Emancipating education’s half-forgotten half

Inaugural lecture: Professor Bill Esmond

This lecture highlighted the ongoing educational divide by exploring its lesser-known history and key moments that link vocational education to social, economic, and international changes. While education access has expanded, students from disadvantaged backgrounds still do not receive the same education or outcomes as those with inherited privileges. Further education once offered modest opportunities for meaningful work, but recent UK policies have deepened inequalities in further and higher education, especially through new forms of 'higher/technical education.' These disparities affect not just the transition to adulthood but entire lifetimes.

Professor Bill Esmond set out on both an alternative research agenda and rationale for practice. Contemporary neoliberal policies, representing vocational study as ‘skills acquisition’, have promoted a research agenda whose focus begins and ends with transitions into work: ‘what works’ in getting young people into jobs. Yet this labour market ‘inclusion’ does not eliminate inequalities or provide the citizenship that general education aspires to provide, as recent riots starkly demonstrated. Research into technical and vocational education needs to understand how it has shaped the whole of its former students’ lives.

This approach aligns with the notion of a deeper understanding of vocational pathways and their potential. Aspirations for a more socially just or emancipatory education have led to many proposals over the years that vocational pathways should draw closer to mainstream schooling and its traditional subjects. Such approaches, however, neglect not only the significance of these pathways for young people rejecting/rejected by mainstream schooling but also the significance of their social, material, cultural and technological engagements with the world, and the lecture will examine their significance for an emancipatory technical and vocational education. 

Professor Bill Esmond

Professor Bill Esmond has taught and researched post-16 education at the University of Derby, following doctoral study at the University of Sheffield, throughout the lifetime of Conservative-led governments. His leadership of multiple high-level studies for policy agencies and national charitable funders during this period, alongside his critical theorisation of educational policy and practice, has provided unique insights into the problems and possibilities of spaces outside schools. His earlier working life was spent in construction supply, transport engineering and professional education.