Mike Cherry, national policy officer for the Federation of Small Businesses, said: "We have to make sure that vocational is equal to academic".
His aim is to make the system broader, more flexible, and more rigorous, stretching the cleverest, while encouraging the least able, giving academic and vocational qualifications equal weight, and ensuring that more people have the skills employers need.The central proposal is a new diploma, with four levels of difficulty, to be introduced over the next ten years.
"Vocational skills are equal to academic skills, and apprenticeships can offer excellent career progression".
Better careers advice The government's new Careers and Enterprise Company must ensure that every school fulfils its legal requirement to provide genuinely impartial and independent careers advice to all young people, with vocational routes given equal weighting to academic ones.
However, the Ofsted report concludes that the rise in these poor-quality courses has devalued the brand just when there is a concerted effort to put vocational learning on an equal footing with academic studies.
He built a groundswell of support behind a plan to put academic and vocational qualifications on an equal footing, by introducing a new overarching diploma that would include in it details of any A-level pass or BTec qualification gained by students.
Corralling young people into vocational factory farms does not equal progress.
But as the report sadly suggests, the nation still lags in living up to the law's promise when it comes to ensuring male and female students equal access to vocational programs critical for seizing higher-paying job opportunities.
2. What more can we do to ensure that both the academic pathway and the vocational pathway are treated with equal respect as they are in leading education systems?
Vocational schools also appeared in greater numbers.
