For years working class students have been punished and mocked by a system set up to fail them. After benefitting from vocational school subjects herself, Ellie Fry writes that Andy Burnham’s radical overhaul is long overdue
Finally, some radical change to an education system that has failed entire generations of working-class students.
Teenagers in England will now be able to study new vocational GCSEs and access more work experience opportunities under Labour’s new reforms.
Prime Minister Andy Burnham has promised to “value the hard hat as much as the graduation cap” in his overhaul, with new courses such as construction, child development and creative media production alongside compulsory GCSE subjects like English, Maths, and Science.
Crucially, these new vocational subjects will be equal to STEM subjects – doing away with the archaic elitism that has been entrenched in our schools for over a decade thanks to the Tories. Some will replace BTECs, which have long been wrongfully steeped in stigma.
The promising new system comes against a bleak backdrop – more than one million young people are currently out of work or training. A disastrous consequence of hierarchical policy cruelly designed to keep disadvantaged students at the bottom of the pecking order.
Michael Gove, the man who butchered our education system by abolishing varied subject pathways that long helped working-class kids to thrive, is no doubt the architect of this terrible NEET crisis. But thank God, it isn’t up to him to solve it.
As a working-class journalist from a small town in the Midlands, I know all too well how empowering vocational subjects can be for people like me. I studied some BTECs, both at GCSE and A-level, at a state school. Without this varied education pathway, I wouldn’t have been able to go to university.
After my undergrad, I went onto study a competitive master’s course that accepted only 18 applicants each year internationally. It was this unorthodox route that has led me to the same career prospects as my grammar school-educated peers. It was never an ambition problem, as the Tories love to paint it out to be, but simply an access one.
Burnham, too, knows just how important it is to ditch a one-size-fits-all approach to education. He would have not been able to go to Cambridge had Gove’s aristocratic English Bac system been in place when he was studying.
After state school, he studied English at Fitzwilliam in Cambridge – a college founded to support students from varied, non-traditional backgrounds who might otherwise struggle with fees. Now, despite not going to Eton, Burnham holds the highest office in the land. Take that, Gove.
The silver spoon Tories were desperate to try and recreate their own education instead of championing equality for bright but less affluent children. And the domino effect is devastating.
Working-class children are the lowest-performing large demographic in the school system in England, with an independent inquiry concluding this summer that such children are being gravely failed.
Just 36% of white working-class pupils achieve a Grade 4 or above in English and Maths GCSE, compared with 72% of all pupils not on free school meals.
And it has nothing to do with aspiration or effort – students at less prestigious schools in poorer areas usually have fewer subject options, and are more likely to be offered BTECs. So a bias against vocational qualifications was always a bias against the working-class. When they were removed, so were opportunities.
Student drop-outs told the inquiry that if more vocational subjects were on offer, they would have stayed on. Bridget Phillipson, who was Education Secretary at the time, says multiple generations had been “robbed”.
Education elitism is a rot that needs weeding out. For too long, we have not only allowed inequality to thrive, but have glorified it as being a symbol of ‘success’.
Sir Keir Starmer laid the groundwork with the Children’s Wellbeing bill and apprenticeships overhaul, but Burnham’s plans are bolder – and come from personal experience. He knows the stakes, and these transformative measures will help everyone succeed.