in rowing, you understand – but in car maintenance. Yes, car maintenance.

Using a small grant they get from the Sports Council for wider education, they came to us every Wednesday evening to learn car maintenance so that they could service their own cars, which they use to travel to training and competitions. Our course is designed especially for women and we offered them the flexibility they needed to rearrange classes at short notice.

And, just as Peter Honey advocated in his blog a few weeks ago, the rowers made the most of their opportunity, working closely as a team, and when opportunity arose competing with each other like crazy - for example, seeing who could jack up a car fastest! The tutor that taught them, Steven Williams, was clearly thrilled to have worked with them, and I’m sure that he, like me and every reader, would like to congratulate all the team for their tremendous performances.

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PM reports more gloomy headlines on pensions, with a warning by CBI’s Richard Lambert that excessive regulation may make it more likely that the lucky few in final salary pensions will see their schemes closed.

As joint owner of a small consultancy, I get quite a different perspective on pensions from watching the behaviour of the recent graduates we employ. We have taken on one or two a year for the last five years or so, and only one has shown any enthusiasm for taking up a pension. It’s not hard to see why that should be. They join us saddled with £10,000 or so of student debt, so adding to their out-goings looks unappealing. They don’t expect to stay with us more than a few years, and the prospect of moving a pension looks unappealing to anyone brought up on the current desperately low levels of customer service from financial institutions. They see their potential retirement date receding into the future and they read headline after headline casting doubt on the likelihood that they will get a good pay-out when they do eventually retire. No wonder they’re not keen on signing-up for a pension – and who can blame them?

It’s all very different from my own experience when I joined the Civil Service after university. I saved money from my student grant, and started work with savings, not debts. I expected to stay with my employer until I was 60. I was offered a final salary scheme, and though my knowledge was very thin indeed, I believed with good reason that it was a first class offer. Of course I signed up.

Back in 1978 most of the work which my company now does was done within the public sector, by people whose pension experience was much like mine. The public sector revolution which Margaret Thatcher started and which the Labour Government has pursued, has taken many hundreds of thousands of jobs out of the public sector and into the private, and in doing so radically changed the employment experience of those who do the work. The future pension prospects of recent top-notch graduates comes a long way down anyone’s worry list, of course, but there’s something wrong when every pension analyst says ‘start early: things will only get tougher’ and intelligent, well-informed, young graduates take perfectly rational decisions to do no such thing.

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The cry that there should be more women on the boards of public bodies is not a new one, but the announcement of a target – reported in the People Management news pages – is new. The government-backed Women’s National Commission wants to ensure that by 2011 women make up at least 40 per cent of the membership of public boards. If that sounds rather modest to you, as it does to me, given that women are half the population, the Commission notes that the percentage currently stands at 34 per cent.

Before I rushed into the bloggers’ trap of instant pontification repented at leisure, I checked what the percentage is for the public board which I chair – the board of Ealing, Hammersmith and West London College. We have 19 board places (including staff, students and the principal) and nine of them are held by women (47 per cent) rising to 10 when our new principal joins us: 53 per cent. I think we can claim a tick for that one.

Minorities? Seven out of 19 – though one is our departing interim principal, and 37 per cent in no way reflects the diversity of our students body, which must be at least 90 per cent non-white.

Disability? Hmm: nought out of 19, so far as I know. Let’s move on, shall we?

I’ve pondered these issues for some time, and wonder whether it’s the model of public boards we use in Britain which is wrong. People still use the shorthand “the great and the good” (though mostly now for national bodies, not local ones) and many boards still rely on the time-honoured assumption that suitably worthy people will make themselves available on a wholly voluntary basis. Others pay, with sums varying from a very modest daily allowance to the sort of fee which a private company would pay its non-executives. It’s a muddle.

Why, for example, does a board member of a university get nothing, but a board member of an NHS Trust get £6,000 a year? Where’s the logic in that?

And, back to what the Women’s National Commission is worried about, I wonder if reliance on volunteers narrows the pool of potential board members in ways which are no longer acceptable? It’s a complex business, and I doubt if there’s a simple correlation either way, but I’d like to see the question considered more. It may help to unlock more progress.

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I was just about to start this blog with the words “The government has launched…”, but then I remembered that opening lines are meant to draw the reader in, and I’m afraid these fail that test!

It’s a pity, because much of what the government does has a big impact on our lives – for the better, if it works, and because it costs us all money, whether it works or not.

And the initiative which caught my eye (you knew I’d come back to it!) is just such a case. Under the new “Framework for Excellence”, employers and learners are to be told how every college and government-funded trainer scores on a four-point scale – much as we all now get such information on hospitals and local authorities.

In the further information sent to colleges we have been told that employers and learners will be offered “some drill-down capability” (how Shakespeare would have swelled with pride had he thought of that phrase first) – which seems to mean that they will get to peer at the detail. So instead of learning simply that a particular college rates “good” for “employer responsiveness”, for example, a firm will be able to see how well the college scores for responsiveness in, say, the hospitality sector.

The question we asked ourselves last week as a college board, however, was whether employers, or potential students, would change their decisions once they had this information. If you knew that we consistently rated four (which means “inadequate”), I can well see that you might look elsewhere – but how much would you worry about the distinction between grade one (“outstanding”) and grade two (merely “good”)?

I’d like to think that employers at least – as sophisticated repeat buyers – would make the effort, and as a college we’re certainly not slackening our pace in working towards “outstanding” across the board, but I wonder how much employers and students really will use these new signals when they are published.

Comments [0] “Pay rises push up prices” is the core of the chancellor’s argument in calling for pay restraint. Yet for the further education college which I chair, the government is telling us to put up our prices to those students who pay (most don’t), as part of its drive to get adults to pay half the cost of their college course by 2010. Which means, ironically, that almost the opposite is true of what the chancellor wants: the fact that we are putting up our prices makes it more possible for us to afford to put up pay (though there are rather more counter-pressures on our budget pushing us the other way). And if we put up pay by more than the 2 per cent which Alastair Darling recommends – which we certainly will – it will have absolutely no effect on our prices. Curious stuff, the economics of public-sector pay!Comments [0]

Would you want to work for a boss who knows you fabricated parts of your CV? Or would you want to work for a boss who knows that people make stupid mistakes, and is ready to forgive, and move on?

What lesson should we draw from Alan Sugar (oops! Sir Alan Sugar) hiring Lee as his apprentice despite the fact that he knew that his claimed two years at university were in fact no more than a few months? In most companies, lying on a CV merits instant dismissal. Yet we’re a very unforgiving society, with less and less scope for people to make good again after making a mistake. Politicians do it all the time, with carefully-crafted contrition, but for more humble folk it can be a real struggle.

So is Sir Alan showing us the way to a more tolerant, far-sighted, attitude to hiring – or letting the side down with some wobbly values?

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I see that the government is advertising for a chief executive for the new National Apprenticeship Service. (Am I the only reader of that ad for whom the words “poisoned chalice” appeared in my mind before “wonderful opportunity”?).

I also read in the business pages a very up-beat article about the fortunes of Skoda, Volkswagen’s Czech subsidiary. The executives at Skoda must be fed up with articles that say, however positively, what a long way it’s come since the cars were the butt of countless jokes - such as “Why does a Skoda have a heated rear window? So you can keep your hands warm when you’re pushing it”. (Sorry, Skoda: couldn’t resist).

And yet the article lavished praise on both Skoda, for the quality of its cars, and Volkswagen, for the quality of its multi-brand strategy, for the Volkswagen Group is now home to four strong car brands: Volkswagen, Audi, Skoda and Seat.

Which brought me back to apprenticeships. “Apprenticeship” is a great brand which is why this government is keen on them, as was John Major’s (which, in fact, deserves the credit for bringing them back). But it’s a brand which works far better in some fields than others. The gas industry, for example, has embraced apprenticeships enthusiastically, but coverage across the service sector, which has never taken to the branding, is thin. So maybe ministers need to take a leaf out of Volkswagen’s book and create another brand or two to get the much greater numbers they want to see?

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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?

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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

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