ABSTRACT
Recent ministerial descriptions of the divide as false, artificial and unnecessary make the damage attributed to it seem readily repairable by sensible curriculum reform, and no educational ‘engineer’ could be more sensible than Sir Ron Dearing. Yet although his review of post-16 qualifications (1996:1.13) recognises the ‘cultural obstacles’ to reform created by ‘pervasive attitudes inherited from the past about the relative worth of achievement in the academic and vocational pathways’, in particular their association with separated provision for ‘the able and the less able’, it makes only passing reference to the size of those obstacles and almost none to the long record of failure to surmount them. The persistent devaluing of vocational education, although increasingly challenged in policy rhetoric, reflects entrenched assumptions about the kinds of learning appropriate for future leaders and for even their most skilled followers. Different qualifications, or the lack of any qualifications at all, have served to allocate young people to different levels in the labour market. It has been assumed that an able minority are best prepared for high-status occupations by studying a few academic subjects in depth, the capacity of that specialised curriculum to survive fierce and persistent criticism being incomprehensible without an understanding of its association with preparing an elite. In contrast, vocational education has been provided largely for those regarded as being less able, as needing to be motivated by seeing direct connections between what they are learning now and their future employment, and as likely to enter technician-level occupations for which higher-order cognitive skills were taken to be largely irrelevant. It was the route for those judged to be unsuitable or who deemed themselves unsuited for advanced academic study, and it was almost entirely separated from extended general education (Green 1995).
