Re: Equity issues in inital vocational education & training

Dear Christa, in Greece VET schools are also attracting three widely different groups of students: a) a minority who has aspirations to proceed to the tertiary education level in a vocational specialty and is dedicated to learning, b) a large group of students who want to get some specialty training and a vocational qualification with no particular interest in doing well in the academic subjects taught at VET schools, and c) another group of students who are not really interested in school learning because their families run a small business and therefore they feel that their future does not really correlates to how well they do at school. This situation implies that VET schools and teachers have to work with classes of students with very different aspirations, motives and prior academic performance.

The above diversity has major implications regarding equity issues within and between VET schools. Some schools or teachers who insist on excellence focus their efforts to raise the academic performance of those who are already motivated learners and pay little attention to those who are low performers or have no aspirations of participating to the national exams leading to a university. This approach, which is not always explicitly stated or reflected upon in a systematic way at school level, can lead to the creation of huge discrepancies in school performance between the high and the low achievers for the benefit of a small minority of high achievers. On the other hand, VET schools and teachers who are neglecting the needs of the high achievers to serve the needs of the majority, that is the low achievers, run several risks. A major one is that they have to stop following the commonly fast pace which the centrally defined curricula and timetables sets to all schools in Greece. Such a decision is not acceptable by the central education authorities on the grounds that it can potentially create VET schools for the “bad” and schools for the “good” students. As usual, at central policy level there is hesitation to recognise that there are serious problems with many students' performance in VET schools, probably because they will have to take a large part of the blame for not doing anything for so long.

In any case, I believe that huge gaps in students' performance are created and become almost irreversible during the early school years, that is, during pre-primary, primary and lower secondary education years. It is really sad that even in developed economies which have achieved very high enrolment rates in compulsory education, so many pupils fail to become literate in the very basis sense of this notion, and for so many pupils their failure is so strongly related to the socio-economic background of their parents…