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.

This shift from knowledge to fluent performance has significant implications for pedagogy.

Firstly, it demands that we take skills seriously as teachable objects. We argue that much of what we think of as ‘skilled performance’ is not mysterious or innate; it can be broken down, practised and refined. In TVP, we describe this through deliberate instructional moves: deconstructing complex tasks into component skills, modelling expert performance, guiding practice, and gradually rebuilding towards authentic, whole-task execution. This is not discovery learning, nor is it generic ‘active learning’. It is structured, intentional, and rooted in the realities of occupational practice.

Secondly, in technical and vocational settings, teachers are not simply facilitators of learning; they are expert practitioners that make their thinking visible. Much of what defines expertise is tacit, difficult to explain, and embedded in action and judgement. Learners need to see the craft, hear the decision-making and then attempt it themselves with support. Teaching, therefore, becomes an act of surfacing tacit knowledge through demonstration, expert verbalisation and carefully designed practice.

Thirdly, a TVP places much greater emphasis on practice, feedback and repetition. Not practice in the abstract, but practice that is tightly aligned to occupational standards. Not feedback that is vague or affirming, but feedback that closes the gap between current performance and occupational expectations.

Crucially, it also insists that we move beyond simple completion of tasks to develop fluency. In other words, enacting skills with speed, consistency, resourcefulness, and good judgements.  A learner who ‘gets there in the end’ is not necessarily ready for the workplace; fluency is the real benchmark.

In too many FE and skills settings, theory and practice remain artificially separated. Classroom time is dominated by explanation, while workshops become loosely structured spaces for ‘having a go’. A technical and vocational pedagogy rejects this fragmentation. It positions every session as both a learning episode and a rehearsal for work. It integrates knowledge, skills and judgement. And it builds deliberately towards authentic performance.

We appreciate that none of this is entirely new. The craft traditions of vocational education have always understood the importance of modelling, repetition and feedback. Researchers have long argued the distinction between ‘academic and vocational pedagogy’ but perhaps what has been missing is a shared professional language to describe and defend these practices. This, we argue, is what Principles of Technical and Vocational Pedagogy offers.

If the FE and skills sector is to be taken seriously as a driver of productivity, a route to social mobility and an equal partner in the education system, then we must be able to articulate how learning in our sector actually works. Not by borrowing the language of others, but by confidently asserting our own.

The Francis review rightly placed greater emphasis on technical pathways and skills, but said comparatively little about the pedagogy needed to teach those skills. As T Levels expand and V Levels emerge, the FE sector has an opportunity to articulate a genuinely distinctive technical and vocational pedagogy.

We do not need a diluted and morphed version of school pedagogy; we need a pedagogy fit for work.