Search Results for
"education"

Political insistence on implementing higher level National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs) and General Vocational Qualifications (GNVQs) currently dominates the ideological high ground for professional development for the post‐compulsory sector. There is a widespread and mistaken belief that GNVQs might redress NVQs’ shortcomings by adding ‘underpinning knowledge’ and offering a broader view of a vocational area. There is evidence that NVQs are adapting to criticism; at higher levels, they appear to be appropriating many features that underpin existing approaches to professional development. This article argues that this apparent reforming of NVQs obscures how the underlying values and educational purposes of professional learning are being completely redefined as both NVQs and GNVQs strengthen their powerful ideological and technical hold over the education and training system. Externally defined and restrictive mechanisms for learning and assessment will eventually dominate teachers’ and learners’ views about the content, scope and purposes of education and training. Yet in posing alternatives, there are important flaws in existing models which weaken our critiques of competence‐based qualifications. In responses to these difficulties, there is a need to combine a rich body of recent research into professional development, pedagogic practice and education policy making, with a concerted debate about ideology and educational values. This would resist the current tendency for research and critique to focus on the technicalities of implementing NVQs and GNVQs. It would also effect a resurrection in research of what Grace (1994) has called ‘policy scholarship’ as part of an attempt to evolve a better system for continuing professional development in the post‐16 sector than the one we already have, or the impoverished competence‐based version currently on offer. © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

This paper offers a strategy for the development of successful work‐based learning programmes within higher education. It identifies and addresses the key challenges facing such development. Firstly, whether it is possible to develop a work‐based learning programme which provides an effective learning experience at higher education level and which draws upon opportunities within the workplace. Secondly, whether work‐based learning programmes are an appropriate vehicle for structuring and accrediting the continuing development of the workforce. In addressing these challenges, we examine the design and quality assurance of a work‐based learning programme for qualified social workers, placing particular emphasis on the development of an appropriate learning model. We consider some of the criticisms levelled at competence‐based education and argue that work‐based learning programmes composed of learning outcomes achieved entirely through practice can be compatible with the aims of higher education. © 1995 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

This paper argues for the need to move beyond the ideological analysis of recent educational change. The current crisis of liberal education (both traditional and progressive) should not be seen exclusively in terms of New Right criticisms. The challenge presented by the National Council for Vocational Qualifications’ vocationalism in the ‘competency’ form predates the New Right and is opposed to both market economics and neo‐conservative traditionalism. Factors intrinsic to the development of liberal education in the post‐war period of expansion were inherently destabilising. A legitimation crisis resulted from differentiation represented in the distinction between traditionalism and progressivism and in developments such as anti‐sexist and multicultural education. Credential inflation produced diminishing returns to individual ‘investment’ in education. The cultural capital of the high status variants of liberal‐humanist education remained inaccessible to newly incorporated groups. Educational expansion was not associated with tangible gains in terms of a redistribution of social opportunities. Competency can be seen as an attempt to stabilise the system and supplant liberal‐humanist forms of education. It is argued that understandings of educational change have to move beyond a reductive analysis of the political interventions of the New Right towards a broader view of tendencies intrinsic to educational expansion and the liberal‐humanist model in the post‐war period. © 1995 Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

Cooperative apprenticeships are a form of structured workplace training in which (a) employers, government agencies, labor unions, or other community or groups join with community‐technical colleges to provide formal educational programs in which structured work‐based experiences are integral credit‐earning parts of instruction; (b) apprentices agree to work for employers for specified periods of time; and (c) employers agree to provide structured and formal training in specific fields or trades over these defined periods of time. These findings are the result of a 2‐year study. We used a case study method for this study, systematically identifying and reviewing factors influencing successful cooperative apprenticeship linkages. The article describes what has been found to work and why, and how these results can be replicated elsewhere by employers in partnership with community‐technical colleges. Dual enrollment of apprentices in associate degree programs is a practice worthy of promotion. Apprenticeships have proven to be more than a training tool. They are a mechanism for potentially bringing together, in a planned and cohesive manner, those human and capital resources within a community to solve human resource education and business training needs. They are a cost‐effective mechanism for employers and government, sometimes in cooperation with organized labor, to provide worker training cooperatively with community colleges. This study was funded in part by a PSC‐CUNY Research Grant, funds made available through collective bargaining by the Professional Staff Congress of the City University of New York for its faculty. © 1995 Taylor and Francis.