NORTHERN Ireland’s biggest locally-based teaching union has welcomed the rise in the numbers of students opting for further education (FE) courses.
Avril Hall Callaghan, general secretary of the Ulster Teachers’ Union, was speaking following the release of the latest further and higher education statistics which show an increase of 2% in those choosing the FE route.
“This suggests that the message is getting through to our young people that vocational qualifications are a currency which will buy them into employment,” she said. “Neither can we argue with the facts that a study last year by the Department for Business in Westminster outlined that qualified apprentices scored 4% higher on an ‘employability’ scale than university graduates, and 15% higher than the average of all other types of qualification.
“It is essential in this global economy that our children are as prepared — if not better prepared — than those with whom they will be competing on the jobs market.
“This means we need to acknowledge that a vocation study route is just as valuable as its academic counterpart.
“Unfortunately, we have a system in Northern Ireland where vocational subjects have too often been seen to offer a second class qualification and this thinking is rooted in academic selection.
“We only have to look at other education systems to see how antiquated the idea of academic selection aged 11 really is.
“I would argue that this attitude and that academic selection at 11 is stifling Northern Ireland’s longterm economic recovery. What we need is a greater parity of esteem between applied subjects and purely academic subjects. Both have their place in our society today and that of tomorrow.
“Indeed, the countries which are leading global economies today are those which take a more vocational approach — countries like Russia, India and China.
“Rather than locking young people into a curriculum of academic subjects in which they have little interest or success until they are 16, the latitude should exist to enable them to tackle these more vocational subjects from an earlier age.”