That’s why today, NUS has launched the Vocation Nation campaign. Over the next few weeks, we’re asking students up and down the country to write to their local MPs and community to raise awareness of the threat to vocational education.
Vocational qualifications provide an alternative to academic education for those who want it. The option of vocational education is based on the principle that everyone is different, and that people need to study in a way that suits them.
Criticising vocational qualifications or implying that they are inferior to academic qualifications risks wasting the hard work of students today and in the future. It also sends a message to employers that vocational qualifications aren’t valuable.
The Vocation Nation campaign will remind the Wolf Review of the faces behind vocational education, to encourage them to remember that the debate goes beyond rhetoric - it actually affects real people.
These are the five principles that the NUS Vocation Nation campaign believes are crucial to protecting vocational education.
Safeguarding our future: five principles for the Wolf Review
1) Every young person in the country should be offered the opportunity to study a vocational qualification.
2) Vocational qualifications should continue to be offered in colleges/learning providers alongside academic qualifications.
3) The Wolf Review must not make recommendations which risk marginalising the provision of vocational education in this country
4) Vocational education must be positioned as an attractive and viable route for all students – not as a ‘second-choice education’
5) The Wolf Review must ensure that any resulting recommendations arising from the review do not malign the future employment prospects of any students who are currently in vocational education, such as devaluing the current qualifications to potential employers.
The deadline for the Wolf Review is 29 October 2010. We only have a few weeks to shout so loud that the Wolf Review is forced to hear our voices.
I’m asking the whole of NUS to get behind this campaign.
We have the right to choose the right education for us.