ABSTRACT
In Britain, such a tradition of vocational education had never become firmly established: from the total cohort of 600,000 16-year-olds leaving school each year, only 120,000 ever entered apprenticeships at their peak, and only 20,000 of these were held by girls. Youth Training Scheme (YTS) seemed at the time to offer a means for Britain to approach continental standards of vocational education and training of the kind offered in Germany’s famed ‘dual system’ - combining employment-based training with vocational schooling. The major emphasis of much of the vocationally-oriented education programmes in schools, such as the technical and vocation education initiative and the YTS itself, was on equal opportunities for young men and for young women. The promotion of post-16 education and training seems to have been effective in the sense that many more of the cohort members were staying on in education beyond the minimum age, and many more were engaged in some type of post-school training.
