Vocational Education

International Approaches, Developments and Systems

Linda Clarke, Christopher Winch, Linda Clarke, Christopher Winch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136714078
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business generale
• Index: Business

Vocational education and training (VET) have a key role to play in raising skill levels and improving a society's productivity. In this important new book, a team of international experts argue that too often national VET policy has been formulated in ignorance of historical and political developments in other countries and without proper consideration of the social objectives that it might help achieve.

Examining a wide range of contrasting international approaches and development strategies, this book demonstrates the central role of the state in implementing an effective system of VET and assesses the extent to which different VET policies can promote equality in the labour market and social justice. Key themes include:

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• the broader educational and social aims of VET
• the nature of learning in vocational contexts
• the historical development of VET in the UK, US, Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands and elsewhere.

Including a full range of case-studies and practical examples, this book is essential reading for all students, researchers and practitioners with an interest in vocational education and training, industrial and labour relations or social policy.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Linda Clarke and Christopher Winch

If we regard vocational education broadly as concerned with the social development of labour, we can begin to see what a critical role it plays. As a guardian of entry into the labour market, it acts as a filter, dividing labour into different occupations, each with a distinct quality, skill and status. This filter may act as a means of inclusion or exclusion, giving certain groups access to particular occupations and denying others. Women, those from ethnic minority groups, and those with disabilities may be discouraged or prevented from entering particular labour market occupations, whether through their schooling, by the system of vocational education and training (VET) provision or by the fact that their group is seriously underrepresented. In this sense, VET is to do with the division of labour in society, whether on the basis of class, gender or ethnicity.

The ways in which particular qualities of labour are nurtured, advanced and reproduced through VET tells us a great deal too about the value accorded to labour in society. For the state, the aim of VET is to improve the productive capacity of society on the assumption that the greater the effort and investment put into this, the more productive the labour. In this respect, VET is critical to productivity, to producing value in production. For the individual, VET is about preparation for working life and about entering and progressing in the labour market, on the assumption that the greater the care and time given to this, the longer it will stand him or her in good stead. The employer, on the other hand, has more immediate concerns, regarding vocational education as a means of skilling labour to meet the immediate needs of the particular firm. These are conflicting interests and, as a result, the VET system represents a compromise and at the same time reflects the power attached to each of these different interests. The British employer-based system, for instance, is more directed to firm-specific skills than the state-dominated French system or the German system built on consensus between the social partners, that is the employers and the employees.

The approach to and the development of VET tends therefore to be specific to different societies. And when we examine these, we gain insights not only into our own society but into similarities and differences with other societies, thereby opening up alternative policy options. This is especially important at this moment in history when VET systems in the Anglo-Saxon world and in many European countries, on which this book is focussed, are in a process of profound transformation. The apprenticeship system in many countries is in crisis as employers increasingly abdicate responsibility for training. At the same time, VET has itself become increasingly school and college based, giving the state a potentially more extended regulatory role. And the trans-European and indeed trans-continental mobility of labour means that the different qualities and skills of labour increasingly confront each other, leading to ever-louder calls for international recognition of skills and qualifications. Our study is therefore apposite in informing both national and international VET policy and in highlighting the difficulties in establishing some form of equivalence between skills, qualifications and VET systems.

This volume is the product of a series of seminars, supported by the Economic and Social Research Council and held over a two-year period between 2003 and 2004. The series was intended to present a range of examples of developments in and approaches to VET and in this way to help set United Kingdom (UK) policy and practice in an international perspective. It integrated historical, conceptual and policy perspectives on VET thematically and provided an opportunity for academics, practitioners and policy makers from Britain and abroad to evaluate and discuss together policies on VET and their impact. It involved many a lively discussion and was a rare occasion for many of those attending from Britain to appreciate different VET systems, particularly those developed on mainland Europe.

This book shares with the seminar series the aim of helping to improve the knowledge and profile of VET through giving it a clearer historical and conceptual underpinning. It is an aim guided by a growing concern, if not alarm, with policy towards VET in the UK and especially in England. Through government encouragement, 42 per cent of school-leavers in England and Wales are today guided through the GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) and ‘A’ (Advanced) level qualification route towards entry into higher university education. This route remains the ‘sacred cow’ of education policy for young people. But what of the remaining 58 per cent of young people? They are confronted with a myriad of alternative routes, whether staying on at school, going to Further Education (FE) College, apprenticeship or entering into employment. These do not constitute a ‘system’, though the diplomas soon to be introduced represent another attempt at least to systemise the qualifications which can be obtained through the school and college-based routes, just as the GNVQs (General National Vocational Qualifications) attempted to before them.

The school and college-based ‘vocational route’ thereby represents a second route, distinct both from the ‘A’ level/higher education and the work-based apprenticeship routes. Indeed, despite its ‘vocational’ label, this second route offers little work experience and is not an automatic route into employment. In FE Colleges the vocational route is often very much more ‘vocational’ than in the schools, covering such activities as carpentry, bricklaying and catering as opposed to the childcare, media and leisure-related options which tend to be offered in schools. In FE too, vocational education provided is regarded as preparation for work in a particular occupation, given the variable quality and paucity of apprentice places available, though it offers little possibility to obtain the necessary work experience.

A third route, apprenticeship, is underpinned by the employer-led NVQ (National Vocational Qualification) system, which provides a tool to assess workplace learning. It represents a route of variable quality in training terms, dependent for places on individual employers’ goodwill and for skill formation on the nature of the activity undertaken and on day release once a week or block release to college. As a result, whilst there are some exemplary high quality apprenticeships available, these are becoming ever rarer and the apprenticeship route is in considerable danger. This is because of both a lack of places, as employers have little incentive and considerable risk and cost in taking on apprentices, and lack of diversity, as apprenticeships remain largely confined to traditional occupations and target groups. The newly launched Skills Academies represent an attempt to address these problems, whilst remaining firmly locked into the British employer-led tradition.

The book is focussed on the vocational routes, on the ‘other’ and larger half of the educational divide. It sprang out of a continual puzzlement and anger about the undervaluing of VET in England compared to much of continental Europe, an undervaluing which extends to the workforce itself where the skilled carpenter or engineer shares nothing like the same status in society as his or her equivalent in a country such as Scandinavia or Germany. We hope to show how and why VET can – and indeed must – be valued differently to the benefit of the individual, employers and society and the economy at large. Thus, though the focus is on VET in many different countries, it is always with the perspective of informing the British situation and those with considerable similarities to it, like the systems of the US and Australia. As a result, even our terminology – the use of terms such as ‘skill’ and ‘training’ – remains inevitably with an Anglo-Saxon bias, as does consideration of the literature in the area which follows.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF COMPARATIVE VET RESEARCH

This volume is distinctive in its intention to draw out different approaches to VET internationally, to explore their philosophical underpinnings and to trace their historical developments. The international and comparative study of vocational education in English and emanating largely from Britain has proceeded apace since the 1980s, though it has been largely dominated by sociological and economic concerns. It includes some notable landmarks, beginning with the publication of a series of comparative studies of the way in which qualifications and skills are configured and related both to the changing workplace and to productivity in different European countries (Prais 1995). This series showed the quite different levels of skill and knowledge deployed in comparable sectors. The suggestion was that different forms of vocational education were responsible for such differences and that, therefore, the quantity and quality of labour deployed and its productivity are related in an important way to national vocational education systems. The work reflected the growing policy concerns with the low levels of productivity in the British economy compared to many other leading European countries and gave supporting evidence to attribute this to the level of skills and hence to the VET system.

Ashton and Green (1996) – another landmark – took up a distinction first made by Finegold (1991) between economies that develop and operate as ‘high skill’ and ‘low skill’ equilibria, applying this to a comparative study of a variety of national VET systems in economically developed countries, including not just the major ones in Europe, but also Japan, the United States and Singapore. A skills equilibrium is seen as a relatively stable state of affairs that satisfies the interests of the concerned parties – employers, employees and customers (Varoufakis and Hargraves-Heap 1995). In Ashton and Green’s (1996) typology of skill equilibria, the UK is characterized as a low skill equilibrium country, whilst Japan and most of northern Europe exemplify a high skill equilibrium, and the United States a mixed high-low skill equilibrium. Different models of high skill equilibrium, some dependent on the active role of the state, others on social partnership of some form or another, were also identified. Thus this work too has served to highlight the distinct nature of the skill structure in Britain and the importance of raising the value of skills for any future development.

A third landmark in the literature on the subject available in English is Jobert, Marry, Tanguy and Rainbird (1997) which examined the interconnected relationships between education and work in Britain, Germany and Italy and was coordinated by a French team of researchers. This is noteworthy in its concern to scrutinize the questions, concepts and analytical approaches distinctive to particular countries, thereby representing a more theoretical approach, one which does not take for granted Anglo-Saxon usage of such terms as ‘skills’, ‘qualifications’ and ‘vocational education’. Indeed, it sought to examine and extend the effet sociale approach developed by the Laboratoire d’Economie et de Sociologie du Travail (LEST) at the University of Aix-en-Provence, of which the most notable work is Maurice, Sellier and Silvestre’s (1986) Social Foundation of Industrial Power. This latter compared wage labour relations, skill formation, occupational mobility, firm organization and industrial relations in France and Germany and challenged the view that societies converge towards similar industrial structures and relations.

In arguing that national specificities are maintained through relations in education, training and promotion, the work of Maurice et al. (1986) is especially important to this book. It showed the institutionally bound nature of the labour and productive systems in different countries and their dependence on education. The suspicion raised, that labour has distinct qualities which are related to its historical, institutional and social contexts, was reinforced at this time too by Biernacki’s The Fabrication of Labor (1995), a seminal work comparing the historical development of labour in Britain and Germany. This showed that divergent understandings of the essential character of labour as a commodity in the two countries influenced industrial development, affecting experiences of industrial work, methods of remuneration, disciplinary techniques and forms of collective action. In Germany, labour is formed and rewarded on the basis of Arbeitskraft, that is ‘labour power’ or the potential and inherent capacity of the labour itself. In Britain, in contrast, labour is – as Biernacki expresses it – ‘concretized in products’, or, in other words, appropriated for its output and not its intrinsic qualities (1995: 42–3). Though this was not Biernacki’s subject, it nevertheless follows that such a distinction is fundamental to understanding the rationale of the VET systems in the two countries.

Subsequent literature has examined more closely and from a more Anglo-Saxon perspective the VET systems underlying different approaches to economic development. Finlay et al. (1998), for example, presented changes in, and long-term strategies for, VET systems in different countries, highlighting the ways in which these have benefited economies, been coordinated with economic and industrial policies, and achieved consensus amongst stakeholders. Green, Wolf and Leney (1999) looked at the ways in which different national VET systems in Europe are organized, noting school-based systems, such as in France, apprenticeship-based systems such as Germany and mixed ones, such as the UK, and arguing that these systems show no obvious convergence. The authors emphasized the deep historical roots and persistence of the different national systems and built upon the work of Green (1990), which had examined the role of the state in developing and, in some cases, building national education systems in general and VET systems in particular.

Subsequent work looked in more detail and in a comparative way at VET systems within different countries, trying to tease out how they operate, how they mesh with the economy and how they differ from each other. Notable among these studies were Crouch, Finegold and Sako’s (1999) exploration of the difficulties presented by the institutional diversity of skill formations in advanced industrial countries and the relation between VET and employment policy. Brown, Green and Lauder (2001) developed this further in their comparison of national routes to and policies for a high skills economy in Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and the USA. This stressed the necessity for a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of skill formation, a study seen to lie at the heart of the social sciences and becoming a central plank in national debates concerning globalization, economic competitiveness and social justice. Our more philosophical and historical approach well complements this, including its rejection of the evolutionary model of technology as the motor of social progress. The comparative theme was continued with the publication of Warhurst, Grugulis and Keep (2004), which concentrated on the concept of skill and noted its shifting usage but without, however, seeking to develop a critique of the way in which ‘skill’ – a concept peculiar to the Anglo-Saxon world – is used, or to compare ‘skill’ with cognate terms in different languages.

While these studies mostly argued for the importance of VET for skill formation and for economic and social development, there were others – more in tune with the prevailing political and economic climate in Britain – which adopted a more sceptical attitude to the need for systematic VET as a prerequisite for economic success. These took their cue from Adam Smith (1776), who argued that employers attend to their own skill needs in ways that they find fit, and that, more controversially, in many sectors and in certain strata, the fragmentation of the labo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• PART One Historical developments
• PART Two Contrasting approaches to VET
• PART Three Valuing VET
• Index