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"education"

Developing learning programmes to enhance the formation of generic skills is an international concern in education and training policy. This paper provides a broad survey of the development of generic skills policy in England from 1975 to 2002, drawing on both the economic and educational literature. It demonstrates that, despite an evident demand for generic skills in the English economy, successive waves of education and training policy intended to stimulate the supply of such skills have failed to deliver the desired results. Such failure is accounted for using a policy instruments and institutions framework. This suggests that the failure of generic skills policy can be attributed to a combination of weak policy design, the interaction of generic skills policy with other market-led reforms of education and training in England, and broader exogenous socio-economic trends. The paper concludes that current initiatives to develop key skills for all 16-19 learners in England are unlikely to succeed without substantial changes in the current education policy environment.

Bellevue Hospital, the oldest public hospital in the United States and a lineal descendant of an infirmary for slaves, accepted its first African-American resident, Dr. Ubert Conrad Vincent, in 1918. This occurred at a time when many medical centers were not accepting African-American residents. At the end of WWII, one-third of the accredited medical schools still barred African Americans. However, Bellevue Hospital continued to train African-American residents. Between the 1920s and 1940s four African Americans matriculated at Bellevue Hospital. There were six in the 1950s, four in the 1960s, and 25 in the 1970s. By the 1980s, 40 African Americans matriculated, and between 1990 and 1995, 61 matriculated. Despite its historic first, Bellevue lagged slightly behind the national average. While the number of African-American residents occupying U.S. residency slots increased from 2.8% in 1978 to 6.5% in 1996, African Americans comprised 3.6% of residency slots at Bellevue between 1985-1995. Currently, only 7% of practicing physicians and 5% in faculty positions are latino, African-American, and Native American. Increasing the number of under-represented minority (URM) physicians is important to the United States, as URM physicians are more likely to serve the poor and uninsured, therefore improving the overall healthcare of the underprivileged. A study by the Association of American Medical Colleges indicated that minority medical school graduates were five times more likely to report that they planned to serve minority populations than other graduates. In their position paper, the American College of Physicians expressed the belief that increasing the number of URM physicians will help reduce healthcare disparities that can hurt minority populations and lead to poor health outcomes. The Supreme Court acknowledged the importance of racial diversity by upholding the University of Michigan affirmative action admissions policy in its June 2003 ruling. URM physicians are needed not only to serve minority populations but also to serve as mentors and role models for prospective and current students. The first African-American resident to graduate from the Bellevue Residency Program did indeed treat the underserved, as Dr. Vincent founded the Vincent Sanatorium, dedicated to treating African-American patients, and training African-American nurses and doctors. Over the course of the 20th century, Bellevue Hospital has trained increasing numbers of African-American physicians. It is hoped that, like their predecessor, Dr. Vincent, they will provide care to underserved communities and to the community as a whole, as well as serve as role models for generations to come.

Like other advanced societies, Germany has experienced marked developments in its social structures during the last decades. But Germany has also been a rather special case due to historical events and institutional characteristics. This distinctiveness is now being called into question. This study traces the major changes in social structure during the last four decades. In particular, it looks at developments in population, family, education, labour markets, class structures and lifecourse patterns. The final section addresses the question of how these changes might have affected interest formation, political cleavages and policies. © 2004 Frank Cass & Co. Ltd. All rights reserved.

Published in 1987, the first edition of The Struggle for the American Curriculum was a classic in curriculum studies and in the history of education. This new third edition is thoroughly revised and updated, and includes two new chapters on the renewed attacks on the subject curriculum in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as the way individual school subjects evolved over time and were affected by these attacks. © 2004 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

In Australia, as in many other countries, initiatives are constantly being developed which aim to assist school students’ transition into work. One such initiative, which was introduced towards the end of the 1990s, was the introduction of school-based apprenticeships and traineeships, often referred to by the umbrella term “school-based new apprenticeships” (SBNAs). Students taking part in these programs, normally in the final two years of schooling (Years 11 and 12), combine part-time work, study towards a vocational education and training (VET) qualification, and normal attendance at school. This paper reports on the first large-scale research study of school-based apprentices and trainees, which was carried out in late 2001 through a survey of students involved in the programs. The survey was carried out in the three Australian States with the highest numbers of school-based apprentices and trainees, Queensland, Victoria and South Australia. The paper commences with a description of the nature of school-based apprenticeships and a description of their introduction and rapid growth. It then gives an overview of the young people's jobs, their learning and training, and concludes by discussing four problematic areas. © 2004, Emerald Group Publishing Limited

This study determined the reliability of ratings and consistency of descriptions generated by experienced field instructors using only their acquired practice wisdom as a framework to evaluate students. Ten field instructors independently divided 20 student vignettes into as many categories as necessary to reflect various levels of student performance, described their categories, and ranked the individual vignettes within each category. The independently generated categories and their descriptions were very similar across instructors, and the inter-rater reliability was very high both for the placement of vignettes into categories (0.77) and the rankings (0.83). © by the Council on Social Work education, Inc.

The concept of individual demand for continuing training needs to be defined carefully in the UK context. Unlike other European countries such as France, initial training takes place either in companies or by young workers undertaking courses at a college of further education. They therefore appear as employees rather than as full-time students in the education system. This makes comparison of statistics on continuing training problematic at European level. For the purposes of this chapter, continuing training refers only to the training of adults in employment and not the initial training of young people even though this may be funded by the employer. © Individual contributors, 2002.

As the staying-on rate has rocketed, the proportion of 16 and 17year olds undertaking training in the workplace, whether government funded or not, has fallen steadily. If there is now to be a major expansion of apprenticeships, what is to be the driving force behind such a reversal of recent trends? (Berkeley, 2000:10) In many cases, particularly in vocational education and industrial training, we have seen old programmes relaunched under a change of name, but without substantial changes in the patterns of resourcing or incentives for the various participants. (Oates, 2000:20). This chapter aims to do two things. First, it examines the current policy options for securing a healthy, vibrant future for work-based training in England. The main focus is on initial vocational education and training for young entrants to the labour force (those in the 16 to 24 age group). There are many equally, perhaps more, important issues concerning adult learning in the workplace and how this can best be supported, but to do any justice to these would require another chapter. However, we suggest that there may be considerable merit in trying to link policy on initial VET to wider policy options for adult training and, crucially, for reflection on the role of employers in providing training, both for young entrants and adult workers. In geographical terms, the main focus is upon England, though much of the analysis can, in broad terms, be applied throughout the UK. © Individual contributors, 2002.

What are the concepts and theories behind current debates about education? This comprehensive introduction to philosophy of education discusses issues that are of current public interest and debate. It locates education at the heart of questions concerned with culture, ethics, politics, economics and shows how key educational issues have to be approached in a contextual way. Written in a clear and accessible manner with current issues in mind the book covers: the curriculum teaching and learning educational research assessment moral, personal and civic education autonomy and multicultural issues in a liberal society education and work privatisation and markets This book will be particularly useful to students on education Studies courses, to those preparing for a career in teaching, to students of politics and to serving teachers undertaking further study in education. © 2004 Christopher Winch and John Gingell. All rights reserved.

Continuous vocational training (CVT) as an identified and formalised field of policy and practice is a recent creation, and by no means a settled one. Informal training in the workplace, as well as codified training through apprenticeship, has, of course, existed for centuries in most European countries, where it was associated with forms of control of access to the crafts and to mechanisms of social promotion at work (Winterton and Winterton, 1994). However, even though structures of social dialogue and funding were initiated by the state and established both in France in 1959 and in Britain in 1964, CVT has taken on a radically different aspect in the last 30 years, and mostly in the last 15 years, during which it has become associated with a different kind of change, that is, change and restructuring for competitiveness and flexibility. Although the rationales of social promotion, and even that of permanent education as a right still survive, clearly the rationale just mentioned has become dominant and has meant a change in the main players as well, as the enterprise became the key decision maker in relation to the implementation and use made of CVT. This change has slowly evolved throughout Europe (Kaiserbruger et al., 1996). © 2002 Compilation, original and editorial material, The Open University. All rights reserved.