14-18 - A New Vision For Secondary Education

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Former Secretary of State for Education Kenneth Baker claims that secondary education has become a five-year programme with a single, narrow aim: to prepare pupils for high-stakes GCSE exams at 16. From 2015, all young people will be legally required to stay in education or training until they are 18.

Kenneth Baker sees this as a historic opportunity to re-think the aims and structure of English education. He argues that the National Curriculum should extend only to the age of 14 and that there should be four distinct pathways from 14-18 to take account of young people's emerging interests talents and ambitions: Liberal Arts; Technical; Sports and Creative Arts; and Career.

All pathways will provide a broad education, but each will have a distinctive character matched to the talents and ambitions of individual students. In 14-18 - A New Vision for Secondary Education, Kenneth Baker builds a compelling case for reform, with contributions from a range of educationalists who draw on the history of English education, practice elsewhere in the world, and their experiences.

An essential read for anyone interested in the future of secondary education. Review: Together with a handful of educationalists and teachers, Baker has written a new book - 14-18: A New Vision for Secondary Education - which proposes a radical transformation of secondary-school education. He would like primary school to end at nine, followed by middle school to the age of 14, at which point the national curriculum would end and every pupil would choose one of four pathways .

This is not a sentence I would have imagined myself writing back at the height of Thatcherism, when Baker was most lefty teenagers' idea of the devil, but I think he has probably come up with an excellent plan...Perhaps even more importantly, his proposals attempt to remedy the impending anomaly of our preoccupation with exams at 16, which will make very little sense once the school-leaving age goes up to 18 in 2015...Given the new leaving age of 18, Baker's ideas make a great deal of sense. -- Decca Aitkenhead The Guardian Kenneth Baker makes a valuable contribution to the debate about the value of vocational education in his new book...The case is made for practical, technical and vocational options to be available to young people of all abilities.

Read it and engage in the debate. -- Helen Hill The Teacher This book may represent a significant milestone in the realignment of English debates about 14-18 or 14-19 education, and possibly a new consensus in the middle ground. -- David Raffe, University of Edinburgh British Journal of Education Studies This brings the much welcome blast of rationality into the education debate and undercuts almost everything being said by politicians.

It is full of serious, sensible proposals for ways of making education better for everyone. Michael Rosen, author and broadcaster, UK 14-18 is highly persuasive, both in its analysis of how we got here and in its route map for where we go next. After half a century of obsessive tinkering with our schools, I'm convinced that it's time for the last, best reform.

Kenneth Baker and his allies show how it could work brilliantly for everyone. Ferdinand Mount, author of The New Few and former head of the Downing Street Policy Unit, UK Apart from minor changes, such as the merging of CSE and O-level in 1988, the system of public examinations in England is essentially unchanged since the abolition of the School Certificate in 1951.

As participation in education beyond compulsory schooling has increased, our existing system of assessments has become unfit for purpose, with examinations at 16 in particular being an increasingly irrelevant punctuation mark in young people's education. In this thought-provoking book, a number of people who have thought about these issues deeply-and for a considerable amount of time-provide insightful analyses into the problems of the current system, and well-conceived solutions about how we could do better.

Anyone interested in what's wrong with our 14-18 curriculum, and what we can do