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Partnership working between institutions and organisations is currently commonly seen as providing solutions to meeting multiple, interrelated needs in areas of social policy including health, social welfare and education. This article examines and discusses the policy and practice of such collaboration in an educational context. Drawing on studies of state-funded interventions into 14-19 provision in England it offers insights into why and how schools, colleges and other organisations involved in education and training collaborate. It concludes that partnership is highly locally contingent. National policy on partnership working, which is itself not consistent, is strongly mediated by local contextual factors, institutional values and interests, personal missions and careers, pragmatic opportunism, ad-hocery and happenstance. The interplay of these factors is highly dynamic and changes over time.

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Drawing on interview data derived from two case studies of teachers in their first year in the profession, this article examines the difficulties that confront new teachers as they move from a Postgraduate Certificate in Education course into their first teaching post. It questions the value of those discursive practices, promulgated by the Teacher Training Agency through ‘Qualifying to teach’, that construct teaching as a set of discrete competences or standards, and argues that Lave and Wenger’s (1991) concepts of legitimate peripheral participation and communities of practice are useful tools with which to analyse the sociocultural complexity of the new teachers’ experiences.

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Many countries have introduced flexibility in their admissions equivalents for tertiary education, allowing students to apply with vocational rather than academic qualifications at upper secondary level. However, entrants with vocational qualifications are generally less likely to succeed at university. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds are also, on average, less likely to succeed: they are more likely to drop out, or graduate with a lower class degree, even when they have the same prior attainment scores and take the same university course. Rich individual-level data in England drawn from administrative records allow us to link outcomes at university with social background and attainment and qualification routes at school, going back to lower secondary level, before academic and vocational pathways diverge. We can thus use the English example to explore whether the relative lack of success of students from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds is in part because they are more likely to enter university with non-traditional qualifications that offer less effective preparation for study. Our results reveal a significant penalty associated with entering university with these vocational qualifications. Controlling for qualification type reduces the SES gradient in dropping out of university by 42 per cent, and graduation with a lower class degree by 28 per cent, although significant SES gradients in success still remain. There is a tension between allowing students from lower SES backgrounds to use vocational routes to enter university and these persistent gaps in university outcomes. Countries using both vocational and academic routes as pathways to university should be aware of this potential conflict.

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Forthcoming article first published online 07 August 2023 by John Wiley and Sons. Show less

The research investigated the association between school engagement and adult education and occupation outcomes, within the context of a 1985 Australian longitudinal national cohort study of the factors affecting children’s long-term health and well-being. School engagement may be more modifiable than other factors related to academic success, such as academic attainment, which is influenced by family background. A School Engagement Index was constructed using questionnaire items on school enjoyment and boredom. Related school engagement items included learner self-concept, motivation to learn, sense of belonging, participation in school or extra-mural activities, and enjoyment of physical activity. In 2004-2006, participants (aged 26 to 30 years) reported their highest level of education achieved and current occupation. Potential covariates included age, sex, markers of socioeconomic status in childhood, personality and school-level variables (i.e. number of students, single sex versus co-education; government, private or independent). Logistic regression was used to estimate the odds of achieving post-compulsory school education and achieving higher status occupations. Findings revealed that each unit of school engagement was independently associated with a 10 per cent higher odds (OR 1.10 95 per cent CI 1.01, 1.21) of achieving a post-compulsory school education. Maternal education, self-concept as a learner, motivation to learn, all also significantly predicted achieving post-compulsory school education. School engagement was found to mediate the association between the personality characteristic of agreeableness and education outcomes. Higher school engagement was also independently associated with achieving higher status occupations 20 years later (OR 1.11 95 per cent CI 1.03, 1.20). Importantly, this was independent of a host of background factors.

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The Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP) project reported on in this article attempts to understand how the Learning and Skills sector functions. It traces how education and training policy percolates down through many levels in the English system and how these levels interact, or fail to interact. The authors first focus upon how policy impacts upon the interests of three groups of learners: unemployed people in adult and community learning centres, adult employees in work-based learning and younger learners on Level 1 and Level 2 courses in further education. They focus next upon how professionals in these three settings struggle to cope with two sets of pressures upon them: those exerted by government and a broader set of professional, institutional and local factors. They describe in particular how managers and tutors mediate national policy and translate it (and sometimes mistranslate it) into local plans and practices. Finally, the authors criticise the new government model of public service reform for failing to harness the knowledge, good will and energy of staff working in the sector, and for ignoring what constitutes the main finding of the research: the central importance of the relationship between tutor and students.

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School attainment is generally believed to be correlated positively with participation in adult learning. The paper explores evidence from Northern Ireland that suggests an inverse relationship is also possible under certain circumstances. In Northern Ireland high school attainment co-exists with low participation in adult learning. The paper considers evidence suggesting that the existence of strong social networks, shared norms and value, and a high level of trust may be a contributory factor to this divergent pattern. While there is a strong social consensus around the academic schooling of young people in Northern Ireland, this ‘social capital’ both provides an alternative to formal participation in adult learning and a legitimation for low aspirations among adults.

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This article explores the strengths and weaknesses of Lave and Wenger’s concept of ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ as a means of understanding workplace learning. It draws on recent ESRC-funded research by the authors in contemporary workplace settings in the UK (manufacturing industry and secondary schools) to establish the extent to which Lave and Wenger’s theories can adequately illuminate the nature and process of learning at work. The new research presented here, which was located in complex institutional settings, highlights the diverse nature of patterns and forms of participation. Case study evidence is used to identify individual and contextual factors which underpin and illuminate the ways in which employees learn. The paper argues that whilst Lave and Wenger’s work continues to provide an important source of theoretical insight and inspiration for research into learning at work, it has significant limitations. These limitations relate to the application of their perspective to contemporary workplaces in advanced industrial societies and to the institutional environments in which people work. These complex settings play a crucial role in the configuration of opportunities and barriers to learning that employees encounter.

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Previously we showed how we measured pedagogy and revealed its association with learning outcomes of sixth-form college mathematics students. In this project we followed a similar approach to the study of university transition. We particularly sought to identify the students' perceptions of the transitional experience, and measure the association with learning outcomes. We drew on longitudinal surveys of students entering different programs in five universities. Following them into their first year or so, allowed us to track their 'disposition to complete the course' and their 'disposition to study more mathematics', inter alia. We developed and validated two 'fit-for-purpose' measures of students' perception of their transition, one we call 'perception of the transitional gap/jump' and one we call 'degree of positive feeling about the transition'. We report some statistically and educationally significant associations between these and the students' developing dispositions, and discuss the prospects for this approach to studying transition.

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Raising the attractiveness of vocational education and training (VET ) has been on the UK as well as the European agenda for some time, primarily for economic and social development reasons. However, little is known about the role of skills competitions in improving the attractiveness of VET. This study uses data from 110 interviews with WorldSkills competitors and their associates to examine the potential contributions of skills competitions to revitalise VET in the UK. Adopting the enhancement strategy we propose that the experiences of young people who have been internationally recognised for excellence in their respective vocations are inspiring for others. Such experiences have the potential to refocus the attention from a deficit model of VET to the level of excellence that can be achieved through competitions. However, the enhancement strategy in and of itself is not enough to raise the attractiveness of VET. To do so requires consistent policy efforts oriented on spreading excellence throughout the entire VET sector. The ultimate disruption of the policy cycle that perpetuates the existing vocational/academic divide may be achieved through a systemic approach that builds upon the examples of vocational excellence.

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This article summarises recent political and theoretical presentations of partnership and networking and discusses their relevance to the understanding of contemporary education policy. It focuses in detail on the first stages of the establishment of Education Action Zones (EAZs) in two areas of England, describing in detail their patterns of governance, and the relationship they involve between public and private partners. It questions whether existing theorisations are adequate to understanding the dynamics of partnership in situations where there are substantial conflicts of interests between partners. It concludes that partnership in the EAZ context needs to be understood not as an established system of clearly-defined relationships but rather as a political strategy intended to accomplish a historic shift in the governance of education.

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