EMC has long been interested in the ways in which subject English might incorporate work-related learning, drawing on real world contexts to give deeper meaning to students’ own reading, writing, speaking and listening, helping them recognise how these relate to the adult world of work and leisure and their future lives. In the past, in a very different climate, where curriculum choices were more open, exams more expansive, and teaching less tied to academic exams, we looked for ways of breaking down the divisions between the academic and the vocational, influenced by, and working with other English teachers and educators, such as Peter Medway, who contributed key ideas and practices to TVEI (Technical and Vocational Education Initiative) of 1983-1997.
In 2006, with a small grant from LNS, the Learning Skills Network, we undertook a development project with a small group of teachers working in schools and colleges, to explore the potential for work-related learning in A Level English Literature and A Level English Language. We were interested in the benefits of work-related learning for all students, academically successful ones doing A Levels as well as those struggling to meet the requirements to move on to Level 3 qualifications. The teachers undertook projects in their own schools, we shared outcomes and reflected on these, on the underlying issues and the potential for future such work, placing the case studies in the broader context of work-related learning at the time. This included an overview of initiatives such as TVEI, the Tomlinson Report, and A Level examining. We outlined the current state of play and explained how work-related learning might be defined, understood and implemented.
The Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, has just announced a new focus on vocational education, breaking down the boundaries between the academic and vocational and providing students who are currently disenfranchised and without work or training after leaving school, with new, more varied pathways that go beyond the purely academic. We’re making our report freely available here, as we think it provides a history, a set of ideas about what work-related learning is and what it can look like in practice. It’s an inspiring set of stories to fuel this kind of work in future but it also offers a history. It seems important to us that new initiatives should build on historical understanding and learn from some of the lessons from past, as a basis for really robust thinking and practices now and in the future.
Comments would be welcome and please share it widely among teachers, policy makers and others who are interested.