FE and skills sector needs to get serious about its own pedagogy

For a sector built on developing highly skilled people, we remain surprisingly tentative when it comes to describing how that actually happens in our classrooms, workshops and workplaces. We borrow heavily from schools, often importing ideas from cognitive science and talking a lot about knowledge acquisition. But we are less confident in articulating what is distinctive about technical and vocational teaching and the learning of skills. This needs to change, particularly as providers increasingly offer T Levels and begin planning their V Level propositions.

In our recent book that identifies Principles of Technical and Vocational Pedagogy (TVP), we argue that the FE and skills sector is not simply a context where general pedagogical principles can be applied. It is a domain with its own purpose, its own forms of knowledge, and crucially, its own approach to teaching.

Too often, teaching defaults to models built around what learners can recall, describe or explain. But in technical and vocational education, knowing that is only part of the story. What matters is whether learners know how to perform complex tasks reliably, efficiently and safely in real-world contexts. In other words, whether they achieve not just accuracy with their skilled performance, but fluency.