Leader: Vocational training

VOCATIONAL education, or teaching which is aimed at learning a trade, has an essential place in modern Scotland and yet it is all too often regarded as the poor relation of post-school learning.

Apprentices at work at Steel Engineering Ltd in Renfrew. Picture: Robert Perry

The report by the Commission for Developing Scotland’s Workforce, chaired by Sir Ian Wood, has produced a sharp reminder that this must change.

The attitudinal bias against vocational education is deeply ingrained, dating back to the days when a school-leaver who went to university was a relatively rare and much-prized occurrence. These days, that is not the case. Around half of Scottish school-leavers now head for university, but the prejudice that this is the gold standard and that any other form of post-school education is second rate remains.

Sir Ian’s remarks, complaining of a “horrible culture” where everyone sees success as meaning a degree, imply that he thinks Scotland now levers too many teenagers into university. If so, that would be wrong-headed. The Scottish economy needs as many people with higher skills as it can produce in order to compete in the global economy. Many university courses are also more vocational than academic – without a supply of engineering graduates, the big oil services company he built up would have been a lot less successful than it has been.

He is right, however, to damn the view that not getting into university and having to settle for a vocational college course is some sort of failure. As he points out, other countries with a more successful economic record than Scotland, such as Germany, accord a much higher status to vocational education, and have lower youth unemployment than the shocking rate of 19 per cent in Scotland.

He is also right to contend that affording parity of esteem to vocational training ought to be a national goal. Being able to operate computer-controlled machinery, for example, demands a high level of ability and skill and can pay salaries which would make some in professional occupations envious. And as Sir Ian knows only too well from his own industry, there is an acute shortage of many of these higher-level skills, which hampers company from reaching their full potential.

The debate which will follow his report should not be about whether he is right or wrong about the objectives, but about how to achieve them at a time when public funds for public education are in short supply. And as Audit Scotland has reported this week, colleges, the main providers of vocational education, have lost £34 million in funding in the last two years.

However Sir Ian’s target is to be achieved – and his idea of putting more certificated vocational education into the secondary curriculum via a partnership with colleges is an interesting suggestion – it will require funding. The challenge for education secretary Michael Russell is how to find those resources without dipping into university funding.