The Worst of British Snobbery

Sarah Ditum writes:

"You've got a fairly low-ability intake. Your kids aren't all very smart, posh, upper-class, whatever." The way John Humphrys trailed off as he made this statement to a headmaster on the Today programme suggests that he knew it was coming out a bit wrong, but it was too late to change. He'd already said that brains and social status were the same thing.

A shabby sort of equivalence to draw, but one that's in keeping with much of the discussion about vocational education. Snobbery explains a lot about how we got to the sorry state we're currently in, and which Professor Alison Wolf's review attempted to address – it also explains why we're not very likely to see the sort of changes that will ultimately benefit young people.

Want to get an easy laugh today? Just try reeling out a list of some of the vocational qualifications that will no longer be considered equivalent to GCSEs. Humphrys sounded like he was close to popping with contempt at the idea that "hair services and horse care" could be compared in any way to the academic rigours of dead languages. When it comes to education in the UK, we can't help ourselves: if it sounds a bit common, then it's not a proper subject.

Never mind that caring for a horse or cutting a fringe involve genuine skills – just the idea of them being taken seriously is worth a snicker. (Whether anyone would be laughing if they saw me approaching the chair with a pair of scissors in one hand and my humanities degree in the other is something else entirely.)

But then snobbery has been part of the self-inflicted damage done to the vocational sector too. The idea that taking these qualifications in a school setting rather than a work one will make them more legitimate seems to me to indicate exactly where the UK goes wrong with vocational training. By trying to fit it to the academic template, we create courses that end up serving neither academic nor employment needs very well.

It's a problem that was highlighted by the games industry a couple of years ago: while games development courses proliferated, few of them actually offered the necessary skills to become a developer. What were employers actually looking for? In this case, pure sciences, arts degrees – and people who were able to come in at the lowest levels of the business and advance as they learned. But to make workplace training widely available requires support.

In an interview with the FT last year, Wolf stressed that successful vocational training needed investment: "You want more apprenticeships? Pay for them. You want more workplace skills? Pay for them." That part of the argument seems entirely lost today, with the emphasis instead on protecting "proper" subjects from being diluted by the vocational ones, and making sure that working-class accomplishments can't be counted with middle-class ones. Economic background has a clear connection to both educational outcome and career aspirations, but that's not the same thing as raw intellect being a feature of social status. The readiness to scoff at blue-collar professionalism (or even worse, to patronise it with flaky qualifications) is the worst of British snobbery.