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Charles Clarke [Secretary of State for Education and Skills] has recently described England as having ‘a weak offer for those who want a vocational orientation to their studies’. This discussion paper analyses the weaknesses of vocational education in this country and suggests how to remedy them. Vocational education should be about progression, both to skilled employment and to further levels of education. If those aims can be achieved it has an important part to play. There are strengths in our system, with around 30 per cent of 16 year olds opting for full-time vocational programs in school or college, quite apart from the numbers entering apprenticeships. And there is a large vocational presence in higher education, including the professions. But vocational education has suffered a chequered history, being subject to many different initiatives over the years, each of which has had rather different purposes in mind. Other countries offer us models of how to constitute programs of full-time vocational education. The right way forward is to develop substantial national vocational programs, perhaps 15 to 30 in all, each culminating in an award at level 3, the first point at which vocational education has a demonstrable pay-off in the labour market. These vocational programs would build on the structures and courses that already exist, but, by gathering them together, make them much more coherent. They would reflect the best of successful practice abroad, where vocational studies are more esteemed than here and produce better results. And they would be consistent with emerging proposals for an ‘English baccalaureate’, providing the specialised vocational variants that are envisaged under this system.