Education, Skills and Social Justice in a Polarising World

Between Technical Elites and Welfare Vocationalism

Bill Esmond, Liz Atkins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367503338
• eBook ISBN: 9781000542400
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book explains how education policies offering improved transitions to work and higher-level study can widen the gaps between successful and disadvantaged groups of young people.

Centred on an original study of ongoing further education and apprenticeship reforms in England, the book traces the emergence of distinctive patterns of transition that magnify existing societal inequalities. It illustrates the distinction between mainly male 'technical elites' on STEM-based courses and the preparation for low-level service roles described as 'welfare vocationalism', whilst digital and creative fields ill-suited to industry learning head for a 'new economy precariat'. Yet the authors argue that social justice can nevertheless be advanced in the spaces between learning and work.

The book provides essential insights for academics and postgraduate students researching technical, vocational and higher education. It will also appeal to professionals with interests in contemporary educational policy and emerging practice.

Chapter 1

Technical and further education after COVID

New opportunities or new inequalities?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003049524-1

Across the developed world, the twenty-first-century’s economic and health crises have propelled education and training towards the top of policy agendas. With international bodies favouring those forms closest to labour markets as most likely to aid recovery, policymakers have launched or repurposed an array of training programmes, apprenticeships, and employment-oriented secondary and higher education routes (OECD 2020a; Cedefop 2020; Osnabruck Declaration 2020; ILO 2020; European Commission 2020; House of Lords 2021). Perhaps inevitably, European countries with well-developed technical and vocational systems are in the front rank of such moves; yet the most dramatic conversions have taken place in Anglophone countries, where such routes have long been unfavourably compared to general education. President Trump’s first major education reform provided $1.3 billion of ‘Perkins V’ to the career and technical education George W Bush once planned to close (Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act 2018; No Child Left Behind Act 2001); community colleges have been central to the USA’s post-COVID stimulus. Having prioritised apprenticeship and technical education reforms in the post-Brexit industrial strategy, UK ministers laud further education colleges, once scarcely mentioned at government level, and now designated as sites for both technical and tertiary education and central to the future of national life (DBEIS 2017; Williamson 2020; Johnson 2020, HM Treasury 2021).

From the 1980s, broad-based training interventions have frequently been mobilised as interventions to ameliorate youth unemployment (Bates et al. 1984; Lafer 2002; Pohl and Walther 2007). Yet 40 years of societal change prevent the simple repetition of this recipe. Globalisation, technological change and the growth of service industries have profoundly disturbed, though not entirely overturned, education’s former certainties, including valued forms of knowledge and distinctions between different routes, sectors and institutions. The discourses shaping emerging policies seek to strengthen employment imperatives in educational practice; but the imperative to relocate learning into the workplace is entangled with a fracturing of boundaries between vocational pathways and higher education. Countries such as France, Holland and Sweden have already accommodated work-based routes alongside school provision; now work-based qualifications at higher levels spread across Europe (Deissinger et al. 2013; Bathmaker 2017; Hippach-Schneider et al. 2017; Persson and Hermelin 2018; Köpsén 2020). The pervasive vocationalism of recent years is now complemented by the inscription of these courses’ candidates in the vanguard of technological change, with their prospects central to discourses of social mobility. Continuities remain, however: older demarcations between educational pathways, not least the boundaries and barriers with which elite universities resist intrusion, remain intact (Reay et al. 2005; Boliver 2013, 2015; Bahr et al. 2013; Katartzi and Hayward 2019, 2020). The fundamental question addressed in this book is how far emerging policies offer improvements to the experiences and outcomes of students on technical or vocational tracks, or whether their new guise facilitates a deepening of inequalities.

A metaphor deployed in support of such policy shifts depicts an educational hourglass. Its base is supposedly formed from the low educational attainment of many young people displaced by crisis, or otherwise judged unfit for employment; its upper end represents the relentless (and expensive) growth of universities; its slender but too insubstantial neck stands for the apprenticeships and technical courses deemed best to meet the needs of modern business. At moments of disrupted labour markets and fiscal constraint, learning closer to the workplace has attractions for all governments, especially when faced with reports of ‘overeducation’ (ILO 2014; Savic 2019; Habibi and Kamis 2021). However, in Anglophone countries this metaphor is represented as a national peculiarity: Field (2018, 2020) is among those who describe a ‘missing middle’ of sub-bachelor courses in England. The weakness of postsecondary provision outside higher education drives the US’s search for ‘alternatives to college’ (Symonds et al. 2011; Kolluri and Tierney 2018; Lanford et al. 2015). European administrations have their own anxieties around the decline of vocational routes and the growth of universities, reflected in policy discourses of skill shortages, mismatches and social exclusion (Cedefop 2018; Vandeplas and Thum-Thysen 2019). Echoing the hourglass metaphor, they identify a corresponding problem of dropout from vocational routes (Tanggaard 2013; Cerda-Navarro et al. 2017). Such charges are laid differently in every country, but they consistently imply that education systems, polarised between unattractive basic offerings and universities preparing too many graduates for professional roles, should devote more attention to the skills required by new generations for anticipated mid-level jobs.

Hourglass discourses, like the all-purpose vocationalism that preceded them in several countries, continue to frame policy in economic terms, demanding better integration of education with work. By contrast with earlier policy discourses, however, they conjure visions of technology-driven social mobility, credentialised by employer-led qualifications fit to replace less ‘relevant’ bachelor’s degrees. The OECD’s (2014) Skills Beyond School summary depicts a Europe with two thirds of jobs at ‘technician and associate professional level’ as well as a US job market where ‘one-third of job vacancies by 2018 will require some post-secondary qualification but less than a four-year degree’ (1). Such exact translations of employment forecasts into specific qualification levels, however, are not the sole origin of the hourglass thesis. Most US community college students already leave with vocational degrees, yet the huge costs and inequalities of the world’s first ‘mass’ higher education system have fuelled an impatience with its liberal traditions (Marginson 2016; Caplan 2018). England lacks US traditions of intermediate (sub-bachelor) qualifications and a succession of reports and inquiries (most recently Augar 2019) has agonised over its limited non-university higher education. These policy turns go beyond economic imperatives, amounting to major political and social projects. Formerly neglected tracks to mid-level jobs, once faintly marked alongside the bright highways to professional careers and broad roads to routine occupations, are increasingly depicted as straight paths to national salvation (e.g., DBEIS 2017). These representations leave extremes out of the frame: neither the genuinely privileged minority, destined for elite education and occupations, nor most young people on vocational programmes, appear on such maps. Yet the prospects of all these groups are bound up together, as technological mobility discourses are deployed increasingly widely. Less than a decade ago, Brown (2013) warned that the doctrine that there is ‘room at the top’ for ‘highly skilled’ graduates could ‘no longer bear the weight of social and political expectations’ (679). A switch to emphasis on ‘room in the middle’ now conjures new possibilities of mobility, albeit with questionable impact on the status quo.

In the remainder of this chapter, we set out our framework for understanding these developments. In the next section, we summarise the origins of this policy turn with an overview of socio-economic and policy developments. We outline how emerging policies are rationalised in terms of social fractions purported to gain through new forms of social mobility, and those marginalised in this discussion. In the process we seek to define how the education sectors central to our account, and their relationship to the employment sphere, can be understood more broadly, drawing on earlier theorisation of reproduction, change and social justice. Finally, we set out the origins of this study and our plan for the remainder of this book.

TVET in times of crisis: vocationalism and its discontents

The hourglass thesis suggests the transformation of educational routes internationally described as (technical and) vocational education and training (TVET or simply VET) or, in their post-school forms in some Anglophone countries, further education. These routes take different forms across and even within borders: they resist simple definition (Tawney 1931; Moodie 2002). Generalising across different national systems is hazardous, and perhaps a failing of too many ‘policy borrowing’ exercises (Esmond 2019). Their distinction from general education is, like all educational forms, arbitrary and historically constituted: especially in times of crisis, such administrative boundaries are liable to be cast anew (White 2009; Apple 2004); but they are subject to societal constraints and historical path-dependencies. They offer policymakers the advantage of supporting their aspirations to strengthen industry skills and social inclusion; but they also suffer lower prestige than higher education or its preparation on general education routes (Billett 2014, 2020; UNESCO-UNEVOC 2018). Vocational pathways have largely catered to young people whose patterns of speech and behaviour position them as ‘outside’ the norms that middle-class children take with them to school: their ‘failure’ or rejection of the standard curriculum has already marked them out for manual and low-status roles (Aronowitz 2002, 113). For some commentators, vocational routes are inherently complicit in social reproduction:...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1. Technical and further education after COVID: New opportunities or new inequalities?
• 2. Lessons of European VET? National systems and international prescriptions
• 3. Shifting but impermeable? Higher-vocational barriers and diversions
• 4. Further education and skills in England: From ‘craft’ education to polarisation
• 5. Enter the technical elites: Fragmentation or a new mobility myth?
• 6. Welfare vocationalism: Preparing for service and caring occupations
• 7. Beyond the divide: Learning for work in the post-industrial economy?
• 8. The polarisation of professionalism
• 9. Conclusions
• Index