Critics of vocational education are snobs, obsessed with academic qualifications. That was the official line-but now reality is dawning. Ruth Kelly, the education secretary, this week described vocational qualifications as "second-class and second-rate". Sad, but true: if you are clever at school, you do lots of GCSE exams at 16,.a bunch of A-levels at 18, and go to a good university. If you are not, you end up with rather few GCSES, and instead do a confusing mix of qualifications with off-putting names like NVQ, GNVQ, AVCE, GSVQ, or BTECH; 3,500 variants are possible (nobody keeps a full count). If you get into a university, it is unlikely to be Oxford.
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