AT LEAST 100,000 secondary school pupils should be spending most of their week in the world of work, the head of the Government’s qualifications body said yesterday.
Ken Boston said that a new legal duty on schools to provide “work-related learning” from next month should act as a catalyst for major reform of the curriculum for at least one in ten students.
All secondary pupils will be required to take part in work-related learning from the age 14 as part of a revised national curriculum. Schools will be expected to reorganise the timetable “to motivate students and encourage achievement”.
Dr Boston, the chief executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), said that greater emphasis should be placed on vocational courses for students who did not enjoy academic study. Greater experience of working life would improve motivation and discipline for such students as they saw the relevance of their studies.
“There is a proportion of youngsters at 14 who should be doing really strongly vocational education, a connection with the world of work. Not because they are destined to become plumbers or builders, but because that is the sort of learning that turns them on,” Dr Boston told The Times.
Advertisement
“My hunch is that it is more than 10 per cent of the cohort and it is not just the behaviourly disordered kids. There is a particular group of children for whom this really would have great potential as a focal point around which their education moves.”
There are about 500,000 students in each of the last two years of secondary school, which would mean 100,000 youngsters spending most of their time on vocational study. Dr Boston said that such teenagers should spend the “best part of their week” on work-related courses, either in schools, further education colleges or with employers.
The new curriculum gave schools flexibility to tailor the week to suit individual pupils’ needs. Guidance sent to schools by the QCA emphasises the importance of work-related study for students “as an essential part of preparation for an adult life in which they can contribute to the country’s economic well-being”.
It also states, however, that the requirement should be “interpreted in different ways for different students”, with some having “an extended work- related learning programme with a college, training provider or employer”.
The guidance continued: “A stronger and more dynamic relationship between schools and local businesses should be fostered by the new requirement.” Dr Boston recalled that in the Australian state of New South Wales, where he was director-general of education and training before arriving at the QCA, companies selected youngsters competitively for work-related courses, gave them uniforms and paid them as employees. Some students were so enthused by their experiences that they began to wear their working uniforms to school.
Advertisement
“The workplace is a very disciplined environment: that is where they learn things like punctuality and working in teams. I have seen employers have no hesitation in telling a kid to get his hair cut before he comes back next week or to remove the ring in his nose, and I think youngsters respond to that,” Dr Boston said. “There is immense benefit in everyone having an understanding that there is a world of work out there and what it is like to have to make a quid.”
Dr Boston did not suggest that companies in Britain should pay students, although he noted that employers already spent £24 billion on training and education each year. He said that more work should be done to bring that training within a national framework of qualifications.
The QCA’s board of governors also contained many senior figures from industry and there was “very strong interest” in strengthening the connections between schools and business.
The Government has allowed schools in recent years to “disapply” individual pupils from certain lessons so that they take part in vocational study in colleges or with local employers for up to two days a week. However, the new regulations go further. Schools will no longer need permission to disapply pupils, but instead can allow them to drop lessons in design and technology and foreign languages in order to create time for work-related learning.
From next month, the academic subjects that students will be required to study after 14 will be English, mathematics, science and information and communications technology. Dr Boston said that he believed that schools should be compelled to enter all pupils for GCSEs in at least some subjects. It was unacceptable that 30,000 currently left school each year with no qualifications after 11 years of education. Although students are required to study certain subjects, schools are not obliged to enter them for exams.
Advertisement
There have been suspicions in recent years that some schools have not put students forward for GCSEs in order to improve their positions in league tables of performance.