Secondary Education
Debate between Lord Lilley and Michael Gove(12 years, 6 months ago)
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Michael Gove
Again, the hon. Lady talks good sense on education and is absolutely right. One strength of the Northern Ireland system is its emphasis on greater rigour and stretch in mathematics, and more and more students are achieving those qualifications. We have sought to pay mathematics graduates more to encourage them to consider teaching, and to create new centres of excellence, new 16-to-18 free schools in mathematics, but there is so much more to do, and I look forward to working with her on that.
Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con)
Does my right hon. Friend agree that the weakness that has characterised the British education system for a century and a half has been a failure to produce enough people with technical and vocational qualifications, partly because of a presumption that they were for the less able and less academic? Can he reassure me that his reforms will tackle that weakness and ensure that technical and vocational qualifications that are of the utmost rigour and held in the highest esteem are available to all?
Michael Gove
My right hon. Friend makes a very good point. One weakness in the implementation of the Education Act 1944 was that the third strand, technical schools, did not receive the investment that they should have done, and as a result a weakness in technical education, which this country has had since 1851, was reinforced.
The advent of university technical colleges, an idea pioneered by Kenneth Baker and Andrew Adonis, is going some way to dealing with the problem, and Alison Wolf’s report, which has injected additional rigour into vocational qualifications, also helps to meet that challenge, but we need to do more, including reforming the funding of further education colleges in order to strengthen vocational subjects.