Vince Cable: Where next for further and higher education?

Reported by Michelle Morris, NERC-Funded CSaP Policy Intern (May 2014 - July 2014)

On 23 April, Vince Cable visited Cambridge University to deliver a detailed account of the current state of our post-school training system.

Anthony Crosland, a Labour Party politician, gave a speech in 1965 addressing his concerns over the gaping divide between our post school systems - academic education on the one hand, and further education and vocational training on the other. He warned that Britain would not survive if we were to downgrade the non-university technical and professional sector, and that we needed to move away from our snobbish, caste-ridden, hierarchical obsession with university status.

In his talk, Vince Cable gave a detailed account of the current state of our post-school training system and how we again need to close the gap that Anthony Crosland set out to do over half a century ago.

You can listen to Vince Cable's talk here:

"We have fallen chronically short of the levels of skills needed for sustained sustainable growth"

Anthony Crosland’s prescription to narrow the gap between university education and vocational training was a system built around polytechnics. However, by 1991, the polytechnics had been absorbed into the university sector. Britain developed a system that was very distorted and only 10% of the youth cohort is now engaged in post-school vocational qualifications. This is in direct contrast to 20% in USA and 50% in Germany and Austria. The consequences for having this distorted system in England is that we have fallen chronically short of the levels of skills needed for sustained sustainable growth. In engineering alone, we need 850,000 engineers in the next 8 years just to replace those who are retiring, let alone provide anymore due to growth.

"Training and skills in the UK lags behind other countries"

So what can we do to reform the system? Cable suggested creating a system of national colleges loosely based on the idea of polytechnics, which Crosland introduced in the 1960s. Some have already been put in place for example, a college has been developed to meet the needs of High Speed 2. Cable envisaged a network of these advanced/national colleges providing advanced skills and a new tier within the post-school training system. Secondly, he suggested breathing life into higher apprenticeships or degree level qualifications that are achieved through a vocational role.

Finally, Cable highlighted how we needed to trust further educational colleges to be more independent institutions. "Training and skills in the UK lags behind other countries" he said, "and urgently needs addressing to improve our future prospects for sustainable and substantial growth."

Banner image from Reith Lectures on Flickr