I’ve recently returned from a parallel education universe, and I’m a bit befuddled. I was lucky enough to go for a fact-finding trip to Switzerland - courtesy of the Gatsby Foundation - and, from what I saw, there is a whole quantum dimension away from the UK.

For starters, ask a Swiss educator about parity of esteem between technical or vocational education and academia, and they look at you blankly.  “Why,” they ask, “would people value one above the other?” It just isn’t an issue, and acceptance of equivalence is universal, including in the way that both routes can lead to university-level education.  Three-quarters of Swiss young people take what we would think of as an FE route and a quarter take academic courses.

These are undertaken on leaving school at 15 and are four-year programmes, although there is ample opportunity to swap between the two should that prove desirable. Some  90 per cent of vocational pathways are apprenticeships, which break down in an 80 per cent-20 per cent ratio between work and college study.  Some 40 per cent of Swiss employers take on apprentices.  The qualification achieved at 19, a Federal Vocational or Academic Diploma, is at roughly Level 3.

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Vocational education and business

Connections with business are positively inescapable. Industry and trade bodies, funded by membership fees, set the curricula and are involved in assessments and ensuring that courses are up-to-date and genuinely applicable to the real world.  Here comes the really gobsmacking bit; those young people who learn more slowly than their fellow students are not under huge pressure to pass their courses before their funding runs out.  That’s because they have until they are 25 to complete their diplomas. 

The Swiss have a target of 95 per cent success by that age, and the current figure of only 93 per cent is considered something akin to a national disgrace.  The pace of education is obviously somewhat slower in Switzerland than here and that’s partly because of an underpinning belief that nobody should be left behind.  There is an overriding sense that in a country with few natural resources, national economic strength is firmly vested in its people.  How many times have you heard people in this country say, “Our people are our greatest resource,” and then behave as if they are the least important?  Not in Switzerland, where this tenet is central to everything.

What is clear is that because relationships with employers are so fundamental to the curriculum, there can be no complaining that students, “Don’t learn the right things in college.”  With Milton Keynes College’s plans to open an Institute of Technology (IoT) at Bletchley Park founded firmly upon the principle that employer input is key, it is fascinating to see how Swiss business people take their direct involvement in education as a given. As we met employers and educators in Switzerland, I realised the extent to which the employer partners that we are working with share this commitment.  

Building the talent pipeline

Creating a diverse digital skills talent pipeline is not just about their own businesses, it is driven by the realisation that building a talent pipeline for all businesses is good for all of us.  Our IoT partners want to set the standard, they want to facilitate wider skills development for our students and apprentices, they want to be engaged in delivery and assessment and they are interested in the whole person, not just the qualification.

Now it’s worth remembering that Switzerland is a nation of 8.5 million so the numbers of people in education are easier to handle.  It’s also important to note that GDP per capita is more than twice that of the UK. To expect the UK’s education system to be transformed overnight into something similar is unrealistic, of course, but there is a great deal we can learn about the central role of employers, attitudes to the relative importance of vocational education and about giving young people the funded time to make the best of themselves. 

We can’t all become Swiss overnight, but if a little Alpine flavour were to be added to the UK system, things might run rather more like clockwork than they do now.

Julie Mills is chief executive and MK College Group principal