I agree with the diagnosis, but I wonder whether we're still treating the symptoms rather than the disease.
For over fifty years successive governments have introduced new qualifications, agencies and funding models—MSC schemes, NVQs, GNVQs, Diplomas, Apprenticeships, UTCs, T Levels and more. Many contained good ideas, yet few survived long enough to become embedded.
My concern is that the root cause is institutional rather than curricular.
Schools optimise for the measures by which they are judged. If university progression is the dominant measure of success, it is entirely rational for schools to devote their effort to that pathway. As the old management adage says: you manage what you measure.
Likewise, governments repeatedly redesign qualifications because qualifications are politically easier to change than institutions.
Perhaps the real challenge is not designing a better qualification but creating enduring technical institutions that command genuine parity of esteem and are sufficiently stable to survive changes of administration.
Until we address incentives, governance and institutional stability, we'll continue to redesign the labels while leaving the underlying system exposed to political fashion and short-term funding cycles.
Perhaps the question isn't "What should replace T Levels?" but "Why have fifty years of well-intentioned reforms failed to produce a technical education system with the same confidence and permanence as our university sector?"
I very much agree with this. I think that the absorption of the UK's 'Colleges of Advanced Technology' into an undifferentiated university sector was a critical departure point.
Sadly, the prejudice against learning a vocational skill at university remains prevalent. With our encouragement, one of my children pursued a vocational course lasting eight years. She is now a doctor!
In 1997, my book 21st Century Schools: Educating for the Information Age was published. In it, I highlighted the value and importance of high-quality vocational education and training. Yet the debate between vocational and academic education has changed remarkably little.
Perhaps I should design a new cover and try to sell the remaining copies gathering dust in my garage.
I do so agree, but (there's always a 'but'), some univeristy courses do themselves and their students no favours. I'm thinking of language courses that belittle educating students to speak and write the language, Accounting courses that eschew providing their students with competence in bookkeeping and so on. On many occasions academics in Arts disciplines have told me that their courses taught students to think and be critical with the implication that courses in professional disciplines and even the sciences didn't. Some students graduating in Maths and Sciences are funcionally illiterate because their courses didn't require them to communicate with other people. Less academic presiousness would help to meet the ligitimate expecation, that many incoming students have, that after three years they will be practiacally competent in the subject they have come to study.
When you write that "Technical education can be liberating, liberal and intellectually ambitious" , it draws the observation that sometimes it is none of these things and this distinction is important. When education , of any variety, loses the capacity to be liberating, liberal and intellectually ambitious it decays into the transmission of dogma. Far too much of our present education system (including much of what is labelled higher) suffers from a lack of genuine criticality. The real debate is not about the title of education (be it technical, professional or academic) but the quality and specifically the capacity to transform lives This is why the arts deserve support. Education is more than a commodity or a service it must embody the capacity to change.
Just to remind the good professor and his readers that Mathematics is indeed a profession. The Instititute of Mathematics and its Applications awards the Chartered Mathematician designation, and the Royal Statistical Society similarly Chartered Statistician. The two bodies are members of the Alliance for Data Science Professionals, which is developing a similar status for Data Science.
One component of professional status in these and, I dare say, most other professions is the requirement for continuing professional development, something missing from the view of education as being something that people do up to the age of 21 and then are done with forever.
Indeed. And of course you have Chartered Scientists etc. My instinct is there are some differences between those disciplines that people enter expecting it to lead to a profession and those that have a professional practice associated with it. Point well taken.
A well reasoned piece that i entirely agree with. The stigma of technical education in the UK is holding us back and limiting our young people. There's something there around status and class that's both legacy and unhelpful. Technical Education needs a better Publicist!!
Hopefully government intervention on skills, post 16 and impending LLE will help and create technical education rooted in pride, and secure employability pathways for all. But then of course.....Ai will impact too, so there's digital to consider as well! The challenges never end.
There are two debates that seem destined never to be resolved.
The first is the old argument between the Arts & Humanities and STEM, dating back at least to C. P. Snow's famous lecture on The Two Cultures. Every few years the debate returns, as though society must somehow choose (or set priorities) between science and engineering on one hand, and literature, history and philosophy on the other.
The second is the equally familiar argument between technical education and academic education. Should universities prepare people directly for employment, or should they stretch minds, cultivate curiosity and develop intellectual independence?
Like the perennial debate about funding social care in the UK, neither argument is ever likely to be settled because both are based on a false premise. They assume a choice where none exists.
I agree with Professor Serious that these are not genuine dichotomies. People possess different talents, different aspirations and different ways of learning. There is no single educational model that suits everyone. The mistake is to assume that every learner should pass through essentially the same institutional system, or one of juts two models.
The real problem is that the Higher Education Institution itself has become the unit of thinking. Universities increasingly optimise around their own business plans, estate utilisation, league tables, recruitment targets and financial survival. Students become inputs into institutional machinery rather than individuals seeking to maximise the value of their education. As so often happens, the system has become optimised for sustaining itself rather than for delivering the greatest value to those it exists to serve. But their business model is broken.
The answer is therefore not simply to make today's system a little more efficient. It is to rethink it altogether.
We need a new paradigm for higher education.
That new paradigm should not begin with institutions. Nor should it begin with traditional subject disciplines that have changed remarkably little for decades. It should begin with the individual learner and ask a much simpler question:
How do we maximise lifetime value?
Value to the learner, through intellectual growth, confidence, adaptability and rewarding careers.
Value to employers and innovators, by producing people capable not merely of filling today's jobs but of creating tomorrow's industries.
Value to society, by developing citizens who can think critically, collaborate across disciplines and respond creatively to unprecedented challenges.
Value to the nation: economic prosperity.
The uncomfortable truth is that we can no longer afford to maintain a higher education ecosystem built on the assumption that every town requires its own comprehensive university offering much the same collection of degrees. The distinction between globally leading research-intensive universities and institutions whose missions are primarily teaching, regional engagement or vocational development has become increasingly blurred. Yet the costs continue to rise while too many graduates question whether they have received commensurate value.
This is not an argument against specialist scholarship. On the contrary, the world will always need institutions that pursue deep disciplinary excellence, fundamental research and advanced professional education. Those universities are national assets (as are their maths departments!). But they are not, and should not be expected to be, the model for educating the majority of the population.
Instead, we should encourage the emergence of new kinds of institution.
These would be designed not around nineteenth-century faculties but around twenty-first-century careers. They would combine academic stretch with technical capability, entrepreneurial thinking with digital fluency, creativity with quantitative reasoning. Their success would be measured not by the number of departments they contain, nor by the size of their estate, but by the value they create for learners, employers and the nation.
The future of higher education is therefore unlikely to consist of making today's universities marginally better. It will consist of creating new educational institutions with entirely different missions.
The question is not whether this change will happen.
It is whether we choose to design that future deliberately, or wait until the present system is overtaken by events.
Of course I agree with you and have tried to practice this approach in my own teaching for well over thirty years. However I think the focus on further/higher education is not where this should start. UK education should be transformed from a much earlier age. Specifically secondary education should follow such a model as the one you propose with no opt outs and no choices for young people. A more basic, life and personal experience affirming syllabus should be evolved which does not focus on exam routes to university but instead utilises thé rich potential of the knowledge, experience and opinions of young people themselves underpinned by the basic/essential educational requirements to prosper in a complex society. With such an underpinning there is time enough at 14-16 to decide with confidence which further learning routes they wish to follow.
Very well expressed and interesting that this theme of new kinds of institution is shared in other comments. I have some sort of idea about how we rebuild the Victorian 'Technical Institute' but perhaps for another day.
There's a lot to agree with in your piece including "building an education system with no dead ends", enabling learners to "move easily" between phases and sectors, making "lifelong learning the default"; and you are right to be irritated with the account of education that crudely opposes technical and academic routes.
The piece made me reflect.
I qualified to teach in technical colleges in 1977 with a PGCE (Technical) from one of the four institutions in England where you could study for this qualification.
Many and possibly most of my fellow PGCE students had previously worked in jobs like nursing, bricklaying, and accounting; and at that time the pay in FE and Polytechnics (we were one bargaining group and the overwhelming bulk of employers were local authorities) was a lot better than in schools.
So teaching in a technical college was a relatively desirable line of work. I got a full time job in Sheffield at one of Sheffield's five technical colleges, all of which, at that time, were rammed with students on day release courses ranging from apprenticeships to HNCs and HNDs, cheek by jowl with younger and older people doing vocational qualifications in things like accountancy, dentistry, hairdressing, how to be a chef, and with a full programme of evening classes including A levels, language classes, and leisure-related learning, and a wide range of non-accredited programmes.
If I sound a bit misty-eyed about this time it is because I am. What made FE so special? Researcher Beryl Tipton became particularly interested in what she terms “the multi-purpose educational function of FE”. She wrote, in 1973:
“For in the heterogeneity of their educational and occupational backgrounds, its members of staff are probably unlike those of any other type of educational institution in the country”.
She continued:
“a college’s staff structure is almost a microcosm of the country’s social divisions featuring, as it does, all of the following: graduates and non-graduates; industrially experienced and non-experienced; craftsmen, white-collar workers, managers, social scientists and artists; men and women; and the relatively young through to the relatively old.”
It was, above all, the heterogeneity that Tipton pinpoints that made me excitedly feel at home as soon as I stepped into an FE college. It still does, even though what FE now does is in many respects a pale reflection of how things were 50 years ago.
There've been many changes:
* a deterioration in the relative pay and status of FE teachers - so that moving from plumbing to teaching aspirant plumbers will involve taking a pay-cut;
* a steady loss of political focus on the work that goes on in colleges (is this about the change?);
* a drop in the number of people in public life who had came through FE (we used to call them the HNC brigade, they were everywhere, and they knew what FE did);
* a reduction in the proportion of school leavers doing work-based qualifications that have them studying and working at the same time (this in parallel with the bigger proportion of school leavers going to university).
But the biggest change (alongside the shift in the UK economy towards services from manufacturing) is the way that employers (and unions!) are no longer much involved in FE (through the day-release system; through standards setting; through local associations). There used to be coordination. There is very little now. The free-rider phenomenon allows employers to poach from others rather than (expensively) "grow their own". This is in contrast to how things are done in, several other developed economies, for example Germany or Switzerland, where, as Sam Freedman explains (https://samf.substack.com/p/burnhams-first-mistake), employers are required to engage. Instead there's carping from employers about the need for students to be "work-ready" (I cannot hear the term without thinking "oven-ready") when they finish a course, in denial of the obvious truth that none of us were actually "work-ready" when we started work (it was the work that eventually made us ready!).
Demanding apprenticeships, T-Levels, and their HE equivalents (where employer engagement and training for the regulated professions has tended to preserve the coordination that has been lost in FE?), are part of the solution. But underlying it all, employers and established workers "schooling" trainees in the technology and culture and nitty-gritty of particular kinds of work is the key activity of which there needs to be much more, and this will not happen without a big change in how employers act. Conceivably, devolution of skills funding may help fix: if Mayors are made to prioritise what needs to be done; and if a wide enough range of employers step up to the challenge. Unfortunately these are both big ifs. (And talk of hard hats vs graduation caps does not help at all.)
I am struggling to reply to this because the whole language and frame of the discourse is part of the problem. People are different along different types of ability and interests, and societies cultural and economic requirements are likewise not simply aligned. For some people there is a relatively short distance to go before they hit their current limits, maybe tuning a car engine and elementary algebra. At the other extreme there are a few who can learn and acquire new skills apparently without limit, mathematicians who move to China and there build themselves a house. In the middle there are the majority, who have some skills in a few direcctions, enough to make a living and enjoy life. I am supposed to be a biochemist but pride myself on scything and hanging gates. I am a bad mathematician with a limit just beyond Fourier Analysis.
Education costs money and resources, and yields result to society in very unequal ways. If someone wants to be a bricklayer they can be taught quite cheaply and quickly. They will do the same work as many other bricklayers with the reward and recognition that goes with being part of a large group. If someone else wants to learn study physics then training them will be much harder and require more resources from the rest of society, but offers a much greater reward for everyone. It is not that bricklaying is not worth learning, but they can teach themselves in their spare time, like Feynman and safe-cracking. It is worth noting that people trained in 'academic' subjects are very often multi-talented in fields where they have no formal training. It is not elitist in the pejorative sense to train an elite. It is simply that elites are expensive to train but pay back disproportionally more.
So coming back to educational institutions. We need true diversity. In my grammar school I was taught metal working, I learnt skills I still use today. The only achievements the school recognised were sporting. I have an accountant friend who says she did technical drawing at school and loved it. What a school struggles to do is to provide an environment where non-academic pupils can be stretched, for example teach your future joiners how to design and build chairs, or classic marquetry. The world is changing so teach them how to learn a new skill, not learn yesterdays method by rote. Essentially do not make vocational education vocational.
The labels and the qualifications are trivia and should not be discussed. What we do need is funding so that schools can offer facilities that draw people out and where they can produce work that they are proud of. The apprentices in the past went on as journeymen to learn new skills and then to produce their masterpiece. That pride in our work is what is missing from our present system.
Postscript. I am proud that I can stretch my scythe to its limit, wrecking it's blade, secure in my ability to hammer it back into shape, and understanding just what is happening to the iron crystals as I reforge it.
I agree with the diagnosis, but I wonder whether we're still treating the symptoms rather than the disease.
For over fifty years successive governments have introduced new qualifications, agencies and funding models—MSC schemes, NVQs, GNVQs, Diplomas, Apprenticeships, UTCs, T Levels and more. Many contained good ideas, yet few survived long enough to become embedded.
My concern is that the root cause is institutional rather than curricular.
Schools optimise for the measures by which they are judged. If university progression is the dominant measure of success, it is entirely rational for schools to devote their effort to that pathway. As the old management adage says: you manage what you measure.
Likewise, governments repeatedly redesign qualifications because qualifications are politically easier to change than institutions.
Perhaps the real challenge is not designing a better qualification but creating enduring technical institutions that command genuine parity of esteem and are sufficiently stable to survive changes of administration.
Until we address incentives, governance and institutional stability, we'll continue to redesign the labels while leaving the underlying system exposed to political fashion and short-term funding cycles.
Perhaps the question isn't "What should replace T Levels?" but "Why have fifty years of well-intentioned reforms failed to produce a technical education system with the same confidence and permanence as our university sector?"
I very much agree with this. I think that the absorption of the UK's 'Colleges of Advanced Technology' into an undifferentiated university sector was a critical departure point.
An excellent essay. Thank you.
Sadly, the prejudice against learning a vocational skill at university remains prevalent. With our encouragement, one of my children pursued a vocational course lasting eight years. She is now a doctor!
In 1997, my book 21st Century Schools: Educating for the Information Age was published. In it, I highlighted the value and importance of high-quality vocational education and training. Yet the debate between vocational and academic education has changed remarkably little.
Perhaps I should design a new cover and try to sell the remaining copies gathering dust in my garage.
I do so agree, but (there's always a 'but'), some univeristy courses do themselves and their students no favours. I'm thinking of language courses that belittle educating students to speak and write the language, Accounting courses that eschew providing their students with competence in bookkeeping and so on. On many occasions academics in Arts disciplines have told me that their courses taught students to think and be critical with the implication that courses in professional disciplines and even the sciences didn't. Some students graduating in Maths and Sciences are funcionally illiterate because their courses didn't require them to communicate with other people. Less academic presiousness would help to meet the ligitimate expecation, that many incoming students have, that after three years they will be practiacally competent in the subject they have come to study.
'precious' 'legitimate' (sigh).
I am a big fan of the South Korean Meister High School model - https://en.sedaily.com/society/2026/06/16/korea-adds-6-semiconductor-ai-meister-high-schools-with-5
In some ways that was what 'University Technical Colleges' were meant to be, but they have never received the structural support required.
When you write that "Technical education can be liberating, liberal and intellectually ambitious" , it draws the observation that sometimes it is none of these things and this distinction is important. When education , of any variety, loses the capacity to be liberating, liberal and intellectually ambitious it decays into the transmission of dogma. Far too much of our present education system (including much of what is labelled higher) suffers from a lack of genuine criticality. The real debate is not about the title of education (be it technical, professional or academic) but the quality and specifically the capacity to transform lives This is why the arts deserve support. Education is more than a commodity or a service it must embody the capacity to change.
Just to remind the good professor and his readers that Mathematics is indeed a profession. The Instititute of Mathematics and its Applications awards the Chartered Mathematician designation, and the Royal Statistical Society similarly Chartered Statistician. The two bodies are members of the Alliance for Data Science Professionals, which is developing a similar status for Data Science.
One component of professional status in these and, I dare say, most other professions is the requirement for continuing professional development, something missing from the view of education as being something that people do up to the age of 21 and then are done with forever.
Indeed. And of course you have Chartered Scientists etc. My instinct is there are some differences between those disciplines that people enter expecting it to lead to a profession and those that have a professional practice associated with it. Point well taken.
A well reasoned piece that i entirely agree with. The stigma of technical education in the UK is holding us back and limiting our young people. There's something there around status and class that's both legacy and unhelpful. Technical Education needs a better Publicist!!
Hopefully government intervention on skills, post 16 and impending LLE will help and create technical education rooted in pride, and secure employability pathways for all. But then of course.....Ai will impact too, so there's digital to consider as well! The challenges never end.
I think the matter of class is strongly bound into this!
There are two debates that seem destined never to be resolved.
The first is the old argument between the Arts & Humanities and STEM, dating back at least to C. P. Snow's famous lecture on The Two Cultures. Every few years the debate returns, as though society must somehow choose (or set priorities) between science and engineering on one hand, and literature, history and philosophy on the other.
The second is the equally familiar argument between technical education and academic education. Should universities prepare people directly for employment, or should they stretch minds, cultivate curiosity and develop intellectual independence?
Like the perennial debate about funding social care in the UK, neither argument is ever likely to be settled because both are based on a false premise. They assume a choice where none exists.
I agree with Professor Serious that these are not genuine dichotomies. People possess different talents, different aspirations and different ways of learning. There is no single educational model that suits everyone. The mistake is to assume that every learner should pass through essentially the same institutional system, or one of juts two models.
The real problem is that the Higher Education Institution itself has become the unit of thinking. Universities increasingly optimise around their own business plans, estate utilisation, league tables, recruitment targets and financial survival. Students become inputs into institutional machinery rather than individuals seeking to maximise the value of their education. As so often happens, the system has become optimised for sustaining itself rather than for delivering the greatest value to those it exists to serve. But their business model is broken.
The answer is therefore not simply to make today's system a little more efficient. It is to rethink it altogether.
We need a new paradigm for higher education.
That new paradigm should not begin with institutions. Nor should it begin with traditional subject disciplines that have changed remarkably little for decades. It should begin with the individual learner and ask a much simpler question:
How do we maximise lifetime value?
Value to the learner, through intellectual growth, confidence, adaptability and rewarding careers.
Value to employers and innovators, by producing people capable not merely of filling today's jobs but of creating tomorrow's industries.
Value to society, by developing citizens who can think critically, collaborate across disciplines and respond creatively to unprecedented challenges.
Value to the nation: economic prosperity.
The uncomfortable truth is that we can no longer afford to maintain a higher education ecosystem built on the assumption that every town requires its own comprehensive university offering much the same collection of degrees. The distinction between globally leading research-intensive universities and institutions whose missions are primarily teaching, regional engagement or vocational development has become increasingly blurred. Yet the costs continue to rise while too many graduates question whether they have received commensurate value.
This is not an argument against specialist scholarship. On the contrary, the world will always need institutions that pursue deep disciplinary excellence, fundamental research and advanced professional education. Those universities are national assets (as are their maths departments!). But they are not, and should not be expected to be, the model for educating the majority of the population.
Instead, we should encourage the emergence of new kinds of institution.
These would be designed not around nineteenth-century faculties but around twenty-first-century careers. They would combine academic stretch with technical capability, entrepreneurial thinking with digital fluency, creativity with quantitative reasoning. Their success would be measured not by the number of departments they contain, nor by the size of their estate, but by the value they create for learners, employers and the nation.
The future of higher education is therefore unlikely to consist of making today's universities marginally better. It will consist of creating new educational institutions with entirely different missions.
The question is not whether this change will happen.
It is whether we choose to design that future deliberately, or wait until the present system is overtaken by events.
Of course I agree with you and have tried to practice this approach in my own teaching for well over thirty years. However I think the focus on further/higher education is not where this should start. UK education should be transformed from a much earlier age. Specifically secondary education should follow such a model as the one you propose with no opt outs and no choices for young people. A more basic, life and personal experience affirming syllabus should be evolved which does not focus on exam routes to university but instead utilises thé rich potential of the knowledge, experience and opinions of young people themselves underpinned by the basic/essential educational requirements to prosper in a complex society. With such an underpinning there is time enough at 14-16 to decide with confidence which further learning routes they wish to follow.
Very well expressed and interesting that this theme of new kinds of institution is shared in other comments. I have some sort of idea about how we rebuild the Victorian 'Technical Institute' but perhaps for another day.
There's a lot to agree with in your piece including "building an education system with no dead ends", enabling learners to "move easily" between phases and sectors, making "lifelong learning the default"; and you are right to be irritated with the account of education that crudely opposes technical and academic routes.
The piece made me reflect.
I qualified to teach in technical colleges in 1977 with a PGCE (Technical) from one of the four institutions in England where you could study for this qualification.
Many and possibly most of my fellow PGCE students had previously worked in jobs like nursing, bricklaying, and accounting; and at that time the pay in FE and Polytechnics (we were one bargaining group and the overwhelming bulk of employers were local authorities) was a lot better than in schools.
So teaching in a technical college was a relatively desirable line of work. I got a full time job in Sheffield at one of Sheffield's five technical colleges, all of which, at that time, were rammed with students on day release courses ranging from apprenticeships to HNCs and HNDs, cheek by jowl with younger and older people doing vocational qualifications in things like accountancy, dentistry, hairdressing, how to be a chef, and with a full programme of evening classes including A levels, language classes, and leisure-related learning, and a wide range of non-accredited programmes.
If I sound a bit misty-eyed about this time it is because I am. What made FE so special? Researcher Beryl Tipton became particularly interested in what she terms “the multi-purpose educational function of FE”. She wrote, in 1973:
“For in the heterogeneity of their educational and occupational backgrounds, its members of staff are probably unlike those of any other type of educational institution in the country”.
She continued:
“a college’s staff structure is almost a microcosm of the country’s social divisions featuring, as it does, all of the following: graduates and non-graduates; industrially experienced and non-experienced; craftsmen, white-collar workers, managers, social scientists and artists; men and women; and the relatively young through to the relatively old.”
It was, above all, the heterogeneity that Tipton pinpoints that made me excitedly feel at home as soon as I stepped into an FE college. It still does, even though what FE now does is in many respects a pale reflection of how things were 50 years ago.
There've been many changes:
* a deterioration in the relative pay and status of FE teachers - so that moving from plumbing to teaching aspirant plumbers will involve taking a pay-cut;
* a steady loss of political focus on the work that goes on in colleges (is this about the change?);
* a drop in the number of people in public life who had came through FE (we used to call them the HNC brigade, they were everywhere, and they knew what FE did);
* a reduction in the proportion of school leavers doing work-based qualifications that have them studying and working at the same time (this in parallel with the bigger proportion of school leavers going to university).
But the biggest change (alongside the shift in the UK economy towards services from manufacturing) is the way that employers (and unions!) are no longer much involved in FE (through the day-release system; through standards setting; through local associations). There used to be coordination. There is very little now. The free-rider phenomenon allows employers to poach from others rather than (expensively) "grow their own". This is in contrast to how things are done in, several other developed economies, for example Germany or Switzerland, where, as Sam Freedman explains (https://samf.substack.com/p/burnhams-first-mistake), employers are required to engage. Instead there's carping from employers about the need for students to be "work-ready" (I cannot hear the term without thinking "oven-ready") when they finish a course, in denial of the obvious truth that none of us were actually "work-ready" when we started work (it was the work that eventually made us ready!).
Demanding apprenticeships, T-Levels, and their HE equivalents (where employer engagement and training for the regulated professions has tended to preserve the coordination that has been lost in FE?), are part of the solution. But underlying it all, employers and established workers "schooling" trainees in the technology and culture and nitty-gritty of particular kinds of work is the key activity of which there needs to be much more, and this will not happen without a big change in how employers act. Conceivably, devolution of skills funding may help fix: if Mayors are made to prioritise what needs to be done; and if a wide enough range of employers step up to the challenge. Unfortunately these are both big ifs. (And talk of hard hats vs graduation caps does not help at all.)
"Policy churn" has been a long running feature of education (along with industrial policy and local democracy) as discussed here : https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/report/all-change
I am struggling to reply to this because the whole language and frame of the discourse is part of the problem. People are different along different types of ability and interests, and societies cultural and economic requirements are likewise not simply aligned. For some people there is a relatively short distance to go before they hit their current limits, maybe tuning a car engine and elementary algebra. At the other extreme there are a few who can learn and acquire new skills apparently without limit, mathematicians who move to China and there build themselves a house. In the middle there are the majority, who have some skills in a few direcctions, enough to make a living and enjoy life. I am supposed to be a biochemist but pride myself on scything and hanging gates. I am a bad mathematician with a limit just beyond Fourier Analysis.
Education costs money and resources, and yields result to society in very unequal ways. If someone wants to be a bricklayer they can be taught quite cheaply and quickly. They will do the same work as many other bricklayers with the reward and recognition that goes with being part of a large group. If someone else wants to learn study physics then training them will be much harder and require more resources from the rest of society, but offers a much greater reward for everyone. It is not that bricklaying is not worth learning, but they can teach themselves in their spare time, like Feynman and safe-cracking. It is worth noting that people trained in 'academic' subjects are very often multi-talented in fields where they have no formal training. It is not elitist in the pejorative sense to train an elite. It is simply that elites are expensive to train but pay back disproportionally more.
So coming back to educational institutions. We need true diversity. In my grammar school I was taught metal working, I learnt skills I still use today. The only achievements the school recognised were sporting. I have an accountant friend who says she did technical drawing at school and loved it. What a school struggles to do is to provide an environment where non-academic pupils can be stretched, for example teach your future joiners how to design and build chairs, or classic marquetry. The world is changing so teach them how to learn a new skill, not learn yesterdays method by rote. Essentially do not make vocational education vocational.
The labels and the qualifications are trivia and should not be discussed. What we do need is funding so that schools can offer facilities that draw people out and where they can produce work that they are proud of. The apprentices in the past went on as journeymen to learn new skills and then to produce their masterpiece. That pride in our work is what is missing from our present system.
Postscript. I am proud that I can stretch my scythe to its limit, wrecking it's blade, secure in my ability to hammer it back into shape, and understanding just what is happening to the iron crystals as I reforge it.