[00:00:03:20]
Hello everyone my name is Sylvia Vitello.
Carmen and i work in the research division
of Cambridge Assessment and in this talk we're
going to present a study where we investigated
progression to post-16 education with a focus
on the role of vocational qualifications.
[00:00:18:56]
One reason for this focus is because of what
happened in 2010 so in 2010 the government in
England announced reforms to vocational
education with the aim of raising the
status of these qualifications within secondary
education and promoting successful progression
into the labour market and into higher
levels of education and training routes.
[00:00:37:68]
The department for education introduced
new categories of vocational qualifications
at key stage 4 when students are typically 14
to 16 years old and then again at key stage 5
when students are typically 16 to 18 years old.
[00:00:52:48]
In particular for key stage 4 technical awards
were introduced as the category and for key stage
5 there were three new categories applied generals
tech levels and technical certificates. Now I'd
just like to draw your attention to some features
of these categories only one category at key stage
four but three at key stage five and in key stage
five there are two advanced qualifications at
level three and one intermediate one technical
certificates which is at the same level level
two as those typically taken at key stage four.
[00:01:19:60]
Now technical awards and applied generals are
similar in that they cover a broad domain of study where students learn applied knowledge
and skills that aren't specific to an industry
or occupational group whereas your tech levels
and your technical certificates are the ones
that enable students to start specializing in a
specific industry occupation or occupational group.
[00:01:38:32]
Now these categories came with a range of specific
criteria that vocational qualifications needed to
meet to be approved for funding and included
within school and college performance tables.
[00:01:47:52]
These criteria really did change in the nature of
vocational qualifications that were on offer at
keystone case stage five affecting for example
the content assessment structure grading and
progression requirements of these qualifications
for example vacation qualifications now needed
to have some form of external assessment so
they couldn't be assessed solely by coursework
[00:02:04:96]
and certain qualifications needed not only
to have exams but the exams needed to be
assessment hurdles so candidates need to need to
pass these exams to pass the whole qualification
[00:02:14:48]
and what's important for our study is the
progression criteria so the department for
education may criteria for progression and
that were different for different categories
of vocational qualifications so for example for
technical awards post 16 providers needed to
make sure that the vocational qualifications
were accepted alongside GCSEs as an integral
and equally regarded part of students programs
of study and that these qualifications needed
to be able to fulfil entry requirements for
courses that key stage five like GCSEs would
[00:02:41:92]
by generals students needed to progress to study
at a higher level for example higher education and
then for tech levels and technical certificates
and qualifications really need to enable students
to secure related employment apprenticeships
training or study at a high level and it's
this progression that we're going to focus on
[00:02:59:92]
We're interested in how the different categories the face vocational qualifications at key stage
4 help students progress to post-16 education
[00:03:07:36]
So a bit of background about the research
that's already been conducted into vocational
qualifications and progression well a great
deal of this research has been conducted
into progression into higher education and
was carried out before the latest reforms
to vocational education were completely
implemented.
[00:03:25:44]
So for example such research showed that there's been a steady increase
in the percentages of university entrance
with vocational qualifications in recent years
although students with vocational qualifications
still represent only a small proportion
of the overall intake in higher education
[00:03:37:44]
But there was still evidence despite this
high level of entry to university and that
vocational students were at a disadvantage in
terms of the institutions and the courses that
they could access at he and how they succeeded
on those courses.
[00:03:53:20]
Fewer studies still have looked at progression to different education employment
and training destinations one of the few research
studies into this area showed that after taking
into account student and school characteristics
vocational pathways at key stage 4 were found
to lead to higher progression to any destination
education employment training than any other
pathway among students with low attainment
[00:04:11:92]
but as students attainment levels increase those
following academic or mostly academic pathways
had higher progression than those on
vocational or mostly vocational pathways
[00:04:20:32]
but really there's little other research into
progression from key stage 4 to post-16 education
in recent years and this continues to be under
researched and despite we think being an important
policy and social justice topic so that's what
our research was interested in.
[00:04:38:72]
We wanted to obtain an up-to-date view of progression from pre-16 to
post-16 education we wanted to research where
the students with different programs are studying
different vocational qualifications that key stage
4 were equally likely to progress to pro 16 for
education and if they progress what routes they
took and this analysis included specific focus
on the new categories of vocation qualifications that i mentioned so we use the national public
database for this.
[00:05:04:08]
This contains for each academic year qualifications entertainment at the end
of key stage 4 and key stage 5 for all students
in England including their characteristics such as
gender, type of school attended, ethnicity and so on
and for our analysis we included candidates
who were age 16 in the summer of 2015 at the end
of their key stage four and we considered all
the qualifications that they achieved during
their key stage four and key stage five period
[00:05:28:40]
and for the key stage five extracts we looked
at the key stage five extracts from 2016 2017 to
investigate the progression of these to key stage 4
cohort so we produced descriptive statistics to
understand the progression rates of these students
as well as multi-level logistic regression
models to control for students demographic
and educational characteristics such as
gender, ethnicity, type of school which we
know is associated with progression we analyzed
it for each individual qualifications so the
categories of qualifications as well as gcse's
a levels as well as broader programs of study.
[00:06:01:68]
These programs of study was defined according to
the percentage of each student's learning hours
that are accounted for by vocational academic
qualifications so here we've got academic only
mostly academic mixed mostly vocational or your
vocational only and pathways and come we'll show
you results broken down by these groups and on
that note I'll pass you on to Carmen thank you.
[00:06:23:76]
Thank you Sylvia. So let's talk now about
the results first of all we look at overall
progression to study for 16. So in the academic
year 2014-15 there were just over 610 000 students
at the unification age for the overall progression
rate to key stage 5 for this cohort was 82.4
[00:06:42:08]
So that's 82.4 percent of the candidates
achieve at least one qualification in the
following two years leading to the end of key
stage five in 2016-17 and the qualifications
could have been at any level so this graph here
shows you the progression to key stage five broken
down by the pathway is students took in key stage
four and as you can see progression rates decrease
as the percentage of vocational qualifications
in the students programs of the study increased.
[00:07:06:24]
In particular over 80 percent of the candidates
with an academic or mostly academic background
progressed to key stage five but over 50 of the
candidates with a vocational background did not.
[00:07:18:88]
When we look at progression from each key
stage four pathway to each key stage five pathway
two educational key stage five pathways were
calculated for each candidate. One was based on the
qualifications candidates took in the key stage
five period and this could be level one level two
level three and then there was a second pathway
based only on the level three qualifications.
[00:07:38:16]
So this table here shows you the progression to key
stage five pathways that include qualifications at
all levels the table shows for example that the
students in an academic only route were likely to
continue on an academic route so over 60 percent
of them did not take any vocational qualifications at key stage five
[00:07:52:80]
Despite this figure around 20
of the academic only students swap to a most
vocational or vocational only pathway key
stage five students from a mostly academic
pathway against stage four were also most likely
to progress to academic only pathways but all over
the stent and the next popular pathway for mostly
academic students was the vocational only pathway.
[00:08:14:32]
In contrast to the more academic pathways for the
mix mostly vocational or vocational only pathways
at key stage 4 there was a more even spread of
students across the different key stage 5 pathways
in particular students with a vocational only
pathway were most likely to progress to mixed
pathways although almost a quarter continue
starting vocational qualifications only
and over 35 percent progress to
fully or mostly academic goods.
[00:08:39:76]
This second table shows you the progression
rates to key stage five but in this case to
the pathways that were based on level three
qualifications only so there were many students
who did not follow a level three pathway and you
can't see that in the last column of the table
so that means that they didn't take any
qualifications at level three in case stage five.
[00:08:58:72]
You see that in particular ninety percent of the
students in a vocational only pathway key stage
four they not take level three qualifications
in case stage five this percentage decreases the
proportion of academic qualifications in the case
therefore pathway increased when considering only
level three qualifications across all the key
stage four pathways as students predominantly
progress to one or two pathways a key stage
five either to progress to an academic only
or to vocational only pathway so the academic only
pathway was dominant amongst the students from an academic only and students from a mostly academic
pathway like stage four
[00:09:27:76]
However a large minority within these two academic groups took vocational
qualifications only as well at level three
in contrast candidates in a mostly vocational
vocation only pathway during their key stage
four studies were most likely to follow
allocation and only route a key stage five.
[00:09:51:92]
We also look at the progression for students with
a specific qualification so the first graph shows
the progression to different types of key stage
five qualifications including the new DFE approved
categories of qualifications as Sylvia mentioned
so supply generals take levels and technical
certificates so students with technical awards the
key stage four were more likely to take an apply
general than the tech level or the a technical
certificate during case stage five and the
percentage of kindness progressing to DFE upper
qualifications were hired for candidates with
technical awards than for candidates who took all
the qualifications whether they were non-approved
vocational qualifications or candidates that took
qualifications and they were academic for example GCSEs.
[00:10:26:48]
This second graph shows the progression to
non-approve vocational qualifications a key stage
five the grey bars and that wasn't very high
in particular the highest progression rate was 5.8
amongst the students with technical awards
and the lowest progression was amongst
students with academic qualifications there is
the highest progression to academic qualifications
so a levels like stage five was from students
who took GCSEs only and those are the blue bars.
[00:10:54:40]
In particular the progression rates
were almost doubled for the candidates
with GCSEs and for candidates to technical awards
however the progression for the technical awards
to academic qualifications was quite substantial
around a quarter of the candidates with clinical
awards progress to a levels. This graph also shows
that the overall progression to key stage five and
that's in the yellow bars you can see here
that the students with the highest progression
to key stage five were the students who do GCSE's
only so the smallest yellow bars because they
show the proportion of students that did not
progress to key stage and the students with the
lowest progression rates were those who have
taken non-approved vocational qualifications.
[00:11:33:28]
So to get a better understanding of the
results from the simple descriptive analysis
we look at the relationship between pathways
and qualifications in case stage four with the
progression approach the extended location
using regression analysis so the regression
analysis aim to answer the question given two
students with the same academic attainment and
similar background characteristics how many
characteristics are those that are displayed
on the box there is there a difference in
the probability of being on a specific key stage five
pathway or in the probability of taking an
approved DFE vocational qualification depending on
the pathway or qualifications the students took in
key stage four.
[00:12:07:76]
Well the outcomes of the regression analysis were very similar to the outcomes of
the descriptive analysis for example in this
graph here you can see that the probability of
progressing to key stage five after controlling
for the background characteristics decrease
with increasing the amount of VQs in the
student's programs of the study this was also
shown by the descriptive analysis so I'm not
going to go into the details of the regressions
but they are available in our research report.
[00:12:30:48]
So just to conclude a couple of slides with the
main conclusions from the work so the overall
progression rate to key stage five was over 80
percent for the key stage for cohort analyzing
this study however the overall progression
rate differs substantially depending on the
proportion of peak use within the students
programs of the study against stage four
progression decreases the percentage of vocational
qualifications taking a key stage 4 increase.
[00:12:56:48]
And there are various reasons for this for
example some vocational qualifications are
designed with a workplace in mind and therefore
they provide a strong base from progression not
only to education at the school and college but
also to an apprenticeship, employment, training
or other kind of other education an increased
experience of VQs may motivate students to
pursue destinations outside the key stage
5 schooling and those destinations won't be in the mpd so we cannot analyse them.
[00:13:17:92]
A different reason is related to academic
attainment so research has shown that students
on more vocational pathways have usually lower
academic attainment specifically with regard to
GCSE muscle English and poor performance in this
GCSE can act as a priority full-time education
because often forms part of entry requirements
the post-existing courses and also psychologically
could discourage students from full-time education.
[00:13:43:20]
So the research also showed that vocational
qualifications are a substantial part of many
students educational experience at secondary
education and in fact key stage five many
students programs of study at level three were
comprised exclusively of vocational qualifications.
[00:13:58:80]
As we saw in the results following both the
vocational and vocational online pathways the
key stage board does not close the student's
options key stage five then students continue
on vocational pathways and they can progress as
well to more academic pathways the findings of the
research provide support for applied generals to
continue to be part of key stage five provision.
[00:14:16:40]
They were more popular than other types of
vocational qualifications and they were combined
with different qualifications sorry finally the
research showed that large presence of students
did not follow a level three pathway at all that
is they didn't take any level three qualifications
during key stage five. This highlights the need to
ensure that there are rigorous level two votes a
key stage five with level two vocational provision
being given as much attention and reforms as
level 3 provision technical certificates were
introduced by the department of education as
a level two qualification for the
students not ready for level three
but as we seen here they are few
in number and the update is low.
[00:14:54:00]
If you want to know more about our research
look at navigational qualifications in key
stage foreign key stage five you can
have a look at our research report
which is published on the Cambridge Assessment
website or you can have a look at our
forthcoming journal article progression to post-16
education in England the role of vocational qualifications
which will be published shortly in research web
syndication and thank you very much for listening.
Return to top