Skills for Human Development
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Skills for Human Development

Transforming Vocational Education and Training

Lesley Powell, Simon McGrath

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eBook - ePub

Skills for Human Development

Transforming Vocational Education and Training

Lesley Powell, Simon McGrath

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About This Book

Focusing on reimagining the purpose of vocational education and training (VET) and grounded in the reality of a small cohort of young South Africans and an institution seeking to serve them, Skills for Human Development moves beyond the inadequacies of the dominant human capital orthodoxy to present a rich theoretical and practical alternative for VET. Offering a human development and capability approach, it brings social justice to the forefront of the discussion of VET's purpose at the national, institutional and individual levels. In doing so, this book insists that VET should be about enlarging peoples' opportunities to live a flourishing life, rather than simply being about narrow employability and productivity. It argues that human development approaches, while acknowledging the importance of work in its broadest sense, offer a better way of bringing together VET and development than the current human capital-inspired orthodoxy.

Offering a transformative vision for skills development, this book:



  • Considers the potential contribution skills development could make to broader human development, as well as to economic development


  • Points to an alternative approach to the current and flawed deficit assumptions of VET learners


  • Presents for the first time an alternative evaluative frame for judging VET purpose and quality


  • Presents a timely account of current vocational and education training that is high on the agenda of international policymakers

Taking a broad perspective, Skills for Human Development presents a comprehensive and unique framework which bridges theory, policy and practice to give VET institutions a new way of thinking about their practice, and VET policymakers a new way of engaging with global messages of sustainable human development. It is a vital resource for those working on the human development and skills approach in multiple disciplines and offers a grounding framework for international policymakers interested in this growing area.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2019
ISBN
9781317328513
Edition
1

1

Introduction

Launched in 2015, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) seek to provide an “ambitious and transformational vision” (UN 2015: 3) designed to free “the human race from the tyranny of poverty and to heal and secure our planet” (UN 2015: 1). This policy objective echoes social struggles and academic approaches that insist on the urgent need for a new development paradigm that reflects existing insights regarding the importance of human and sustainable development.
In the arena of education, SDG4 signals a move away from the schooling focus of Millennium Development Goal 2 towards a lifelong learning focus. As part of this, vocational education and training (VET) is identified as central to human and sustainable development. In 2012, the Third International Congress on Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) held in Shanghai anticipated the transformative language of the SDGs by talking of “transformative VET”, which meant both that “the target of VET [changes] from economics to individuals” and that VET “does not adapt to current work and societal change, but aims to challenge and transform those” (UNESCO 2012). This included an emphasis on human development and the need to think more seriously about skills for life as well as for work in all its various forms.
Alongside these high-level revisitings of the importance of VET, the past five or so years have seen a massive increase in global investments in the VET sector globally by international development cooperation agencies, regional development banks, philanthropies, businesses and national governments. This represents a marked shift from the 1990s, where international funding organisations, particularly the World Bank, concluded that VET in many developing contexts was inefficient and ineffective and that the rates of return to the individual and to the economy was too low to justify further investment. As McGrath (2012b: 623)noted in 2012, reflecting on leading the writing of the background report for Shanghai:
The 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.
(McGrath, 2012: 623)
He went on to argue that the academic field of international education and development remained largely uninterested in VET, whilst the limited VET literature on the South was not deserving of the title of “VET for development”, as it was wedded to outdated theories of development on the rare occasions it did move towards any explicit theorisation.
The call in that paper to start building a new theory of skills development for human development is what we, with a handful of others, have been working on since. This book represents the most ambitious and detailed contribution to that literature to date, as we provide an empirically grounded and theoretical account of one direction such a project could take. In it we are not talking just to VET in developing contexts. Rather, what we have to say is of relevance to those working on VET in the North, and to those working in the wider domain of education and development, two communities to which we also belong. Equally, in writing on human development, but seeking to offer a new model of how the capability approach and critical realism can be brought together, we believe that we have something of importance to contribute to the debates in those two traditions, both theoretically and methodologically.

The tricky terrain of terminology

Already the careful reader will have noticed our use of a number of terms. We have used “skills”, “skills development” and “vocational education and training” ourselves and referred to others’ use of “technical and vocational education and training”. Subsequently, as we introduce South African historical institutional forms, we will refer to institutions within the sector by further names such as “technical” and “further education and training”, as well as sometimes using the shorthand of “vocational” to describe them.
Whilst our readers would have little trouble in imagining what a school looks like and would be able to navigate such an institution easily in most settings around the globe, the case of VET, as we will most typically call it, is less certain. We have been using terms that would be intelligible to an Anglophone reader but, depending on their location, they might themselves talk of the key providers, and sometimes of the system, as TAFE (technical and further education), FE (further education), VTC (vocational training college), polytechnic, community college, or many other variants.
Whilst the broader concepts and the institutional forms take on specific meanings for some, there is also a general sense of their overlap and interchangeability. They may cover specific or multiple age ranges, qualification levels, occupational sectors and jobs. The terms may be used to talk about different combinations of:
public and private (for-profit and not-for-profit) providers; basic, intermediate and advanced skills formation; formal and informal sector workplaces; learning in enterprises and in educational institutions; formal, non-formal and informal modes of learning; pre-employment programmes and continuing occupational and professional development. Views about what is to be included and which institutional forms deliver specific forms vary over both time and space. Moreover, we are seeing an increasing hybridity of form and a blurring of the general-vocational barrier.
(McGrath 2012b: 624)
Moodie (2002: 258) argues that any definition of VET needs to be cognisant of at least four dimensions: epistemological, teleological, hierarchical and pragmatic and concludes that we “may consider VET to be the development and application of knowledge and skills for middle level occupations needed by society from time to time”. In this sense, VET is sometimes talked about as an adaptive layer between education and the economy. As the fields of education and the economy are constantly in flux, the VET system must reposition and reinvent to remain effective as a bridge between them. The term VET as applied in this study aligns, at its broadest level, to this general definition of VET.
In this book, we are writing at two levels and we use language accordingly. At the empirical level, we are talking about a particular institutional form, located in time and space: the South African public Further Education and Training (FET) college sector, as it was known at the time of fieldwork. The South African FET colleges have since been renamed the South African TVET colleges, which is the term used in this study to refer to these institutions. Some of their history, nature and changing terminology will be outlined later in this chapter. At the theoretical level, or what Moodie (2002) identifies as the epistemological and teleological dimensions, we see skills development/VET as a discursive space that cannot and does not need to be tightly defined. Our language will move between the two according to which term seems more natural at a given moment.

Why VET matters

VET matters because it is a form of learning that all humans experience in one way or another in spite of its possible invisibility. Even if we confine ourselves narrowly to public vocational institutions, this is a system serving approximately 100 million learners globally at any moment in time (UNESCO 2018). Moreover, due to the segmented nature of educational access and attainment, public VET is disproportionately a site of learning for the poor and the marginalised. This is even more the case when we move into the realms of non-formal vocational programmes, traditional apprenticeship (although exceptions exist), work-based vocational training or vocational learning in prisons (though these are not the empirical focus here). Though VET is huge, it has received only a fraction of the attention of educational researchers, with VET largely being disregarded as an essential educational component by schools of education and by the broader academic community. This led Winch (2000: 1) to comment that “anyone interested in promoting (and understanding) vocational education is thought to be a philistine”. Indeed, one can go so far as to say that there has been a process of silencing VET research by the broader education field. In far too many cases, VET research exists on the outskirts of education faculties precariously dependent on external funding. Of equal concern is that we can point to numerous examples of academic papers and funding bids being rejected, not on grounds of quality but because VET research is not considered “important” to the study of education.
This “silencing” is neither morally nor intellectually tenable and Winch (2000: 1) makes this point powerfully when he argues further,
. . . that this view is a travesty [as] our deepest concerns with moral and spiritual wellbeing are bound up with work, and that any education directed at the wellbeing of the vast majority who are not going to live the life of the country gentry of yesteryear needs to concern itself with preparation for work in the broadest sense. VET’s importance goes beyond its mere size or its frequent orientation towards the marginalised. For its core youth population, VET has immense transformative potential. First, it is crucial to transitions to the world of work. Recent years have seen the understanding of this transition shift from a crude and narrow employability framing in which any transition to work is deemed a success to a growing awareness that the real goal needs to be decent work and sustainable production. Second, it plays a fundamental role in the formation of identity through this transition. This is not simply about becoming a generic worker, but is embedded in occupations and the languages, ethos and cultural norms embedded in occupations. It is not by accident that surnames such as Smith-Schmidt-LeFevre, Baker-Becker-Boulanger and Shepherd-Shäfer-Berger are so common, as occupation and identity have historically been intertwined (perhaps best expressed in the German notion of Bildung). Though the power of a single occupation for life has receded, the relationship remains important. Third, these are of course linked to transitions to adulthood and to the essential role played by work in transitioning a young person to adulthood through steadily expanding responsibilities, independence, interdependence and skills. Fourth, these link in the modern era to notions of enfranchisement, of becoming a citizen. Thus, VET transforms young people from students to workers, adults and citizens. In all these, it inducts them into a wider community by strengthening their relationality. We shall return to these debates throughout this book.
As we noted at the start of this chapter, the importance of VET has received renewed global policy attention recently. In talking about skills for work and life, UNESCO has focused on three lenses for thinking about VET: economic productivity and growth, equity, and environmental sustainability. This has been built upon by the SDGs, which link VET to decent work and sustainable production and consumption. However, globally, this new interest in VET is far from consolidated. Whilst notions such as ‘21st century skills’ are a commonplace language in VET and certainly not completely without merit, it is apparent that some in the schools lobby are using this as a justification for arguing that VET is just not that important. Moreover, many in the VET community are rightly concerned by actual and possible changes in the world of work. Notions of the fourth industrial revolution and concerns about the ‘end of work/industry’ have raised the growth of automation and the steady decline in formal sector jobs as real challenges for how we understand the world of work. These are challenges which the field is still attempting to understand.

The need for a new theoretical approach

Human capital and the VET orthodoxy

The current VET orthodoxy works neither theoretically nor practically. As a theory, it is grounded in human capital theory. This leads to the assumption that VET is only worth investing in if it provides a positive rate of return to the economy and to productivity. This has been a major factor in the under emphasis of VET in international policy, which was a direct result of the much-critiqued but nonetheless hugely influential work of the World Bank (cf. Ngcwangu 2015; McGrath 2018). In this model, VET is seen as entirely instrumental and only narrowly concerned with paid work in the formal sector. Following Anderson (2009), we employ Giddens’ (1994) notion of “productivism”. For Giddens, late modernity has seen paid employment’s separation from other aspects of life and the enshrinement of economic growth as the ultimate goal of society. Anderson builds on these arguments to claim that VET is built on two key productivist assumptions:
  1. training leads to productivity, [which, in turn] leads to economic growth
  2. skills lead to employability, [which, in turn] lead to jobs (skills for work).
We find Anderson’s argument very powerful and will quote him here at some length:
cast within the ethos of productivism and the ideological framework of neoliberalism, the institution of TVET is based on a restricted and instrumental view of lifeworlds which reduces people and the environment to the status of human and natural resources for economic exploitation. Such a perspective overlooks the complex and interdependent nature of human existence, the source and meanings of which are inextricably linked to the social relations, cultural practices and natural material conditions. TVET students are not only already, or aiming to become, workers. They are also human beings and citizens with a wide range of needs, relationships, duties, aspirations and interests beyond work; in the family, the local community, in civil society and the global environment. Over their life course, they give birth, raise and care for family members, consume goods and services, manage finances, fall ill, experience unemployment and hardship, elect governments, get involved in community affairs and ultimately rely for their survival on the fruits of nature. Yet in TVET they learn only to labour and produce commodities.
(Anderson 2009: 44–45)
As will become clearer in the next chapters, we reject the orthodox approach not only because of its productivist tenets, but also for its individualist ontology of the human. Its atomistic individualism underplays the importance of structure and power, and has the effect of labelling millions of people as failures. Moreover: “These individuals are rendered voiceless as there is no need to debate what the purpose of VET is: it is simply to promote employability and productivity” (McGrath & Powell 2015: 278). Lauder (2015) argues that human capital theory is incapa...

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