Vocational education was priority of the conservative government and was continued under New Labour. It was created as it was felt that education was not providing enough skills for the workplace, the emphasis on academic education was crippling the economy. For more than 100 years the education system has been designed to meet the demands of the economy. By the late 1960s and 1970s it was argued that the education system was failing in this respect that much more was needed to be done to prepare pupils for their roles as future employees. Some pupils followed traditional academic curriculum based around GCSEs and “O” levels, whilst others followed less rigorous examination course and other courses designed to prepare them for entry into manual labour rather than non- manual occupations.
As vocational courses drew in a young crowd, such as school leavers aged around 16 – 19 years old, this means that they are being set up for cheap labour as employers can exploit young workers by keeping wages low for their age range. Vocational education exploits workers as they train them to work in these occupations where they don’t get as much pay even as someone older who is doing the same job as them with as many long hours and hard labour. Fin states that vocational education provides cheap labour and also the sort of skills that are taught are only useful for low pay insecure jobs so the course itself is setting the workers up for exploitation in the workplace. For the amount of work they do and accompanying the long hours known with manual labour jobs such as factory workers and builders. However these courses do help the pupils have an alternative to academic qualifications, so if they enjoy what they do they might succeed in the qualification. Even though some vocational courses don’t result in fulltime jobs or the jobs they end up with aren’t great pay, they still receive training to help the workers prosper onto higher paid and higher status jobs. Overall the vocational courses do set workers up for exploitation as they will then be training for manual labour jobs where the pay does not resemble how much work they do but have a high reward rate as the jobs mean experience. The course itself does not exploit workers but what the course trains them for will create exploitation in the workplace.
The overall aim of New Right policies was to use education to promote economic growth through encouraging competition, increasing choice and raising standards. The education system was to be more efficient; saving the taxpayer’s money. Private schools provide a better education because they are answerable to consumers. Chubb and Moe call for an introduction to market forces where control is in the hands of consumers. They propose a system where each family would be given a voucher to spend on buying education from a school of their choice. This would force schools to become responsive to parents schools would have to complete to improve ‘product’ and have to adapt to the needs of consumers. They argued introduction of market forces in education would help problems such as declining test scores, loose academic standards and lax discipline. Private schools are different from state schools as they are able to have more freedom to manage budgets, hire and fire teachers and improve teaching standards. They are responsible to consumers and have to take their views into account as they provide the school’s budget through fees. This means they are more likely to change if they are failing. The education system exploits uneducated parents into picking school for their child to achieve a vocational education.