not many young people are going to be fooled by the simple abolition of the term “vocational” from the menu of available secondary education qualifications, as proposed by last week’s Green Paper. The Government wants more young people to embark on and to complete vocational courses that will lead to well-paid and satisfying jobs. We are all in favour of that.

But the current vocational courses do not enjoy a “parity of esteem” with academic study and it is unrealistic to pretend that this problem can be solved just by re-branding vocational qualifications as “real” GCSEs and A-levels and by talking of “individual pathways” instead of “vocational routes”. Employers, already faced with a jungle of vocational qualifications, will only be more confused as they try to read between the lines of the proposed new individualised matriculation award for evidence of the occupational skills they require.

Here the Green Paper fails to see what is wrong with our existing system of vocational qualifications. We do not need more, because there are already too many of them. Very few, however, are designed in consultation with real employers to meet actual and forecast skill needs. For the young, there is little or no practical guidance to help them sort the good from the bad.

Careers teachers in schools are supposed, according to the Green Paper, to be the main source of guidance to young people in constructing their individual learning route maps to their goals at age 19. How can careers teachers be sufficiently aware of changing medium-term employment patterns, likely earnings and all the other factors that giving such advice to 14-year-olds requires? Few 14-year-olds have any clear idea of what they want to do after they leave school. So non-academic GCSE courses should not be narrowly linked to specifically selected future occupations. They should broaden horizons, opening windows on to the world of work and kindling (or re-kindling) the motivation to learn for those with aptitudes or personalities less suited to straight academic courses.

This is precisely the pattern offered in other European countries, with secondary education being structurally integrated with apprenticeship arrangements. In Denmark, when young people follow vocationally based education, whether in a college setting or apprenticeship, they are provided with a “taster” experience that introduces them to one or more vocational fields and the opportunities they offer. Only at the end of their initial college period (which will be at least six months) are young Danes asked to make a definite choice of vocational direction.

Where there is a strong apprenticeship tradition (in Germany, for example), the training programmes last three or more years and are clearly understood to include general education to provide transferable skills as well as more narrowly defined industrial training. By contrast, in Britain, the distinction between school and work has remained unhelpfully stark. Indeed, in its response to the Government’s consultation document on Modern Apprenticeship in 2000, the Confederation of British Industry wrote:

“Employers are not educators and Modern Apprenticeships are part of the foundation learning, not the education system”.

If the Government wants to make a major change to the esteem of Britain’s vocational education, it should have looked more closely at the French experience. The French educational system has traditionally been seen as the pillar of the public and professional sectors of society, while vocational education before 1993 was mainly left to the private sector and employers.

So apprenticeship was thought of as being principally for those unsuccessful academically in the school system. Since the 1993 reforms, college students and apprentices in industry have been able to work for nationally recognised vocational qualifications, extending to first degree level and beyond. A recent innovation in France is provision for apprentices to attend publicly-funded vocational lycees for off-the-job education and training.

In Britain, the Government and employers (and, it has to be said, trade unions) have so far shown no real determination to integrate the education system and vocational training for those whose inclinations and aptitudes are not “academic”. A serious move in this direction requires the delivery of a scheme of linked general education and training for our 14 to 19-year-olds, leading to a single nationally recognised, understood and respected scale of qualifications in which employers can have confidence and young people can have pride. Just tampering with the labels on our present unconvincing system will achieve nothing.

Hilary Steedman is senior research fellow at the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics. Her research paper Benchmarking Apprenticeship: UK and Continental Europe Compared can be ordered from the CEP or read at http:cep.lse.ac.ukpubs