Fully integrating upper-secondary vocational and academic courses: A flexible new way?

The tracking of students in upper-secondary school is often criticised for narrowing the post-secondary pathways of student in the vocational education and training (VET) track, which can stigmatise VET. To tackle this problem, countries have introduced courses that integrate aspects of VET and academic study, which provide the dual purpose of preparing students for work and vocational study and providing university pathways for more academic students in the VET track. In this study we assess the latter purpose by examining the outcomes of university aspirants who take these courses in their final year of school. Using rich survey and administrative data from Australia and propensity score matching we find that these courses are associated with lower academic performance and a lower chance of attaining a university offer. Decomposition results show that poor performance in integrated courses is the main driver, which points to potential tension between the two purposes.     

Vocational Education and Training: Researching the Relationship between School and Work

Researchers and policy makers agree that the relation between school and work is an important characteristic of vocational education and training (VET) and needs attention. The relation itself poses several challenges for research to be successful and useful for policy makers. In this article, we outline these challenges and answer the following question: What needs to be considered when researching the relation between school and work? Our central claim is that research on the relation between school and work needs to (1) take into account contextual conditions of the VET system, including identifying the central actors and their responsibilities within a VET system, (2) take into account the characteristics of VET itself, (3) define the quality of the relation between school and work (depending on the context, characteristics of the VET system and VET itself), and (4) be consistent with respect to chosen research aims and paradigms. To illustrate how these aspects can be taken into account an example of empirical research conducted in the German dual apprenticeship system is described. The readers are provided with guidelines for researchers and policy makers to carry out high quality research on the relation between school and work in VET systems that enables policy makers to make use of the results to improve the relation between school and work in VET systems.     

The coherence of vocational education and training in Norway and Spain: national traditions and the reshaping of VET governance in hybrid VET systems

Coherence of national education and training systems is increasingly tabled in European policy debates. Leaning on literature about the emergence and consolidation of national education systems, this article explores the rationale for VET reforms in Norway and Spain by scrutinising attempts to strengthen the coherence of their VET systems. Coherence has been sought through the unification of different strands of vocational education; initial, continuing and active labour market policies (what we call ‘horizontal coherence’) and the mainstreaming of VET curricular elements; plus the systematisation of VET practices across educational levels (‘vertical coherence’). While both countries looked for coherence, their motivations, how they operationalised the term and the emphasis of their actions differed substantially. Spain has experienced a move from the three largely unrelated strands into a more unified system; Norway from a fragile VET system to the availability of more VET courses and apprenticeship arrangements at all educational levels.     

澳大利亚高中职业教育最新概况及启示

澳大利亚是世界上职业教育发达的国家之一,近年来以高中为本位的职业教育培训受到了职教界的关注。本文介绍了澳大利亚高中职业教育的最新概况,分析了澳大利亚高中职业教育培训的特点,总结了此种教育体制对我国的启示,对我国职业教育有一定的借鉴作用。     

Strong on retention,weak on outcomes: the impact of vocational education and training in schools

The re-shaping of the Australian senior secondary landscape in recent years and the emergence of a new space for vocational knowledge within Australian senior secondary certificates of education have been underpinned by a national focus on raising retention rates and achieving Year 12 or equivalent attainment rates in the context of a diversifying senior secondary cohort, and on delivering effective training to meet the skills needs of the growing economy. Absent from this policy agenda is a focus on the efficacy of the expanding vocational education and training (VET) in Schools. At the core of this discussion are the impacts of ongoing tensions between the instrumentalist labour market role of VET in Schools programmes and the expectation that an equitable senior secondary landscape should respond to the education and training needs of all students. Despite rapid growth, low achievers and socioeconomically disadvantaged learners remain the dominant participants in VET in Schools programmes, and pathways for these students into post-school education and training or full-time employment remain weak. This paper draws on the views of students, teachers, and policy-makers to examine the ways in which vocational programmes are delivered within the different curricular contexts of VET in Schools across Australian senior secondary education systems.     

The recruitment of VET teachers and the failure of policy in England’s further education sector

England’s further education (FE) sector has been characterised by instability and policy churn for at least three decades during which time reform of vocational education and training (VET) has been piled on top of reform, with few resulting in lasting change. In the context of another ambitious new reform of VET in England, this article reports on a study that examined the chronic difficulties in recruiting teachers of vocational science, engineering and technology (SET) to FE colleges. We argue that these difficulties in recruiting SET teachers reveal persistent weaknesses in policy planning for the English VET sector and help to explain the serial failure of VET policy in England.     

Working their way to school completion: a snapshot of School-based Apprenticeships and Traineeships for young Australians

This paper highlights troubling patterns within the Australian School-based Apprenticeships and Traineeships (SBATs) by analysing statistical data of 21,000 of 15–19 year old apprenticeship/traineeship learners engaged in Vocational Education and Training in School (VETiS). It confirms the alignment of social groups to certain qualification fields and levels and provides a compelling picture of the learner profile of SBAT including the type of occupations and qualifications being undertaken at school level. In a complex policy environment, where VET in Schools has been assigned the important task of preparing ‘workforce job-ready’ students for the ‘high skill and high earning roles our economy demands’, we argue that the SBAT pathway is not yet adequate to meet these high expectations. It is not an effective apprenticeship pathway as it potentially ‘locks-in’ already disadvantaged young people to precarious pathways, and reinforces the nature of an already highly gender-segregated Australian labour market. The paper helps to focus attention on endemic weaknesses in the Australian VET system that serve to entrench disadvantage in Australian society.     

An education policy paradigm that fails upper secondary school pupils

In this article, we illustrate the creation of the education policy paradigm that constitutes the framework of vocational education and training (VET) programmes, and analyse local school representatives’ perception of VET in upper secondary schools in Sweden. The education policy paradigm, established through three periods of reform during the twentieth century, undervalues VET as being less worthy than general/academic education. This paradigm generates the rhetoric used by interviewed school representatives that encourages school pupils to choose the ‘right’ (academic) programmes in order to foster a specific citizenship competence, even if this competence is not fully compatible with labour market demands. Young people who cannot, or will not, attain the ‘right’ education, and thus the advocated citizenship competence, lose out in a school system where general/academic education and higher education preparatory programmes are consistently prioritised over VET. An educational system that advocates discrimination and suspicion of VET limits career options and restricts entry into the labour market, as well as risk stigmatising pupils undertaking VET; this paradigm is neither justified nor democratic.     

How Competency‐based Training has Changed the Role of Teachers in the Vocational Education and Training Sector in Australia

Most formal vocational education and training (VET) in Australia is now competency‐based. When competency‐based training (CBT) first became government VET policy in the early 1990s, there was heated and acrimonious debate about its desirability. During the last few years, debate about CBT has all but disappeared, and VET teachers and trainers have been struggling with the implementation of CBT with, often, little support, and certainly with little interest from the VET research community. A research project examined, in late 1996, the effects of CBT on teaching and learning. A number of creative responses to CBT were discovered, with a major effect of the change to CBT appearing to be an impetus for teachers to re‐examine what they do with their students. Despite changes in teaching methods, CBT nevertheless allows teachers to exercise their skills, although the skills needed are in some respects different from pre‐CBT teaching. This paper reports on the project findings, and looks at the changes in teachers’ activities and roles using definitions of teaching propounded by Fenstermacher, and Miller and Sellar.     

Vocational education and training and the therapeutic turn

The concept of ‘therapeutic education’ is being increasingly used in contemporary education policy studies to identify learning initiatives which are dominated by objectives linked to personal and social skills, emotional intelligence and building self‐esteem. Contemporary educational goals connected with such strategies have been criticised for encouraging a ‘victim culture’ which marginalises learners and replaces the pursuit of knowledge and understanding with the development of personal values relevant to a life of social, cultural and economic risk and uncertainty. In relation to vocational education and training (VET) and post‐school policy trends in particular, Hayes has argued that preparation for work has abandoned vocational/occupational knowledge and skills in favour of providing learners with personal skills for emotional labour in low‐level service jobs. This paper interrogates such analyses and questions whether the therapeutic role of VET really is incompatible with the traditional objectives of developing knowledge, understanding and values in work environments. Links are made between new emphases on work‐based learning and the ‘caring’ conceptions of learning in post‐school education. It is concluded that—although therapy should not dominate VET—an attention to the important values dimension of learning in the field does involve a therapeutic dimension of some kind.     

A reflective account of the VET FEE-HELP initiative as a driver of ethical dilemmas for vocational education teachers in Australia

This paper reviews the nature and implementation of the Australian VET FEE-HELP (VFH) policy initiative: a scheme introduced in 2008 to extend income-contingent loans to the vocational education and training (VET) sector in Australia. We argue that the implementation of the scheme has been seriously flawed, leading to a range of counter-educational and unethical practices on the part of some VET providers. An ongoing research project into the impact of the changing contemporary cultural context of VET on the creation of moral dilemmas facing VET teachers in their work has identified four dilemmas that were seen by teachers to be significantly driven by the VFH scheme. Those dilemmas arose from (1) unethical student recruitment and enrolment practices, (2) overlooking traditional educational standards, (3) constraining teacher responsiveness and (4) manipulating learning assessment. The identifying teachers saw themselves as being professionally unprepared to handle such moral dilemmas, leading to discomfort and inappropriate handling of the dilemmas.     

Unwelcome stranger to the system: vocational education in early twentieth-century China

Both in China and internationally, educators and policy makers claim that vocational education and training (VET) is essential for the sound economic development of a country and the physical and social well-being of its population. However, China looks back upon a century-long history of rejection when it comes to popularising VET, despite attempts, both in the present and in the past, to invest in its implementation. Much of the literature attributes this lack of success to the failed, or distorted, transfer of Western educational models or simply to policy drift.

The article approaches this history of rejection by tracing back the original Chinese encounters with Western-style vocational education. After an introductory discussion of different scholarly attempts at explaining failed transfers of VET, I look at how this transfer actually took place when VET was first introduced to China. Therefore, the focus will be on the first decades of the twentieth century and a group of Chinese actors who were pivotal in importing VET models from abroad and building up a nationwide vocational education programme (primarily members of the Chinese Association of Vocational Education). I will argue that vocational education, when introduced to China from abroad, was embedded in an existing framework of systematic and widely practised discrimination and segregation of the population. Therefore, it was less the Westernness of VET that made it undesirable to many Chinese, but its specific – and specifically Chinese – integration into existing practices of allocating cultural capital.     

Vocational education and training for development: A policy in need of a theory?

The current decade has seen a significant return of interest in vocational education and training (VET) amongst the international policy community. This rise in policy and programmatic interest in VET's role in development, however, stands in contrast to the state of the academic debate. Whilst there have continued to be both policy and academic developments in VET in OECD countries; in the South there has been a paucity of VET research and little in the way of theoretical exploration. Rather, the academic orthodoxy in the international education and development field is dismissive of VET's possible contribution. Given the return of the policy interest in VET for development, and the possibilities of a broader vision of education–development relations beyond 2015, when the MDGs end, it is time to revisit the role of VET in development from an explicitly theoretical stance. In this article, I argue that the current approach to VET is grounded in an outmoded model of development, whilst the academic critique of VET in developing countries is clearly long outdated. In contrast, I examine the implications for VET of recent trends in thinking about development through the exploration of three particular theoretical approaches: human rights, capabilities and integrated human development. I conclude by considering the purposes, natures and possibilities of VET as a means of human development.     

OVERVIEW OF THE AUSTRALIAN EDUCATION SYSTEM

This article gives an overview of the Australian education system. It outlines key recent policy developments affecting higher education and the vocational education and training (VET) sector, and it describes the pathways for the recognition of overseas qualifications in Australia.     

Making it real: The benefits of workplace learning in upper-secondary vocational education and training courses

In OECD countries, ‘real world’ upper-secondary vocational education and training (VET) programs are used to engage less academically oriented youth in learning, while helping to prepare them for post-school work and/or further education. In general terms, VET programs with high employer involvement, such as apprenticeship schemes, are considered to be superior to classroom-based VET programs that are typically found in many English-speaking countries. In this study, we examine outcomes from a potential ‘third way’: classroom-based VET with a short-term structured workplace learning component. Using propensity score matching and PISA data linked to information from the Longitudinal Survey of Australian Youth, we find this model is associated with higher school completion rates and better employment transitions.     

Teacher preparation for vocational education and training in Germany: a potential model for Canada?

Germany's vocational education and training (VET) and corresponding teacher-education programmes are known worldwide for their integrated framework. Government legislation unifies companies, unions and vocational schools, and specifies the education and training required for students as well as vocational teachers. Changing from the Diplom programme model to the Anglophone Bachelor and Masters degree model has raised concerns for VET teacher preparation. It is within this context that we explore Germany's VET teacher-education system and current academic debates. We further investigate challenges in the development of Canada's VET teacher-education programmes and suggest some policy borrowing from the German model.     

The delicate dance: the assessment implications of awarding students vocational qualifications within university degrees

This paper explores the implications for assessment of embedding qualifications from the vocational education and training (VET) sector within university qualifications. As VET qualifications are now all competency based, assessment in the two sectors is quite different, since universities have generally eschewed competency‐based training and assessment. A general discussion of the issues is followed by the results of a small‐scale research study carried out in the VET discipline area itself, with participants drawn from the AVTEC list of VET teacher‐educators. Telephone interviews were conducted with nine Australian university academics involved with such qualifications; and data were extracted from a broader study of students who had undertaken the Certificate IV in Assessment and Workplace Training embedded within degrees and graduate diplomas in VET at one of these universities. It is clear that there are many assessment challenges involved with the practice of embedding, which have not yet been systematically addressed.     

Which difficulties and resources do vocational teachers perceive? An exploratory study setting the stage for investigating teachers’ resilience in Switzerland

ABSTRACT

Based on an ecological view of teacher resilience, the paper investigates perceived difficulties and resources among vocational education and training (VET) teachers as a first step for investigating teachers’ resilience. Given the substantial shortage of theoretical and empirical studies on this population, more research on resilience among VET teachers is necessary and relevant. In this exploratory qualitative study, interviews with VET teachers in Switzerland (n = 37) sought to identify the specific challenges faced by teachers, the resources to be addressed. As well as confirming the different critical challenges and protective factors emerging from the literature review, the results identify difficulties and resources specific to VET teachers in Switzerland. In terms of critical challenges at a macro-contextual level, teachers’ low social recognition is emphasised. Moreover, exposure to curricular reforms generates stress and pressure related to the required standardisation of content and subject changes. At a micro-system level, we detected teachers’ frustration in relation to students’ low vocational motivation and maturity and specific emerging instructional challenges in vocational subject teaching. In terms of resources, teachers perceived the possibility of diversifying their professional role by alternating school and extracurricular activities as a supportive factor. The results provide a basis for more extensive quantitative study investigating relationship among adversities and resources and resilient strategies.     

Governance Dynamics and the Application of the Multilevel Governance Approach in Vocational Education and Training (VET) in the European Neighbourhood Countries: the case of the ENPI South region

This article analyses moves towards good multilevel governance approaches in Vocational Education and Training (VET) as an effective way to improve VET policy making in transition and developing countries, focusing on the Southern Neighbourhood of the EU (ENPI South). The centralised approaches in public administration and to VET governance still prevail in this region. The new modes of governance applied by the EU in the policy area of education and training are based on the Open Method of Coordination (OMC). They are a source of inspiration to improve VET governance, taking into account the complexity of VET policies and systems. According to current European and international experiences, the most effective, relevant and attractive VET models and systems are demand‐driven. They rely on the effective and accountable participation of both state (national/local public actors) and non‐state VET stakeholders (e.g. employers, sectoral actors, unions) in decision‐making and policy implementation processes. This could also pave the way towards self‐governed and performance‐based VET provider institutions which would give quicker responses to rapidly changing labour market skills, competences and qualification needs. Thus, this means putting in practice more and better inclusion and effective cooperation and coordination of regional and local voices of VET actors and developing stronger social partnerships to engage employers, unions and civil society in shaping and investing in skills development. Furthermore, the role of methodological tools for VET governance is not only to provide an analytical ground to capture data and structure further policy advice. These tools can also be used as ice‐breakers to improve collaboration, inclusiveness, multi‐participation and trust‐building among policy makers as they work together on very sensitive issues such as reviewing country VET governance models, modes and institutional arrangements, and/or planning policy thinking and/or learning for implementing coordination mechanisms for VET policy making. The European Training Foundation (ETF) has implemented a methodology to map, analyse and self‐assess good multilevel governance in VET, inspired by how EU governance soft tools in education and training are being used. This methodology has been applied to the Governance for Employability in the Mediterranean (GEMM) project in the ENPI South region, which is a regional project implemented by the ETF and financed by the European Commission's Directorate General for Neighbourhood and Enlargements Negotiations (NEAR).