England is wrong to silo academic and technical education

The UK government’s Skills for Jobs White Paper, published in January, heralds an alternative to the traditional academic degree in England. Building on the higher and degree apprenticeships introduced in 2015, Higher Technical Qualifications will be one- and two-year programmes designed to meet the skills shortages of specific occupations just below degree level.

The Augar review, published in 2019, identified this as a large gap in England’s tertiary-level provision and a cause of lagging productivity growth. This review also argued that students are choosing “low value” degree subjects because student loans are available to study them despite their limited economic worth to both the learner and the taxpayer.

This narrative of low-value degrees is a peculiarly English one. It is not nearly so prominent in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, which have devolved responsibility for tertiary education – and which fund a much higher proportion of degree costs from taxation. But this doesn’t mean that a higher proportion of their populations study for degrees. On the contrary, while HTQs are being launched as an innovation in England, Higher National Qualifications are already an established and flourishing part of the sector in Scotland, accounting for 30 per cent of higher education provision.

Scotland has also retained a modular framework for all higher education qualifications, including degree apprenticeships. England, however, has abandoned modularisation for both degree apprenticeships and now HTQs. A strong focus on putting the employer at the centre of tertiary education has become translated into a commitment to linear progression along a single occupational pathway, with everything depending on the final assessment, and based on largely short-term needs. There is, as a result, no provision for credit transfer and exchangeability of “academic” and “technical” credits, and only limited provision for progression to further levels of study.

This is a backwards step – not just in terms of social mobility, but also in terms of meeting rapidly changing labour market needs. The advance of technology is putting a premium on skills that are uniquely human and common to many occupations, such as leadership, teamwork, empathetic communication and complex problem-solving – and on people who can do jobs needing two or more occupational competencies, such as analytics and marketing.

It remains important that occupational competencies are defined and can be assembled into qualifications, but these competencies overlap much more than their division into separate training silos suggests – including with the content of “academic” degrees. And it is not always necessary to achieve every competency in a standard to be job-ready.

This traditional ladder model of job preparation contrasts with what we might call the climbing frame model favoured in both Scotland and Wales. This encompasses a stronger commitment to putting the learner at the centre and recognising that pathways need to be flexible and permeable. England is by no means the only country to stick to the ladder model, but it has gone further than most in differentiating between “academic” and “technical” tracks.

Take Asia, where academic and vocational streams of education are coming closer together, and where the social class segregation typically found in the West is not as prominent. Singapore, for example, has reformed its vocational education so that it offers similar progression to university as its academic routes.

It is possible and desirable to create these pathways without enforcing a choice between “academic” and “technical”, allowing a mixing of modules from both that, as credit accumulates, can be cashed in at various stages for a qualification; we already do this at the Open University with our Open certificates, diplomas and degrees. That is the promise of England’s new lifelong learning loan allowance, funding 480 credits – 4,800 hours – of tertiary learning over a lifetime. But its realisation is threatened by the position that academic and technical programmes should be separate and impermeable.

Greater flexibility is needed to respond quickly to accelerating technological changes and emerging challenges, such as climate change. We also can’t afford to deny large numbers of people the chance to hone the human skills needed for a range of occupations: skills that were once regarded as the sole preserve of liberal education.

Tim Blackman is vice-chancellor of the Open University. This article is based on his Raymond Williams Memorial Lecture, delivered on 1 February.