Sir Chris Woodhead Blog: Hunt’s Hairy Debate

27 April 2015

Professor Sir Chris WoodheadLast week, Labour education spokesman, Tristram Hunt, announced that if his party were to be elected on 7 May he wanted to start a big ‘hairy’ debate about the future of 14 to 19 qualifications and the possible abolition of the GCSE examination.

Mr Hunt is a historian, but a historian, it seems, who knows nothing very much about recent education debates. In 2003, when Ed Balls was Secretary of State for Education, Labour asked the former chief inspector of schools, Mike Tomlinson, to develop a diploma qualification. His ideas were kicked into touch by Prime Minister, Tony Blair. Now it appears that Hunt wishes to re-invent them.

The idea behind Tomlinson’s diploma proposals was rooted in the belief that we must ‘consign to history the artificial divide between academic and vocational subjects, which does not make sense in today’s world’. Hunt was saying much the same thing last week. The truth is that the divide is not artificial. However much the soggy egalitarians who dictate government policy might prefer it otherwise, education and training are different activities.

Education is an enterprise which has no external purpose; training involves the teaching of the specific knowledge and skills needed to perform a particular task.

The logic of the distinction is clouded, of course, in the refusal of educationalists and left wing politicians to accept that human beings differ in their abilities and aspirations. It is the ‘artificial’ divide between the academic sheep and the vocational goats that really upsets the great and the good of the educational world. The truth is that not everyone has the intellectual ability to study A levels, even in their current debased form. Hunt’s response to this truth is that A levels and GCSEs must be abolished. Like his predecessor, Mr Balls, he wants to believe that everyone is equal and that everybody can profitably follow one course.

They cannot. However ‘hairy’ the debate Tristram Hunt wants to promote, it will end in tears. The baccalaureate or diploma he thinks should replace the current system of qualifications will neither challenge academic students nor motivate those who have been failed by the current predominantly academic curriculum.

The 14 to 19 curriculum should offer students the opportunity to study practical vocational courses which lead to real jobs in the real world and academic courses which stretch their intellectual resources. Horses for courses, not a mish mash of this and that, that is neither fish nor fowl.


Professor Sir Chris Woodhead was formerly Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools from 1994 until 2000. He is author of Class Wars and A Desolation of Learning. His areas of expertise are education and leadership, accountability and the drive to raise standards; his research interest currently is the involvement of the private sector in raising educational standards. He retired at the end of 2013 from the chairmanship of Cognita, the international schools company he established in 2004.

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