Vocational Education

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  • Created by: bex77
  • Created on: 10-03-21 15:09
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  • Vocational Education
    • Relates to career or specific work roles
      • Students are prepared for a particular form of skilled employment that requires strong practical skills and training (e.g. mechanic, electrician, plumber)
    • Sociological Perspectives
      • Functionalists
        • Schultz says human capital (investment in skills of humans) meets the needs of the economy.
        • Positive
      • New Right
        • Boosts the economy
        • Positive
      • Marxists
        • Gives the working class a second class education which forces them into working class jobs
          • Prevents social mobility
        • Negative
    • Main focus of vocational education in contemporary Britain has been on:
      • Improving the quality of the basic skills of the workforce, particularly those of 14-18 year olds
        • This has become more important in recent years because of high levels of unemployment among young people with around 16% of 16-24 year olds unemployed in 2014
      • Ending the status division between academic and vocational qualifications so that practical, technical and vocational education is integrated with academic learning (such as in AS and A levels and uni degrees) so they all have more value in the market
    • Measures to achieve the main focuses:
      • Work experience programmes to ease the transition from school to work and help them to get jobs successfully and carry them out well, with a better understanding of work and the economy
      • Expansion of post 16 education and training, more government training schemes closely related to world of work and concerned with learning work related skills, e.g NVQs, BTECs, apprenticeships
        • GCSEs and A levels made more demanding so students were better qualified
      • Stronger emphasis on key skills in use and application of number, and in communication, IT and problem solving as well as basic literacy and numeracy skills in the national curriculum
        • These are skills that most employers found school leavers lack as well as appropriate attitudes to and an awareness of working life (CBI/Pearson's Gateway to growth education and skills survey of business leaders 2014)

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