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Attitudes remain biggest barrier to vocational parity

While recent moves to provide better quality and more coherent vocational routes for students are welcome, the key challenge continues to centre on changing public attitudes, a leading researcher has warned.

A paper by Tami McCrone, a research director with the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER), says policy-makers must “lead the charge” in breaking down “entrenched views that academic routes are better for all”.

A key issue, it states, is that a majority of young people continue to turn to parents and teachers for careers advice, but that these groups tend to have biased views towards academic and vocational study.

It quotes three research studies. The first found that 70 per cent of young people turn to parents and 57 per cent to teachers for careers advice, the second that 

65 per cent of teachers would rarely or never advise a student to take an Apprenticeship if they had the grades required for university entry, and the third that only a quarter of parents judge vocational education to be worthwhile.

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