Inequality – ‘wicked problems’, labour market outcomes and the search for silver bullets

In recent years concerns about inequality have been growing in prominence within UK policy debates. The many causes of inequality of earnings and income are complex in their interactions and their tendency to reinforce one another. This makes inequality an intractable or ‘wicked’ policy problem, particularly within a contemporary context in which many of the established policy responses from previous eras are at best discussed in muted terms and more normally deemed to be unavailable. This reflects the eclipse of ‘equality of outcome’ models and the concomitant rise of ‘equality of opportunity’ as the new policy mantra from Thatcher onwards. As traditional policy responses have withered, the role of education and training as a ‘silver bullet’ that can address a host of economic and social challenges has come to the fore. This article outlines policy makers’ beliefs that improving the educational attainment of students from lower socio-economic backgrounds can enable them to compete more effectively for elite jobs, and also that increasing the supply of educated employees can transform the level of demand for skills from employers. These beliefs are then critiqued, with reference to occupational congestion, over-qualification and the evidence that skills supply does not always create its own demand.     

Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Conference of the National Council for Jewish Education

ABSTRACT

Citations are one of the ways that scholars engage one another in dialogue, debate, and discussion. As such, they represent a powerful way in which practitioners constitute themselves and others within a scholarly field. This article studies the citational practices of articles published in the Journal of Jewish Education over a 10-year period in order to discover how scholars have constituted the field of research in Jewish Education. Using social network analysis and qualitative examination, this article presents an unprecedented portrait of the field of knowledge including its strengths and new directions for scholarly investigation and analysis of how the field of research in Jewish education has been formed, and how citational references have shaped how scholars and practitioners understand what we know about Jewish education.     

’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) system's 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 concludes that while an individual focus is important, it needs to go hand in hand with wider structural change ‐‐ aimed at reforming the VET system, stimulating greater demand for skill in the UK economy, and at tackling structural barriers that impede access to learning opportunities.     

Notes on contributors

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.     

Employability skills in mainstream education: Innovations in schooling and institutional isomorphism

In England, the Studio Schools model, focused on developing employability skills in young people, represents a disruptive attempt at educational innovation. Through a documentary analysis of foundational documents, interviews with the model’s architects and case studies of five Studio Schools, we map the tensions between theoretical conceptualisations of the model and the messy realities of implementing it. We found that the schools faced a wide range of challenges related particularly to local inter-school competition, centralised accountability measures and structural assumptions about the ‘gold educational standard’. When facing these challenges, the course of least resistance for the schools was an iterative abandonment of the distinctive aspects of the Studio Schools model and a move back towards mainstream approaches to schooling. This process of institutional homogenisation is discussed through the lens of neo-institutional theory, with the challenges schools faced and their trajectories framed in terms of coercive, mimetic and normative isomorphism. We argue that the use of isomorphism as a heuristic device provides important insight into the process of educational innovation in an educational system that combines competition and the risk of market failure with coercive accountability measures and embedded assumptions about the ‘gold standard’ schooling pathway.     

加强金融监管防范金融风险

随着东南亚金融危机的全面爆发,人们在对其进行诊治的同时,也在深思如何构建一套较为完整而科学的、具有普遍指导意义的、特别适合我国国情的金融监管体系.本文从目前我国金融监管体系中存在的问题出发,对金融监管体系的构建及具体运作进行了初步探讨.     

Parallel lines or divergent trajectories? A response to the other contributions

ABSTRACT

This article provides a response to the other contributions in this special issue and explores the range and scale of the opportunities for policy learning across the four UK nations. It addresses the importance of locating FE and skills policy within wider national policy contexts, national choices between markets and systems and the wider implications of these choices, and the vexed role of employers. Behind these lie three over-arching questions that are then interrogated – have we arrived at a moment when we can conceive of the UK as a policy learning laboratory, is this laboratory open for expansive policy learning, and who might be working in it?