"Vocational high school certificate to be scrapped" - The Age

[Joseph41]

Victoria’s vocational high school certificate will be abolished and merged with the VCE, in a move aimed at dispelling the persistent stigma that it is solely for non-academic children.

The Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning – the VCE alternative taken by more than 25,000 senior secondary school students last year – will begin to be phased out as a standalone qualification in 2023 and will be scrapped by 2025.

Full article at https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/vocational-high-school-certificate-to-be-scrapped-20201123-p56h2w.html

Thoughts?

[keltingmeith]

I'd feel better about this if the VCE wasn't a course designed purely for entrance to university. Maybe if they adopted a similar stance to WA, where you could choose a non-ATAR pathway of the VCE*, I'd be more interested in this. But even if someone is going to go out and get 50 different jobs, there needs to be a level of understanding for the students who feel abandoned by academics, and don't want anything to do with it. But as is - VCE is an academic course designed by academics for academics who want to go on and do an academic degree after they've finished this year 12 academic course, and it's not fair on those who struggle with academics to get dragged through this system where they're just going to be degraded.

*=for the unaware, all students in WA studying year 11 and 12 study WACE. All of them. However, some will take a slightly different stream called "General" - and it's a stream that is, by and large, the same. Majority of the subjects are shared, though general will often cut back on content a little bit. Other than that, the big difference is students doing general don't get an ATAR - only the students studying the ATAR stream of WACE get an ATAR.

[The Cat In The Hat]

I'd feel better about this if the VCE wasn't a course designed purely for entrance to university. Maybe if they adopted a similar stance to WA, where you could choose a non-ATAR pathway of the VCE*, I'd be more interested in this. But even if someone is going to go out and get 50 different jobs, there needs to be a level of understanding for the students who feel abandoned by academics, and don't want anything to do with it. But as is - VCE is an academic course designed by academics for academics who want to go on and do an academic degree after they've finished this year 12 academic course, and it's not fair on those who struggle with academics to get dragged through this system where they're just going to be degraded.

*=for the unaware, all students in WA studying year 11 and 12 study WACE. All of them. However, some will take a slightly different stream called "General" - and it's a stream that is, by and large, the same. Majority of the subjects are shared, though general will often cut back on content a little bit. Other than that, the big difference is students doing general don't get an ATAR - only the students studying the ATAR stream of WACE get an ATAR.

But they don't need to get dragged through it at all, as I understand it - no one is forcing a kid to go through school (although the encouragement to go through VCE is quite unreasonable as it is) and they could simply drop out and do a pre-apprenticeship or something, couldn't they?

[dedformed]

Coming from a VCE focussed school I think this is a very interesting approach. There's very few (<25) VCAL students and some people make VCAL seem like it's "for the weaker students" which makes no sense. The idea of introducing vocational subjects seems like a good approach because not only will this allow students to explore their likes and dislikes a bit more, it would provide them an opportunity to broaden their skillsets too. Also, the distinction between the respectability (unfortunately, it's not the same at many schools) VCE and VCAL will be diluted a bit.

[keltingmeith]

But they don't need to get dragged through it at all, as I understand it - no one is forcing a kid to go through school (although the encouragement to go through VCE is quite unreasonable as it is) and they could simply drop out and do a pre-apprenticeship or something, couldn't they?

Sure, but take a look from another lens - maybe they can drop out, but that means they go through all that schooling, and don't even get that shiny certificate at the end to show for it. At least in VCAL, they can learn in a way that benefits them, and can leave school with a year 12 certificate. In this new proposed system, you would advocate for leaving the students by the wayside, because, "hey, if it's not for you, then don't do it", leading them to be shunned by a society that has already been shunning them for most of their formative years.

VCAL was a pathway for people who were less academically inclined, who were really good at working with their hands in some way (whether cutting people's hair, unclogging drains, building houses - what have you), for people who normally would not survive an academic environment. By removing alternate pathways that allowed them to feel accepted, like they had somewhere to go, these students are now being  further victimised by a system that never helped them in the first place.

Part of this decision was because of the thought that VCAL was solely for non-academics - but that's what VCAL was designed for, students who have skills that aren't academic, and wanted an alternate pathway to a trade while still getting their year 12 certificate. If anything, in a world where it's more normal to go through upwards of 10 different jobs in your life, it's MORE important to give people accessible options to a year 12 certificate, not LESS. A year 12 certificate is a gateway to so many different jobs, fields, and qualifications - and it's something you might not realised if you're privileged enough to have people in your life that have these qualifications. When my parents divorced, I saw this first-hand - my mum had access to basically no jobs, because the only ones available to someone without a year 12 certificate were the kinds of jobs you needed to be able to work flexibly in (have work hours decided for you at the drop of a hat) - which is fine for people who just dropped out of year 12, but not fine for a single mother of two boys, one of whom was very special needs.

And a second point - why does it matter if a student is more non-academic, anyway? Why does it matter if a student took an alternate pathway that is for "people not as academically gifted"? Why is this a bad thing? The student has likely proven in VCAL that they can apply their learning to some really useful vocations, and surely that's a good thing. Instead, we choose to continue judging this fish by its ability to decipher the meta-language in a newspaper article?

I acknowledge that they're planning to introduce more vocation-based subjects into VCE, but this is going to require new resources for a lot of schools that before could just offer VCAL with no resources, and then direct students to a tradesperson for help. Maybe this could end up being a good thing, but I want way more information on how they plan to implement these new subjects, and how they might make the course structure less academic for everyone. We'll see what's announced in future - but without a scaffold to support non-academic students, I am against this.