Bringing vocational routes into the school system is key to preparing young people for a fast-changing labour market, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
Montserrat Gomendio, OECD deputy director for education and skills, told the New Education Forum’s conference “Soft Skills and Vocational Education and Training (VET) - Key Elements of the Labour Market” in Edinburgh last week that the “dichotomy between the academic or traditional path and VET and apprenticeships” had been broken.
Ms Gomendio said: “Many countries are now developing more flexible systems, where they have four or five tracks, like Singapore or the Netherlands, with different combinations between what is academic and what is applied and the amount of time that is in the workplace. I think that is the right way to go.”
Scotland’s Foundation Apprenticeship (FA) scheme, offered to school-aged teens in the senior phase, is “impressive”, she said.
Ms Gomendio added: “The linear approach is changing for the whole of the education system, not just VET. People require broader and more general skills, like problem-solving.”
She said the key advantage of apprenticeships is their closeness to the labour market. “The only way to keep up is to interact within the workplace. To acquire all the skills the workplace requires, you need to be there. The closer the link with the workplace, the more employers get involved.”
Funding concerns
FAs are being rolled out across Scotland - the government has committed to 5,000 by 2019 - but FE leaders have raised concerns about how the scheme was funded. Questions were also raised about how to make the scheme appeal to parents.
In July, Scotland’s fair access commissioner, Professor Peter Scott, said he believed that it was essential that vocational qualifications had parity with traditional academic qualifications. He made his comments as Tes Scotland revealed that there was no coherent view on the value of a completed Foundation Apprenticeship in the university application process.
This month, a Scottish Qualifications Authority report - based on fieldwork in every local authority, including schools and colleges - said that schools believed working with colleges to offer vocational courses was “vital to the delivery of a balanced curriculum for their learners”. But some respondents said changes to college structures had created difficulties for school-college partnerships and that minimum numbers required by colleges for courses could not always be matched.
John Hand, insight professional adviser for the Scottish government, told last week’s conference that FAs were “a welcome addition to the portfolio of school”. He said his view, as a former school leader, was that “a lot of young people enter their desired profession despite what happens in schools, not because of what happens in schools, and so Foundation Apprenticeships are a step in the right direction to change that”.
Gregor Scotland, a senior policy executive at CBI Scotland, agreed that FAs were “a really great initial step”. “We welcome the 5,000 FA target,” he said.
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