Anyone here work in vocational training/education?

[Cloo]

Or maybe studying something vocational themselves? Be interested to hear what things are like in the field at the moment. I have an interview for a publisher of vocational stuff, and it's an area I am really interested in, though no expert. Tellingly, I suppose, there's not an awful lot about it in recent news or even in the last 12 months on the DfE website (kind of dies down post Wolf Report, early last year).

My understanding is basically it's hugely underresourced and that a lot of the people teaching it don't have the opportunity to get good training to do so - that they're either people who know the vocation, but not about teaching, or know about teaching, but not the vocation.

And that what are called 'apprenticeships' are not really anything of the sort - they just use it as a name for various vocational training, without guaranteed jobs.

As far as I can tell, the only new-ish development in the field is university technical colleges/studio schools, which are still pretty untested and presumably no better funded and supported than anything else vocational.

Given the paucity of news about it, any views from the inside would be helpful in trying to get a good understanding of what's up at the moment.

 

[Brixton Hatter]

..there's not an awful lot about it in recent news or even in the last 12 months on the DfE website...

Post 16 education is BIS: try http://www.bis.gov.uk/policies/further-education-skills for the Govt stuff.

Also check out the post-16 teaching unions, NIACE, FE News, Campaign for Learning, Association of Colleges, 157 Group which will all have loads of material covering the past few years.

 

[Cloo]

Thanks, BH - that's a real help

 

[Hellsbells]

I teach Functional skills on vocational courses - alot of them (maybe all?) except you to take compulsary Functional skills in English, Maths & ICT as well as the actual vocational element. It's different in different colleges but where i taught last year, students were adults already in employment & their employers paid for them to do the course, although they did lose a day's wages so it wasn't really that great. The apprenticeship course was all a bit of a mess. The functional skills tutors were generally far better qualified than the vocational tutors who really didn't seem to know what they were doing. This may just have been the college i was at though.