Educating Cinderella

Are we equipping young people with realistic career goals and training?

BBC Radio 4's Analysis: Educating Cinderella? is broadcast on Monday 5 October at 20.30 BST.

Read the programme transcript

Is Britain's further education system providing teenagers with the best possible route into the labour market?

In this week's Analysis, "Educating Cinderella", Fran Abrams considers what the system has to offer the less academic teenager, and asks whether it strikes the right balance between choice and paternalism.

The debate over the future of education often focuses on the 'top' 50 per cent, who are expected to aim for university.

But what of the other half, many of whom leave school with few qualifications?

Should they be allowed to follow their dreams and make their own mistakes, or should they be pushed into areas where there are still jobs available?

There is basically no work in Britain for unskilled people. Lord Digby Jones

With little information available on the likelihood of finding a job in their chosen field, "Analysis" finds that many teenagers mistakenly assume their courses are 'vocational'; and only a tiny proportion of students on basic vocational courses actually get a job at the end of them.

The most popular courses like performing arts, media and hairdressing attract more students each year than the total number of employees in those sectors.

"Analysis" asks if there's a risk that further education colleges are being used in some cases simply as a means of "warehousing" young people who are not work-ready to keep them off the streets.

The programme considers arguments that the system needs to gear itself much more closely to the needs of employers, like the old system of apprenticeships.

And in a fast-moving economic world where skills get rapidly outdated, the programme argues that teenagers need far more active career guidance to steer them into the right work areas.

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Producer: Zareer Masani

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Interviewees include:

The Principal and Students of Croydon College of Further Education

Professor Richard Pring (Oxford University)

Lord Digby Jones (former Minister and ex-Director of the Confederation of British Industry)

Ruth Lea (Economist and Business Adviser)

David Willetts, M.P. (Conservative Shadow Secretary for Universities & Skills)

Richard Williams (Chief Executive of Rathbone Training Centres)

Professor Michael Young (Institute of Education, London University)

Kevin Brennan, M.P. (Minister for Further Education, Apprenticeship & Skills)

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Coming Up

Next week Bronwen Maddox asks if small is beautiful when it comes to nation-states. Are small countries really as independent as they might appear?