Modular strategies for overcoming academic/vocational divisions: issues arising from the Scottish experience

This paper discusses modular strategies for integrating academic and vocational education, such as those advocated in proposals for a unified system of post‐compulsory education and training. It focuses on the ‘aggregative’ strategy, which allows students to combine ‘academic’ and ‘vocational’ modules flexibly in programmes designed to match their individual needs and circumstances. No pure example of a fully unified national modular system yet exists; to gain empirical evidence of how such a system might work we must analyse incompletely unified systems. This paper examines the recent experience of the Scottish system, which has some but not all of the characteristics of a fully unified modular system. It identifies three sets of practical issues which the modular strategy for overcoming academic/vocational divisions must face. These respectively concern the potential limitations of modular curricula, the coherence of institutionally diverse systems and the need to avoid ‘academic drift’.