The summer ritual of A-level results day is so well known it’s easy to forget the thousands of students receiving their BTec National results.
That’s the intro to a BBC News item on vocational qualification results issued today. It’s also the story of British culture and economics, told in a single, unwittingly revealing, sentence.
Around 250,000 kids will get BTEC results today – that’s almost as many as the 300,000 or so who get A-level results. But of course, media and political attention paid to the latter group is vastly greater than the former.
Why? Because BTECs are for other people: people who are poorer and whose parents didn’t do A-levels or go to university; people who don’t consider higher education as the default option after school (though quite a few people do use BTECs to get into uni). BTECs are not done by the people who write BBC headlines and stories, or edit newspapers, or sit in Parliament, or run the country from Whitehall offices.
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