Philip and Beryl, may I first thank you for inviting me here to day to begin our discussions. I’m delighted to be here for two reasons. Firstly, there is the issue we’re here to explore. I believe we may just be at a crossroads concerning the future of vocational education and education business links in this country. We’ve been at a few crossroads before – and I’m not sure we’ve always taken the right path. Perhaps today’s debate will spur a number of us on to ensure that this time we really do begin to move in the right direction.

The second reason I’m delighted to be here is because of the group of people you have managed to gather. We are a real mixture. Educationalists, journalists, representatives from business and industry, policy makers, brokers. I genuinely believe that the future of education in this country depends on just such a mixture of people. If we are going to create the competitive economy, world class workforce and inclusive society that Estelle Morris refers to in her most recent strategy document, then we’re going to have to work together. It’s a shame that the document itself doesn’t mention such a partnership, but I know of the Secretary of State’s personal commitment and trust her to involve us all in her endeavours.

Today I want to outline three challenges that face us in delivering a credible system of vocational education – credible for employers and for students and their families. I do not profess to have an answer to any one of them, although I have some views that may, or may not chime with those of you around the table. I do, however, believe that we must all attempt to tackle them before we can move the agenda any further forward.

The three challenges are:

The challenges are, of course, interlinked. And, as this isn’t an academic treatise, I make no apology today for throwing at least some thoughts and ideas at you that have little more than anecdotal evidence to support them. I’m a dreamer, not a researcher.

Let me begin with the issue of cultural distrust. The BBC’s Mike Baker has summed up the challenge really well. In an article at the beginning of this year he asked, "Will the British ever value vocational education as highly as the purely academic?" It isn’t as if we haven’t tried to put job-related courses into the mainstream of secondary schools before. We all know that we need to engage and motivate pupils who don’t find academic programmes relevant. We also know that there’s a growing deficit in employment skills. A Skills Task Force report has estimated (I’m not quite sure how, but more of that later) that within ten years, the UK could have a shortfall of nearly 50% in its skilled taskforce across craft, technical and practical skills. The Moser report identified one in five of the adult population as functionally illiterate, one in four functionally innumerate and one in three with no formal qualification. In a country boasting generations of compulsory education, these are shaming figures and pose some demanding challenges for us all. But it isn’t as if the Vocational GCSE is something that’s been born as a wizard and wonderful new idea. There have been work based programmes in schools for many years, including those offered by the vocational award bodies, RSA, City & Guilds abd BTEC, such as Foundation Programmes and CPVE.

Within the last decade, GNVQ, General National Vocational Qulaifications have been introduced. The GNVQ framework was developed with much debate and planning, with extensive involvement of educationalists and employers. The government tried to present it as the third of three equally meritorious routes: academic (GCSE, A-level, university) work based (using the five levels of NVQ) and the magical middle way of GNVQ, preparation either for employment or for entry to higher education.

Given the time lag for any qualification to become recognised and respected, I don’t believe the GNVQ has really been given much of a chance. University colleagues of mine tell me that GNVQ undergraduates are better able to manage their time, learning and their project work than many A-level undergraduates. GNVQ paths into employment have also shown success.

But GNVQ’s aren’t widely recognised. And only 64,000 were awarded this year, marginally less than last year, compared with the 5.6 million GCSE’s that were achieved.

I believe that the fault lies not with the qualifications themselves, but with the way in which they are viewed by our elitist society. And, if we’re not very careful, we’re going to travel down the same path again. It was perhaps a shame that, when announcing the Vocational GCSE, David Blunkett suggested that the major reason we need to boost vocational skills is because we can’t find a plumber at the weekend. To imply that vocational education is mainly about making it easier to find tradesmen doesn’t seem the best way to promote parity of esteem for vocational education.

We have to change our attitude in looking down on vocational education, treating it as a ghetto for the least able or as an educational or career cul-de-sac.

What’s really irritating is that our European neighbours have managed to create secondary school education systems with well regarded vocational routes. In the Netherlands for example, 12 year olds are directed towards different types of secondary schools which specialise in either ‘pre-vocational’, ‘general secondary’ or pre-university’ education. The first year or two is spent in transition classes which are broadly similar across the different types of school. This allows movement between the different schools if a child finds that, after all, they are better suited to a different sort of education.

The emphasis is on flexibility and on pupils and parents choosing the right type of school for them rather than the school choosing the child. At 15, students choose again between university preparation, vocationally-oriented courses or an apprenticeship system.

Now this isn’t so dissimilar from the direction we took after the 1944 Education Act, with our tri-partite grammar, technical and modern school system. But as we know, there was never any remote parity of esteem between these types of schools andtheir academic, technical and general education pathways.

Few technical schools were built and they educated just 2% of students. The grammar schools retained the prestige of these ancient institutions while too many of the secondary moderns simply inherited the mantle of the old elementary schools.

It was lack of investment in post-war Britain and the deadening effect of the class system that killed off this attempt to match the European school systems. (Not to mention the unreliability of the 11 plus – an exam I’m proud to have failed – and the lack of flexibility in the years after the age of 11 – and the fact that schools chose pupils rather than the other way round)

So what we’ve been left with is a comprehensive system in which all students follow a largely academic curriculum until 16. Despite my cynicism, I do believe that Vocational GCSE’s may help to create a more flexible system. I am excited by the possibility of taking a mix of vocational and standard GCSEs, making it possible to switch between vocational and academic routes.

But for all of this to work, the vocational pathway needs to be a route not only to Modern Apprenticeships and skilled trades, but also to university courses and technical and managerial careers. I am sure that the fact that both the academic and vocational routes lead to the same type of qualification is a strength. But the new system will only work if the vocational GCSE is properly respected, is delivered by teachers with credibility and is not seen as the route only for the less able.

If that happens, and vocational GCSEs are mostly achieved at grades D and E, then the qualification is doomed to second-class status.

As John Dunford of the Secondary Heads Association has put it, the new vocational system must embrace physics as well as plumbing.

They need to be properly resourced – not like in a secondary school I visited recently where all money had been invested in state of the art library facilities, leaving language labs and technical areas looking like they’d come out of a late 1960’s set of Dr Who.

And the people teaching the courses need to have real credibility with their students. But more of that in a moment.

So there’s the first challenge. Get away from the snobbery and create an environment that values the vocational route fully – enough to attract the brightest of students as well as the less able.

The second challenge now; coming to accept that the world for which we are preparing young people looks nothing like the world we knew even five years ago.

There is an old Chinese saying that "forecasting is difficult – especially about the future!"

One thing we can say without any difficulty is that we are already living in a time of profound change – and the speed and extent of this change is going to intensify.

Just reflect that only 12 years ago, the Berlin Wall was still place; Communist regimes ruled in Eastern and Central Europe; and the apartheid regime in South Africa still held Nelson Mandela in jail.

12 years, the time it’ll take a child who joined the Reception class in September, to work through the school system to reach statutory school leaving age.

A year’s worth of growth in the US economy in 1830 happens in a single day today. All of world trade in the whole of 1949 happens in a single day today. The equivalent of all the science done in 1960 happens in one day today. All of the foreign exchange dealings around the world in 1979 happens in a day today. All the telephone calls made around the world in 1984 happens in one day today. The equivalent of all the e-mails sent around the world in 1989 happens in one day now.

That is the reality of the speed and extent of change through which we are all now living.

I believe we’re living through 4 revolutions of change – and that these will have a major effect on our education system.

The most dramatic changes are coming from the growth in the power of computing and telecommunications.

Our ability to access and transmit information is increasing dramatically with the phenomenal increase in computing power and telecommunications capacity and reduction in cost.

Computer power is 8000 times cheaper than it was 30 years ago.

If there was a similar rate of progress in the automobile industry, today you would buy a Jaguar car for $2, it would travel at the speed of sound and travel 1000 miles on a thimble of fuel.

a transatlantic telephone call in 1999 costs less than 1.5% of the 1939 price

A US Department of Commerce report (1998) suggested that Internet usage was doubling worldwide every 100 days. By next year, there will be 500 million people connected to the Internet worldwide.

One result is the growth of electronic commerce. Already, you can buy cars, books, CDs, airline tickets on the Internet; pay your bills; find new products - pretty soon you will be able to put your mouse where your money is!

This transforms work: what work is done, where it is done, when it is done

and by whom:

What we do know is that higher levels of skills – regularly renewed throughout one’s life – will be essential for finding and keeping a good job.

The technology revolution is driving and is driven by the second revolution: of markets.

Since the collapse of Communism and the fall of the Berlin Wall, there has been a rapid process of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation.

Three billion new consumers have entered the world economy in the past decade.

We now have powerful transnational companies with global brands.

From Cape Town to Buenos Aires; from Sydney to New York; from Los Angeles to Moscow: you will find the same global brands – especially in popular music; in fashion; in fast-food.

Think of the Nike swish and "Just do it" – the golden arches of McDonalds; the ubiquitous Levis.

Some see this as the CNN world – that we have been coca-colonised!

The youth culture is global – and the Internet and other new global media will intensify this.

I was in Uganda just a couple of months ago. When I was travelling around the South East, it was fascinating to watch the teenage taxi driver who was ferrying me around, appear each morning, wearing a different, designer-label T-shirt and listening to the same pop music that was playing in London.

But less than half an hour’s drive from the capital city: Kampala – villages which did not seem to have changed in a thousand years. But in Kampala itself, young Ugandans were flocking to the multi-media leisure and food centres; and to the Internet cafes.

Bill Gates – the worldwide boss of Microsoft – says:

"The Internet changes everything!"

We are at a moment in history like the arrival of the printing press or the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

Some suggest there is a conflict: global cosmopolitans or locals. I think the two can co-incide, and our education system can help it to do so:

Revolution 3 - REVOLUTION OF DEMOGRAPHICS

After 3.85 billion years of evolution, world population had risen to 2.5 billion by 1950 and has doubled over the last 50 years to 5.9 billion, and is set to double over the next 50 years to 9.5 billion. Source: Business in the Environment.

85 million more people are added to the world’s population every single year. Around November 10^th this year, somewhere on this planet, a baby will be born who will tip the world’s population over six billion.

The other key feature of this revolution of demographics is that we are getting older!

We’ve got to think more carefully about how we can use the skills of everyone.

Revolution 4 - REVOLUTION OF VALUES

The fourth revolution I want to highlight is that of Values.

Across the world, there is the phenomenon of the decline of deference to the established sources of authority – intensified by the wider availability of information and knowledge which means that "experts" are no longer so much in control.

This has had an enormous effect on the way that young people view adults. We have to begin understanding that teaching is more about a relationship based on partnership than hierarchy – and this goes for the teachers as well as young people.

We have to be more aware of and open to our different stakeholders.

Tom Delfgaauw at Shell describes this changing attitude to business as: from:

"Trust me -- Tell me -- Show me" (and query increasingly: -- Include me)

Organisations in all three sectors are being moved along from left to right:

Where does all this leave us? With my third challenge.

Beginning to explore the possibility that schools and education may need to undergo a massive revolution.

If we’re going to change our attitudes to vocational education, if we’re going to cope with the four revolutions of change that are effecting our world, the I believe that we have to (and I steal a brand currently used by IBM here) re-engineer our education system.

We have got to stop seeing schools as separate ivory towers and the teaching profession as a closed vocation.

It’s interesting isn’t it, that if you took a 19^th Century Doctor into a modern hospital he (and it would be a he, I guess) would be amazed at how things have changed in 100 years. We’ve had the discover of penicillin, of DNA, of hospital radio.

If you took a 19^th Century teacher into most schools, they’d see a not dissimilar scene from that which they themselves experienced. Serried ranks of young people being tutored by an individual, imparting knowledge.

Now, apart from the fact that such a mechanism is probably not the most productive use of anyone’s time, we’re fast entering a state of crisis in getting enough people to stand in front of those young people. Estelle Morris, at the SMF earlier this week, reminded us that there are more teachers in schools than ever before, yet demand far outstrips supply. If we continue to run schools as we do currently, there could be an enormous shortfall by 2006.

Hidden beneath the heavily hyped idea of using teaching assistants to cover classes while teachers have non contact time was a much more exciting development in government attitude to the profession. Estelle has suggested that there should be "more flexible use of teaching staff drawn from beyond school boundaries. An important feature of teaching in the school of the future is that some schools will wish to explore with others, for example with universities, further education colleges, industry and business – loans and exchanges of trained staff where this will help deliver high quality provision".

There are, of course, examples of this happening already, but they’re examples we haven’t yet capitalised upon or built to scale.

Travel to West London and to British Airway’s teaching centre in the grounds of their head offices. There you’ll find employees, usually, but not exclusively, cabin crew, working with language students in aircraft mock ups, getting the students to use their modern foreign languages in real work situations.

Or visit a number of schools around Norwich and see employees going into schools weekly, brokered by their local EBP, delivering training in work related skills to classes of young people under Industry in Education’s Workwise scheme.

Or go to Birmingham where one secondary school’s head of Design and Technology has persuaded a number of the local restaurateurs to lend their Chefs to tutor students in food technology.

Or to the East Midlands, where a bakery challenged a group of students to create a new product for the company as part of their coursework. The product they’ve come up with a savoury line which remains in the company’s top twenty sellers out of 1400 products, selling 6000 a week.

Or, actually, go to any Education Business Partnership in the country – and its manager will show you similar examples of innovation and learning.

What they can’t show you, despite the great trumpet heralding of the new Learning and Skills Council and its local arms, is a truly systematic approach by government to supporting such pre 16 work. Or a genuine proven commitment to providing resources to enable this good practice to build and spread.

The papers you received before today outlined the Social Market Foundation’s ideas about Industry Teachers, people from companies who would spend time in schools sharing their skills on Vocational GCSE courses. Just the sort of concerted systematic approach I’d love to see.

The idea’s a great one. We know that business benefits enormously from getting involved in education. And for most people here I am just replaying old speeches that many of you will have made by reminding you of the benefits in terms of

And I am sure that, by engaging the right people to act as tutors on these courses, much would be done to gain the credibility of students that I referred to at the beginning of this speech as well as opening up schools so that they begin to face the revolutions I’ve also described.

I’d add to that model the opportunity for employers to be involved in the monitoring and further development of the Vocational GCSE, the opportunity for students to be mentored, as well as taught, by employee volunteers. And for local employers to commit publicly to supporting young people who are undertaking Vocational GCSEs by providing quality work placements.

But I’m left wondering if, whilst the rationale is sound, there isn’t enough real interest or commitment – from schools and business – to build such partnerships to real scale. .

Shouldn’t we be creating opportunities for people to move in and out of teaching, for companies to commit to recognising the transferable skills that exist, rather than seconding employees on a short term basis. (That, of course, means that we’d have to do something about teachers’ pay to put it on parity with that in industry so that moving to and fro was financially worthwhile for staff – At present, whilst starting salaries are beginning look similar, expectations after 5 years look very different.

Shouldn’t we be laying down an entitlement model for young people in regard to education business links, rather than the still quite scatty one that we work to at the moment? The National EBP Network has led in this work, supported by Business in the Community and other national education business link organisations, but its quality assurance model has yet to be recognised by the DFES.

And shouldn’t that model be properly funded with government recognising the enormous investment that companies already make in education and matching time donated with funding, rather than seeing business partnership in education in terms of blank cheques and cash sponsorship?

I share Estelle Morris’s vision of the secondary school of the not too distant future and would wish to develop it more radically. In my vision, businesses have an essential role to play in providing part time teaching and support for various parts of the curriculum, often working with small groups of students rather than whole tutor groups. Companies use the school building for their own in service training, often facilitated by the full time teaching staff at the school. This is funded by government through preferential tax arrangements.

Many of the students receive support from mentors, often via email as well as at 1:1 meetings. Teaching staff spend time on placements within companies, skilling themselves up in preparation for extended stays in industry and commerce or ensuring that their own teaching is up to date.

And the fabric of the school is as inviting and well designed as the best company’s headquarters. Young people and teachers see their school as cutting edge – in much the same way as many people viewed the glass palaces of post war education, full of promise and aspiration, not the run down second rate buildings that they have degenerated to have become.

To achieve this, what will have happened? The government will have committed long term resources to recognising the power of business, will have funded an effective brokering service for schools and companies who want to work together; will have written in and funded an entitlement to effective education business links within vocational GCSEs – and even in primary schools too.

A pipe dream? Possibly not. Today’s discussions could begin plotting the strategy that will be needed to make this succeed. Much of that, I think, depends on all of us here speaking with a similar voice.

A Japanese friend helped me to crystalise my thoughts on all of this recently: In Japanese, to teach is "kyo"; but to educate can be said either as (most common) "kyo-iku" (and iku means ‘to grow’) or (less commonly) "kun-iku" (where kun means spiritual rather than physical). In other words, whereas to teach is just to teach, to educate is either ‘to teach and grow’ or ‘ to grow spiritually’ – which is really what the vocational route could be about. Equally interesting is the fact that to learn is "gaku" and that a school is "gaku-koh" – and koh means a cage. The learning to which I think we all aspire doesn’t happen in cages!

The very spirit of vocation is to do something – the challenge is to ride the waves of change and not to be overwhelmed by them. Good dreaming – but also – good doing!

I leave you with the words of the late, great Robert Kennedy:

"some people see things as they are – and ask: "why?"

Others dream of things as they might be – and ask "why not?""

As we prepare to work a very different sort of programme for our 14 – 16 year olds – I encourage you too, to ask: "why not?"

November 2001