“What is vocational learning like just now?”

We had two sessions today: The first one was with a group of students from year 9 until 11 who are all on vocational training schemes.

We wanted to find out what vocational learning means to the students and who they normally relate to, ask for support and so on. We have started to map vocational training as a system of relationships from the students point of view. The idea for this map is to grow as the project evolves, allowing us to build a rich representation of the current system.

In the same session, we also asked the students to map their journey through the vocational system from first discovering the options available for vocational training, through to decision making, as well as being on vocational training and making choices the following year.
It turned out that for many students, the initial process of gathering information and making up their mind about what courses to choose seemed unclear and is one of the things that could be improved upon.

In the second session, we met up with the co-design team, Ms Dodd and Ms. Pearson and some other people who had previously filled in the 'My school diary' . The exercise was to map a week's activities and then to highlight the scenarios where people waste their time to feed into the broader project framework.