I don’t honestly understand what they intend to achieve with this. Specialisation right now is quite enough – students get a good, general education up until 16, and then they can specialise in post-16 and/or post-18 education. By setting the bar at 14 for that specialisation, we are encouraging the notion that knowledge and learning is unimportant by making it excessively utilitarian.

Not to mention, the idea that a child can decide what they want to go on to do at 14 is utterly, utterly ridiculous. A 14-year-old is probably still unsure what he wants to do beyond his GCSEs; hell, if he’s sure, there’s a good chance that he’ll change it anyway.

Not only is this policy an affront to any sort of intellectualism, it’s an affront to the very welfare of students and their ability to choose their path. A 14 specialisation system would be a disaster.

If the Tories were going to be truly progressive on education, putting aside the issue of funding and any pretense that any of the big three parties are even slightly progressive on education, they wouldn’t carry on the stagnant educational policy of Labour…as this, along with the more high profile benefits announcement, is ultimately all that this policy is.

it may be that Gove and Willets have twigged that ‘specialisation’ is an easier route back to selective education than reintroducing grammar schools and the 11+. Throw in a few corporate sponsors such as Asda, and you’ve all the cheap service sector labour you want, with the nice retro flavour of revived technical colleges to keep the traditionalists even sweeter (whatever next: secretarial schools?).

The problem is that for many people, for much of the time, school is booring.
Lessons appear to have no connection with life; we need high quality vocational engineering such as car mechanics being taught aerodynamics, thermo dynamics, materials engineering, fluid mechanics,contract law, project management, financial management, etc, etc . Children leaving full time school for work but having to attend lessons relevant to their work( day release and/or night school) may increase peoples interest.

The problem with education is that it is invariably run by people who have spent their whole life in it, think it is relevant to life ( well it is for them as it provides a job) and has a middle class white collar humanities bias. Perhaps, if education systems included the input from craft trained foremen; we would have a system which was far more appealing to working class boys who often loathe school, despise the teachers and create merry hell. The old system where apprentices went to night school to study higher maths, physicics, chemistry , etc , etc did produce such engineers as R Mitchell – The Spitfire and R Chadwich – Lancaster and Vulcan.

Totally disagree. I knew what I wanted to do at 11. Not being a natural school-o-phile I worked only at those GCE (Ha) subjects that would qualify me for my choice and was completely uninterested in the rest. Thus I was in the top 5 for some subjects and the bottom 5 for the others.
This thread so far seems to totally ignore the fact that across the Country are a lot of young people who by the age of 14 are totally alienated from the whole school process, There are a lot of reasons for this, but a significant reason is that they find the learning environment within our schools constricting, degrading and distasteful. Very often these same young people will spend hours in a garage or fashion shop or hairdressers, doing little jobs to make themselves useful for little or no reward apart from being in an environment they can relate to.

There is the additional problem that the present government uses the education system to disguise the structural unemployment problem. University lecturers, FE and Sixth Form heads are very aware of this. Young people who are entirely unsuited by inclination to academics are shoehorned into courses they have no interest in, with predictable results. The students themselves know why they are kept in education rather than getting on with their lives and bitterly resent as they see it, being forced to stay as children . There are places for the academically inclined. They are called Grammar Schools and they do a superb job in giving academically inclined young people from all walks of life a though grounding in academic pursuits, We used to have technical schools ( I went to Bromley Technical School) where young people with a technical/engineering bent were given an education that they could accept. We also had a wonderful Secondary Modern School, Quernmore School, which, pound- for- pound was probably the best achieving school of the lot.

Many, indeed a majority, of young people see education not as an end in itself, but as a means to an end. Often a love of intellectual pursuits come later in life. The Open University, whose scope and reach has, alas, and to the credit of none of the big 21/2 become somewhat truncated. Adult Evening Courses, now but a dim memory, were set up by Atlee’s government for the express intention of enabling people who wanted to to study everything from hat-making to philosophy.

I am lucky to have grown up in what was probably a Golden Age of educational opportunity. Technical Schools and Colleges are, I think, a step back towards that era between 1945 and 1970, where a working class person like me had a realistic chance of achieving my life’s desire,

3. atropos . Excellent points.

“This thread so far seems to totally ignore the fact that across the Country are a lot of young people who by the age of 14 are totally alienated from the whole school process”

Far from ignoring it, my post out right states that the current way we school kids is not appropriate.

I can understand the rigid curriculum in a time when you were essentially just making sure that a kid took in some knowledge and social conditioning and went on to do what their fathers and mothers did, but now the whole idea is completely outdated.

I agree that teaching methods we currently use don’t suit everyone, there are great examples of kids that were previously “unteachable” in *core subjects* that were engaged by new techniques and new ways of thinking about education.

Technical schools and colleges are a bad idea, to me, unless you as a child have already consigned yourself to a singular path…and I have to ask atropos whether you knew what you wanted to do all the way through your teenage years because of a strong conviction (which is entirely possible, not saying it isn’t) or because a lack of any other option from your perception.

Now, regional technical and scientific teaching bodies, specialising in taking core and basic knowledge and enhancing it, bodies that don’t confine themselves to the boundaries of single schools. That I can get on board with. Why should I, as a child who’s parents can’t afford to get me specifically to a city with one of these specialist colleges not get the impact of the specialised teaching and advanced knowledge on offer? Because I’m at one school and not another? On the flip side why should I as that child have to move away from what is otherwise a good school for my core learning (in purely arbitrary and theoretical example terms here!) to get that specialist knowledge?

If I was being radical, which I honestly believe this country (and others) needs to be about education over the next decade, I would say that we abandon the idea that teachers belong to one school, and that a single curriculum fits everyone. I would have a system where kids were funded to take advantage of regional centres of expertise, to mix with other kids that are just like them with just as much excitement about that particular subject. I would also recognise that along with this new way of teaching comes a new way of assessment based entirely on an intrinsic understanding of a child’s ability rather than an understanding of a child’s ability to memorise on one particular day.

For example, you say…

“Very often these same young people will spend hours in a garage or fashion shop or hairdressers, doing little jobs to make themselves useful for little or no reward apart from being in an environment they can relate to.”

Why can’t this very action be part of our education system?

You’re quite right that education is a means to an end, and I hope I’ve not made out that I think otherwise…but the way to deliver this is not to restrict people’s horizons in a world where the jobs they think they want as they enter their teens may well not exist as they knew them when they enter adulthood.

“Children leaving full time school for work but having to attend lessons relevant to their work( day release and/or night school) may increase peoples interest.”

Very good point Charlie2, there’s a lot to be said for specific and specialised education when and where it is needed. For a start the appetite and desire to learn is actually there in such situations.

” …….. they would develop an educational infrastructure that broke down the physical boundaries of schooling and allow any student at any secondary school the ability to harness the knowledge and best practice of our nation’s experts as necessary”.

That would call for a lot of CRB checks, Lee
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/authors-boycott-schools-over-sexoffence-register-1748267.html

Actually, this is a very good idea – my daughter’s school have invited Ken Livingston and Shami Chakrabarti amongst others to talk to the children – these sessions went down a storm from what I hear.

6. Technically it shouldn’t involve much, if any, more CRB checks as you wouldn’t necessarily be creating vast amounts of jobs. As far as I’m concerned you’d be dispersing the way that education is delivered rather than increasing the amount of education delivered.

You can’t have every school with the top staff for each subject, so why try, when in the modern age it’s easy enough to move between locations in a region or, shock horror, engage with people indirectly through modern technology. Do you need a CRB check if you’re never in the same room as the children?

All joking aside, CRB checks are awful instruments for protecting anything other than our consciences. Glad to hear that your daughter’s school is open to outside influences.