Ewart Keep

State Control of the English Education and Training System--Playing with the Biggest Train Set in the World.

This article examines the causes and consequences of the increasing control of English education and training (E&T) by central government and its agencies. It poses three questions—what are the reasons for national government becoming the dominant player in this area of policy, why is the English system so statist in design and operation, and what factors underlie the continuity of this trend in policy over the last quarter of a century? In seeking answers, it argues that policy has become caught up in a cycle of intervention that is heavily path‐dependent, and that this is the result of the interplay between a set of paradoxes about what the state believes it can and cannot do within the labour and product market. E&T has come to act as a substitute for regulation in both these areas. The article concludes that unless and until the state ‘lets go’ of some element of control it will be trapped into having to do more and more, as other actors take a passive role and fail to develop their capacity to act as strong partners in the E&T system.

Education for all : The future of education and training for 14-19 year olds

1. Introduction: Why a Review? 2. Aims and Values 3. Context 4. Measuring System Performance 5. Learning 6. Teaching 7. Curriculum Framework for the 21st Century 8. From Qualification Reform to a Framework for Learning 9. Employers and the Labour Market 10. Progression to Higher Education 11. Insitutional Arrangements and the Wider Governance Landscape 12. Policy and Policy Making in 14-19 Education and Training 13. Conclusions and Recommendations

The skills that matter

The Skills That Matter is an edited collection written by leading academics from the UK, Europe, the USA and Australia in the area of skills acquisition, formation and development. It combines academic evidence and policy debates with a critical analysis, making it an asset to students of HRM, industrial relations, sociology of work and business and management at both undergraduate and postgraduate level as well as being a useful resource to researchers and policy makers working in the field of skill formation.

Voice without Accountability: The Changing Relationship between Employers, the State and Education in England.

In the past decade employers, market and private sector influences have had a marked impact on vocational education and training (VET) policy. This article critically examines the effect of such impact on the relationship between employers, state and education in England. It is argued that largely unfettered de‐regulation practices have gifted employers a ‘voice without accountability’ that has shifted regulation and responsibility for VET onto the State and education and away from the workplace. The article considers the consequences of this for future VET reform in terms of 14–19, further and higher education, and social inclusion policies, alongside wider changes in economy and society. Looking beyond critique, the article argues for clearer rules of engagement for employer, state and education partnerships, where power and accountability is a shared rather than a privileged option.

Moving beyond skills as a social and economic panacea

This article examines two inter-related issues. First, the tendency for UK skills policies to act as a substitute for other social and economic measures. Second, the problem of current conceptualisations of skills policy creating narrowly-drawn, technicist interventions that are frequently incommensurate with the scale of the problems which they purpor t to tackle. The ar ticle suggests that current policy formation processes, particularly in England, are being deployed in a manner that seeks to close off consideration of other potential avenues by which contemporary social and economic problems might be addressed. The case is made for a wider framing of both policy possibilities and avenues for relevant research to support such policy development.

'There's no such thing as society . . .': some problems with an individual approach to creating a Learning Society

This article reviews the current enthusiasm for an individual approach to creating a Learning Society in the UK, particularly as typified by the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) Campaign for Learning. While accepting that there are good reasons for policy makers wanting to place a greater emphasis upon the role of the individual learner, the article warns that major problems confront a more learner‐centred approach. These difficulties are reviewed on three fronts. First, parts of the vocational education and training (VET) systems institutional framework are not geared to meeting the needs of the individual user, and their governance structures afford little weight to the views of individuals and their representatives. Second, the economic case for individual upskilling is much weaker than many policy makers wish to believe. Third, an undue emphasis upon individual responsibility for learning runs the risk of ignoring the major structural and societal barriers that confront many adult learners. The article co...

Reflections on the curious absence of employers, labour market incentives and labour market regulation in English 14–19 policy: first signs of a change in direction?

This article explores the previously quite marked absence from English policy debates on 14–19 education of issues that, in other developed countries, would be seen as key elements in the policy landscape. These are: the role of employers as providers of learning; the structure of employers’demand for skills, their recruitment and selection practices and the incentives this creates; the impact of labour market regulation on patterns of post‐compulsory participation in vocational education and training. This article argues that these issues help explain our comparatively modest participation rates at 16–18 and that failure to confront such underlying structural factors makes progress on the kind of agenda raised by Tomlinson and the subsequent White Paper extremely problematic. It is suggested that recent developments may mark the start of a change in policy, with labour market issues gaining a new prominence. The article concentrates on the English institutional context, but many of the general points about the labour market and its interaction with young peoples’decisions about education and training hold good across the whole of the UK.

The English Vocational Education and Training Policy Debate--Fragile 'Technologies' or Opening the 'Black Box': Two Competing Visions of Where We Go Next.

This article reviews current English Vocational Education and Training (VET) policy. It argues that policy now stands at a decisive juncture, torn between two competing models. The first is traditional, and relies on yet more institutional change and increases in the supply of skills. Its embodiment is the Learning and Skills Council (LSC). The other model for policy comes from the Cabinet Office Performance and Innovation Unit (PIU)s work on workforce development. This posits a need to tackle issues about demand for and use of skills in the workplace, and for marrying skills policies with wider business support and development. The article reviews the prospects for the LSC and identifies a number of weaknesses inherent in its supply-led approach. The article argues that, for a variety of reasons, the PIUs broader analysis may be likely to gain greater influence, but that it will also need to overcome significant barriers embedded in the current ideological and institutional fabric in England.

Re-visiting the Nordic approaches to work re-organization and job redesign: lessons for UK skills policy

The paper considers the lessons that UK policy makers might draw from Scandinavian programmes in the area of work re-organisation and job redesign. It takes as its point of departure the recent publication of the Cabinet Office Performance and Innovation Unit’s report on workforce development which signalled the need to develop a new ‘demand-led’ approach to tackling Britain’s ‘skills problem’. Building on the PIU analysis, the paper asks how UK policy makers might go about developing programmes aimed at improving work organisation, as one element of a wider ‘demand-side’ strategy. It begins by asking why work re-organisation and job redesign have tended to be relatively neglected as policy issues in the UK. The paper then moves on to explore the problems and challenges that Norway and Finland have faced in developing programmes aimed at ‘workplace development’, and tries to assess what UK policy makers could learn from these experiences given their willingness to do so. Finally, the paper examines how the UK might approach initiating a publicly supported programme of workplace development, albeit from within a very different and perhaps less hospitable social, political and institutional environment.

A Bermuda triangle of policy? ‘Bad jobs’, skills policy and incentives to learn at the bottom end of the labour market

A focus of Government policy has been the need to ensure that those at the lower end of the labour market invest in their human capital through re-engaging with learning, which has been assumed to enable progress into better-paid employment. This article explores the problems created by ‘bad jobs’ and the evidence for the existence of a set of mutually reinforcing factors that reduces the incentives acting on individuals in such work, and in many cases their employers, to participate and invest in education and training. Each of these factors, on their own, would be sufficient to cause problems at the lower end of the labour market. Acting in concert, as a mutually reinforcing matrix, they produce powerful reasons why many individuals perceive that the incentives to engage in work-related learning are weak. More broadly, our argument suggests that the fundamental causes of low pay and low-quality employment have been misdiagnosed and the subsequent public policy solution of up-skilling interventions is relatively ill-fitted to achieving the desired policy goals. Imaginative re-thinking on how policy might help those in low-wage, dead-end jobs is necessary.