Vocational education and training
Improving technical and vocational skills is key to improving productivity and social mobility in Britain. Relatively high numbers of people with poor basic skills and low numbers with high-level vocational skills are long-standing national challenges.
To meet them we need to ask what the individual and social returns to further vocational and technical education are. What influences the quality of provision? What are the factors that determine whether young people and those in work study and train beyond school? Our work here has been facilitated by Department for Education funding of the Centre for Vocational Education Research.
Work on vocational education traces the trajectories of young people after leaving school and their later consequences. Few young people have a clear idea of the different labour market and wage returns to these educational choices, but we found that making available even small amounts of careers advice and information on the labour market consequences of different education routes helps change teenagers' aspirations.
Once choices have been made, for those pursuing lower level vocational qualifications post-16 we find that less than half progress any higher up the educational ladder. Whether or not these learners are being well served by the education system needs further investigation, in particular given their disadvantaged profile. Making an informed choice is particularly difficult at this level because of the huge range of options offered by a multiplicity of public and private education providers with little clarity on their relative merits: our research has for the first time attempted to map the options available and the skills they provide.
For those that can get on them, apprenticeships offer a better medium-term return on earnings than other vocational routes . Nevertheless, the returns are much higher for men than for women, reflecting the fact that men tend to specialise in areas such as engineering that have much higher returns. Reversing such tendencies to self-select into different subjects appears to be difficult: for example reforming the curriculum to encourage more students to study science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) subjects at school does not necessarily encourage more women to pursue these subjects in higher education.
What influences students' performance? Just missing out on a grade C (or 4) in GCSE English, strongly decreases the probability of advancing further and may even lead to students dropping out of education altogether and being "not in education, employment or training" (NEET).
Featured Work
Vocational education and training publications
Sandra McNally, Guglielmo Ventura and Gill Wyness
1 July 2024
Alan Manning, Sandra McNally and Guglielmo Ventura
10 January 2024
Nye Cominetti, Rui Costa, Andrew Eyles, Kathleen Henehan and Sandra McNally
16 March 2023
Chiara Cavaglia, Sandra McNally and Guglielmo Ventura
21 February 2023
Chiara Cavaglia, Sandra McNally and Guglielmo Ventura
8 December 2022
Chiara Cavaglia, Sandra McNally and Guglielmo Ventura
8 December 2022
Sönke Hendrik Matthewes and Guglielmo Ventura
11 November 2022
Sandra McNally, Guglielmo Ventura and Hanna Virtanen
29 July 2022
Sandra McNally, Luis Schmidt and Anna Valero
8 March 2022
Stephen Gibbons, Claudia Hupkau, Sandra McNally and Henry G. Overman
23 November 2021
Gavan Conlon, Andy Dickerson, Steven McIntosh and Pietro Patrignani
14 April 2021
Jiaqi Li, Anna Valero and Guglielmo Ventura
16 December 2020
Chiara Cavaglia, Stephen Machin, Sandra McNally and Jenifer Ruiz-Valenzuela
20 October 2020
Stephen Machin, Sandra McNally, Camille Terrier and Guglielmo Ventura
14 October 2020
Jack Britton, Hector Espinoza, Sandra McNally, Stefan Speckesser, Imran Tahir and Anna Vignoles
11 September 2020
Chiara Cavaglia, Sandra McNally and Henry G. Overman
1 August 2020
Esteban M. Aucejo, Claudia Hupkau and Jenifer Ruiz-Valenzuela
23 June 2020
Chiara Cavaglia, Sandra McNally and Guglielmo Ventura
1 April 2020
Emily McDool and Damon Morris
20 March 2020
Vahé Nafilyan, Stefan Speckesser and Augustin de Coulon
13 March 2020
Andy Dickerson, Emily McDool and Damon Morris
7 February 2020