Andrew Selous
Main Page: Andrew Selous (Conservative - South West Bedfordshire)Department Debates - View all Andrew Selous's debates with the Department for Education
(10 years, 10 months ago)
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Michael Gove
Our ministerial team, and, indeed, the superb team at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, take every opportunity to encourage young people to consider engineering as a career, but one of the problems we face is that the quality of the teaching of literacy and, in particular, numeracy and mathematics in science qualifications is often not good enough to give ambitious young people the chance to become engineers. That is why we are improving the quality of English, mathematics and science teaching, and reforming GCSEs.
Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)
13. What steps he is taking to improve the status of technical and vocational education.
The Secretary of State for Education (Michael Gove)
More than 60% of 16 to 19-year-olds now participate in vocational education. This Government have: raised the quality of vocational qualifications; expanded vocational education through studio schools and university technical colleges; and introduced tighter quality controls in further education and work experience. All those reforms build on Professor Wolf’s report on vocational education, which was welcomed across the board.
Andrew Selous
How can we ensure that high-quality non-academic learning gets the status and recognition it deserves, given that we need more practical on-the-job training, such as is being provided at university technical colleges?
Michael Gove
My hon. Friend makes a typically acute point. The way in which we can raise the esteem and prestige of vocational qualifications and vocational training is by making sure they are every bit as rigorous as academic qualifications and the academic pathway—I say “pathway” for want of a better word, although I am sure there is one. The way in which we do so is by making sure that the recommendations in Alison Wolf’s report are implemented—recommendations that were once accepted by the Opposition Front-Bench team but now seem to be rejected.