Understanding Work-Based Learning

John Mumford, Simon Roodhouse

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317004509
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This important book is for anyone who wants to make the most of work-based learning: employees, employers, educationalists, policy makers and researchers. It sheds light on ways of giving full-time employees the chance to take up learning opportunities which are of the same level and rigour as those on offer to the full time student. It approaches the subject from the perspective of the learner, drawing on case studies to provide detailed insight. It suggests that universities already have in place much of the machinery needed to support learners who are in work: they just don't make enough use of it. Look closely and you will find a substantial legacy of this kind of activity by universities. This is a book about seizing opportunities. In one volume, Understanding Work-Based Learning makes a valuable contribution to current employer engagement and learner demand debates, and provides first hand learner experiences to guide existing and potential work based learners, employers, educationalists, policy makers, and researchers.

PART I
Making Sense of Work-Based Learning

CHAPTER 1
The Genesis of University Work-Based Learning

SIMON ROODHOUSE

Following on from the introduction, this chapter introduces higher education work-based learning. The rationale for higher educational engagement is examined historically, from the perspective of the knowledge economy and the changing world of work. Many of the observations are taken from Employers, Skills and Higher Education, (Roodhouse and Swailes, 2007) and Getting Started with University Level Work based Learning (Durrant, Rhodes and Young, 2009).

A Brief Higher Education History

Waterhouse (2002) seeks to explain employer engagement by focusing our attention on technical education as the point of contact. He suggests that, ‘A fundamental part of education, wherever it occurs, is technical. Technical education is not simply practical, it is about particular types of action to make and manipulate physical things. Technical learning begins at birth. Technical education as a specific social institution began when techniques had reached a certain level of complication and sophistication.’ This gave birth in Europe to the apprenticeship system, with its overlay of secret knowledge and mystique. In spite of the printing press, the computer and communications technology, the restrictive practices of these medieval guilds are still with us – known today as professional bodies or associations such as the General Medical Council, the Law Society or the Institute of Civil Engineering. This concept of technical education as a social institution has often been distinguished from vocationalism; ‘A vocation is a calling, and the highest vocation, certainly in Europe, is to the priesthood and the European universities were invented to deliver vocational education in the strictest of senses. They were set up by the Church to train clerks, i.e. clerics. Indeed, all the great civilizations of the old world had similar institutions with an identical purpose.’ (Waterhouse, 2002) These origins are still evident today in the oldest universities. They were essentially the training colleges of their day.

The classic model of the late medieval university was the Sorbonne in Paris. Like other European universities the Sorbonne had four faculties. The lower faculty, the Faculty of Arts, generally trained young men in the skills of the clerk (church employee) and the three higher faculties were those of theology, medicine and law. The whole purpose was vocational, with the degree as a licence to practice and the doctorate as a licence to teach. However, much of this seems to have been forgotten. Medicine, law and theology as subjects worthy of study were the equivalent of the creative industries today.

As Waterhouse (2002) points out, ‘Universities in the early modern period were in no sense technical. They were about language, social interaction, beliefs and ideologies. They were not about making things or manipulating the physical world by action. (This even applied to faculties of medicine. If a surgeon was needed, people visited a barber not a doctor). By the 18^th century the universities were largely moribund, their social function having become the perpetuation of the aristocratic elite.’

In 1792 the Legislative Assembly of the French Revolution abolished the Sorbonne and three years later the Hautes Ecoles were established. They were dedicated to practical and technical learning – astronomy, geometry, mechanics, applied arts, natural history, medicine, veterinary science and rural economy, the new industries of their day – comparable to media studies or business and management. These actions were indicative of an explosion in technical knowledge during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which had occurred almost entirely outside the universities. Investigation, experimentation and learning had largely taken place without formal structures or teaching institutions; the Hautes Ecoles were designed to help put this technical knowledge into practice and fuel the Industrial Revolution.

However, the French model of the Hautes Ecoles did not sweep across Europe. With the notable exception of the University of Berlin, under Von Humboldt, existing universities were slow to change. Industrialists, Princes or enlightened regimes found it easier to establish new institutions of higher technical learning than to change the power structures of the universities. So, for example, England in the mid-nineteenth century saw the foundation of the University of London and the first of the civic universities, often driven (for reasons of public health) by the medical school. Elsewhere in Europe colleges of mines, engineering and commerce were being established. Later we had the development of technical schools and colleges; these were specialised professional schools for teachers, nurses, artists and designers, all of which eventually went to provide the heritage of the English polytechnic system.

None of these types of institution had degree-awarding powers, though various professional diplomas were created. Throughout the course of this development the word ‘vocational’, like the word ‘professional’, was used to give dignity and status to practical, socially useful, and in some cases technical, activities. The next stage of evolution, as suggested by Waterhouse (2002), requires universities to re-conceptualise themselves as a service industry, not a priesthood of occult technology, or a restrictive academic guild. In place of the student and teacher come the customer and facilitator of learning. Replacing the campus is the distributed system in which technology enables institutions to extend into the workplace. But, however, they have a long way to go, as Woolf suggests:

‘There are two key characteristics of universities which undermine their ability to provide good education and training in some areas. First, they are self-contained and separate from the workplace. They cannot for either financial or practical reasons, possibly keep up with all the changes that take place in a fast-developing industry – the new machinery and techniques, new markets, the emerging competitiveness. And because they are separate their instruction takes place in environments which are not like the workplace. Universities use classrooms. They assess and mark people individually, which is the only fair thing to do – and what students, very reasonably, demand – since people then go out into the world as individuals, with their individual degree results. University rhetoric about developing teamwork is consequently not worth very much. When people in work are asked about the type of training they have found the most valuable, “on-the-job training”, invariably comes out on top by a mile; and it is what universities cannot, by their nature, provide.

Secondly, university teachers, however vocational their speciality, are making their careers as academics, not as practitioners of the profession, trade or calling they teach. The tension, in university life, between teaching and research is a permanent one. Teaching is ultimately, what universities exist to do. But research is what academics like to do, and it is what helps to maintain the universities ability genuinely to promote understanding and, critically, it is something on which one can reach fairly objective judgements about people’s quality and abilities. You cannot sit around a table looking at direct evidence of teaching skills in a way you can with research publications. So research publications inevitably get the most attention from the ambitious and able.’ (Cited in De Burgh, Fazackerley and Black, 2007. pp. 278-9)

Consequently, the ultimate value proposition for universities, Waterhouse argues, ‘is not that they can teach, nor even that they can sell research, but that they can assess: they accredit learning and are awarding bodies. It is this social certification of successful learning that individuals, employers and ultimately society pay for.’ The next reinvention for the sector is contemporary vocationalisation and responsiveness to economic imperatives rather than learning. So what is being said here is that universities have engaged in a form of vocationalisation and that technical needs of business have generally been met outside the system, although the universities have engaged in the practice of the new industries.

The Reassertion of the Knowledge Economy

The arguments about university engagement in work-based learning are inevitably caught up with a wider debate about the purpose of these institutions and their role in economic development. Blunkett (2000), speaking on ‘Modernising Higher Education’ as Secretary of State for Education and Skills, argued that change was necessary: ‘Higher education policymaking is now subject to new constraints caused by the rapidity of change, a situation unthinkable in the 1960s Robbins era. And this change is related to the fundamental socio-economic development of the last quarter of the 20^th century: globalisation.’ These views are echoed by the Institute of Directors:

‘Education and skills are crucial ingredients for business success. Businesses need to have an educated and skilled workforce in order to enhance their productivity, quality of service and overall competitiveness. Business success is important because it can result in employment and wealth creation and so contribute towards financing the public services through taxation.’ (Wilson, 2006)

In 2009, Mandelson, the Secretary of State for Business and Universities reaffirmed these themes:

‘…the modern global economy puts a premium on specialization. It is an economy of supply chains and niches. The sectors in which British firms have potential comparative advantage in the next decade – low carbon, digital communications, life science, the creative industries: these are all absolutely reliant on high levels of knowledge, of skill and innovation. They will also draw heavily on our capacity for research and our ability to commercialise it. So our universities are inescapably central to our economic future.’ (Mandelson, 2009, speech at Birkbeck College, University of London)

The interest in globalisation has created the environment for the knowledge economy. For the purposes of clarity, in this case, globalisation is understood to mean, ‘The growing interdependence of countries world-wide through the increasing volume and variety of cross-border transactions in goods and services, and also through the more rapid and widespread diffusion of technology. Not just an economic phenomenon, but frequently described as such.’ (New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 2006). In higher education policy terms it has been interpreted as a need for virtual universities, international alliances, expansion with diversity and excellence, wider participation and expanded student numbers, and a role in securing economic competitiveness and social cohesion. Vocational relevance to improve competitiveness and social inclusion, and generate wealth may then be summarised as the New Labour higher education strategy.

As Brennan (2005) suggests, in this setting, learning is seen as an integral and ongoing feature of working. This is reflected in the DfEE Green Paper (1998) which highlights the rise of the knowledge economy, or the learning society. Brennan argues, in this version of human capital theory, that intellectual capital has become critical to economic success. This approach focuses on the importance of knowledge creation, and the application and manipulation of ‘new’ knowledge in the workplace. Garnett describes it as:

‘It is intellectual capital that is the true measure of the wealth of an organisation. The importance attached to the concept of intellectual capital is indicative of a revolutionary shift from the company as a place of production to being a ‘place of thinking’. At one level this could be thinking to improve what is it being done or at a deeper level a fundamental change in what is being done.’ (Garnett, Costley and Workman, 2009, p. 226)

He develops this theme by suggesting that knowledge can only have a value to the organisation if it contributes to the aims of the organisation. This he says ‘places an emphasis for the organisation on identifying, utilising and measuring the performance of the value of knowledge’ (Garnett, Costley and Workman, 2009, p. 228).

The authors of a High Level Review of Training Packages in Australia (Australian National Training Authority, 2003) suggest that this new knowledge is different such that:

• The production of new knowledge within organisations and enterprises is different from the knowledge outlined in traditional subjects or disciplines, and common in educational and training programmes.

• New knowledge is high in use-value for the enterprise or organisation. Its deployment has immediate value but, as it is context specific, its value within the enterprise or organisation may be short-lived.

• New knowledge is not foundational and cannot be codified into written texts such as competency standard descriptions, procedural manuals or textbooks; rather it is constructed within the context and environment of the immediate workplace.

• New knowledge is therefore rarely the product of individuals but is constructed through collaborations and networks that exist within specific sites and particular contexts.

Brennan (2005) reasons that this new knowledge is conceptualised as practical, interdisciplinary, informal, applied and contextual rather than theoretical, disciplinary, formal, foundational and generalisable. She posits that relevance no longer equates with the ‘application’ of knowledge to the workplace, but instead, the workplace itself is seen as a site of learning, knowledge and knowledge production. When this view of the nature of knowledge in the workplace is linked with an analysis of the skill requirements generated by changes to the way work is organised, it would appear that a higher proportion of workers are now expected to use their technical and generic knowledge and skills to contribute to the production of new knowledge within the workplace. The application of skills previously learned outside the work context may no longer be sufficient.

A view proffered by Brennan is that current demands for work-based learning differ from those involved in formal university award courses in that they:

• do not rely on the intervention of institutionally-based teachers or organizationally-based workplace trainers;

• are not structured around predetermined vocational outcomes;

• are not determined by qualification frameworks and endorsed training packages;

• are not guided by specific content;

• are not organised around the ‘enabling’ disciplines.

Instead, the main characteristics of work-based learning, as identified by Brennan (2005), are that it:

• is context bound, driven by specific and immediate work requirements;

• emphasises learning over teaching or training as a defining characteristic;

• depends on the responsibility for learning being spread between a number of people within the workplace;

• is consistent with new learning concepts such as learning networks, learning organisation and communities of practice.

The changing nature of work is relevant to the integration of work-based learning into higher education in that it points to significant changes in the ‘content’ or curriculum of higher education programmes, as well as where and how it should be delivered or achieved. It also suggests that the historic dominance of universities in knowledge production is being eroded, and that knowledge production increasingly becomes a collaborative activity based in and around the workplace. As the University Vocational Awards Council (UVAC) indicates, if higher education is to continue to make a contribution to the knowledge economy, it becomes necessary for higher education to expand work-based learning and recognise the workplace as a legitimate site of knowledge production and commercialisation. In order to realise this universities need to build formal and informal relationships with the creative industries, employers, operatives, students and their own staff.

In this context partnership and collaboration between employers, employers’ organisations, workers, further and higher education providers assumes a particular significance. The concepts of lifelong learning an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Case Study Contributors
• Glossary of Terms
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I Making Sense of Work-Based Learning
• Part II The Learner’s Experience
• Part III The Rights of the Learner
• References
• Index