Quality and excellence in vocational education - City & Guilds Centre for Skills Development

By City & Guilds Centre for Skills Development

City & Guilds Centre for Skills Development's latest research report is now available: How to teach vocational education: A theory of vocational pedagogy, by Professor Bill Lucas, Dr Ellen Spencer and Professor Guy Claxton from the Centre for Real-World Learning at the University of Winchester.

At the City & Guilds Centre for Skills Development, we believe vocational education needs to be high-status and valued, and for that we need high quality teaching. However, current policy debates about how the quality of teaching can be further improved have underestimated the role of a vocational pedagogy. Our latest report offers important evidence for why we need a vocational pedagogy and provides a robust and comprehensive framework.

The report also illustrates why vocational education is difficult, valuable and should be respected in it’s own right. We take a fresh look at the outcomes of vocational education and the implications for teaching practice. We argue that vocational education must equip workers with six key characteristics; the routine expertise to deal with everyday problems; the resourcefulness to solve trickier problems; the functional literacies to explain their solutions to customers; the business-like attitudes to do so in a way which values the customer; the craftsman’s desire to do a job well; and the wider skills for growth to innovate for future solutions.

A copy of the report is available here: www.skillsdevelopment.org