Education: Vocational Subjects

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, I also thank the Minister for repeating the Statement, and we, too, welcome the Wolf report. We particularly welcome the Government’s commitment to improving the quality, status and availability of vocational education.

I will pick up two concerns that I heard expressed earlier today in another place. The Chairman of Committees was concerned that, although it is welcome that schools will be made accountable for how they deliver vocational education, teachers and parents may find it rather confusing to have another system alongside the English bacc for holding schools accountable. Given the Government’s commitment to improving the quality of vocational courses, once that has been done to the Government’ satisfaction, would they consider adding an additional section to the English bacc to include vocational courses, and perhaps arts and cultural courses, once they are convinced of the quality of those? Of course we all agree with the objective of giving young people a broad and balanced curriculum. Once we have achieved that quality, surely there is a case for expanding the English bacc.

Secondly, on the amount of timetable time given to the English bacc, will the Minister confirm, as his right honourable friend the Secretary of State did in another place this morning, that the 80 per cent of timetable that is supposed to be spent on English bacc subjects is only advisory and not statutory; and that schools are very open and able to allow young people to choose subjects which would means that they spend, say, 40 per cent on vocational subjects and not just 20?

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

I am grateful to my noble friend for her welcome for the Wolf review and her recognition of the importance of vocational education. One of the performance measures that we are keen to try to develop is a destination measure for schools and colleges so that we can see where children and young people go on to when they leave, and so that parents can see how a school or college is doing, whether it is vocational or academic.

We are keen to have more information generally. As that spreads and people are able to look at data and find their own ways of using them, the measure that my noble friend mentioned of seeing how schools and colleges might be doing, particularly as regards vocational or technical subjects, will develop of its own accord. The point of the EBacc is to try to have a small, narrow basis on which to shine a spotlight, particularly on academic subjects. It is not meant to betoken any kind of judgment and is obviously not compulsory. It is not a qualification in its own right. We want schools to decide for themselves whether it is something that they want to pursue. As my noble friend flagged, there is no statutory requirement on timetabling around the EBacc. There is, indeed, no statutory requirement that anyone should offer the EBacc at all.