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Maybe your vocational courses are different to ours. Ours seem more focused on filtering kids through to be plumbers and hairdressers.
Nowt wrong with that of course. But it should be based on who wants and can do what, not on where someone lives and whether the powers that be have decided they are likely to want academic education.
One of the problems as I see it is this: all the ideas about increasing choice and not foisting academia onto kids who won't get anything from it, and recognising the value of vocational skills and other types of intelligence, sound great until they get filtered through the system. At which point they stream kids from the middle class towards academic subjects, leading to college, university and an entry point to high skilled professions, and working-class kids towards vocational subjects which will be best suited to producing good plumbers, builders, electricians and factory workers.
Again, nowt wrong with any of those jobs, and nowt wrong with kids choosing to go down that path. But there is something wrong, in my opinion, in choosing for them to not experience those things based on assumptions made by other people about their aptitude.
Even when it isn't so blatantly class based as a system, and the choice is genuinely made by the child...parents influence that choice. And if parents don't value academic pursuits then what chance the child will either value those things, or if they do, successfully go against their family culture in order to follow them?
State schools get a ot of stuff wrong. And no doubt with massified schooling in the west a large part of school structure is centred around getting kids out from under their parents' feet so they can work, whilst shaping a future workforce. But...I suspect most people got their first introduction to many wonderful things through school as well. I have a literate family who value academic pursuits, but it was my secondary school lit classes that introduced me to the poems of Wilfred Owen. The one and only time I ever went to see ballet it was with my school.
I got to do all sorts of things through my secondary school that I just never would have done otherwise. Now, I don't much like ballet. But I know that I don't like it based on having seen it. I also know that I really like the poems of Wilfred Owen and also Philip Larkin.
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