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The [Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework] SCQF is one of the longest-established comprehensive qualifications frameworks and is often perceived as one of the most successful. This article describes the main features of the SCQF and outlines its progress, drawing on recent studies and evaluations by the authors. It draws lessons for the [European Qualifications Framework] EQF and for further development of national frameworks to respond to it. These lessons concern the specific requirements of meta-frameworks and comprehensive frameworks, the need for realistic expectations and time scales, and the value of an incremental and pragmatic strategy for introducing a learning-outcomes approach. The article also identifies issues relating to the architecture of a levels framework and the limitations, as well as strengths, of a voluntary partnership-based approach.

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The three home countries of the United Kingdom, England, Scotland and Wales, are employing divergent strategies for postcompulsory education and training. All three countries are following differing strategies towards the same goal, i.e. the unification of academic and vocational learning, and a reduction of the gap between the two curricular pathways. This chapter examines policy developments in Wales and investigates the scope for the development of a Welsh policy distinct from the English approach. The Welsh approach is compared with the linkages strategy used in England and the unified system adopted in Scotland. The chapter is based on the outcomes of the Unified Learning Project which compared English, Scottish and Welsh approaches to unifying academic and vocational learning. The authors begin by summarising the conceptual framework developed within the Project to analyse these approaches and then discuss the impediments to the adoption of a unified strategy in Wales. The chapter concludes with an examination of three options which may help to address these barriers: reforms of government and regulation and possible institutional change; reforms of the qualifications system within the current structure; and the development of separate Welsh qualifications.

The volume from which this chapter is taken is indexed at TD/TNC 65.128. Show less

The Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework (SCQF) was formally launched in 2001. It is a comprehensive credit-based National Qualifications Framework (NQF) with 12 levels, intended to accommodate all qualifications and assessed learning in Scotland. It aims to support access to learning and to make the education and training system more transparent. It is a voluntary framework, led by a partnership of the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA), higher education (HE), colleges and the Scottish government. Qualifications in the framework must be credit-rated, which means that each unit must be described in terms of a volume of learning (credit) at a given level of the framework. This in turn requires that units and qualifications are expressed in terms of learning outcomes, but the framework does not impose a specific concept of outcome or competence. The SCQF has a ‘loose’ design, but it embraces sub-frameworks which are more tightly specified. These features have led the SCQF to be seen as a communications framework: one whose immediate purpose is to describe the existing qualifications system and thereby make it more transparent, as compared with a transformational framework which prescribes a proposed future system and imposes changes to introduce it. A communications framework seeks to bring about change indirectly, by providing tools to support incremental reforms and by making the system transparent and thereby facilitating rationalisation and coherence. This view in turn is associated with what I shall call the celebratory account of the Scottish framework. The SCQF is widely perceived as a relatively successful NQF. Young’s (2005, 19) review of NQFs concluded, with reservations, that the SCQF was one of the ‘success stories’ of framework implementation. It is one of the most developed comprehensive frameworks within Europe. And it emerged as the ‘most successful’ of the 16 national frameworks recently studied by the ILO (Allais 2010, 2). As a result the SCQF has assumed an almost moral authority among NQFs and become a source of lessons to others. And these lessons attribute its relative success to its nature as a communications framework. Thus, the SCQF experience is perceived to show that an NQF should have a loose design, that it should start from the existing education and training system, that it should aim at most to stimulate modest and incremental improvements in that system, and that it should do so as part of a broader suite of policies (e.g. Raffe, Gallacher, and Toman 2007-08; Tuck 2007). This paper addresses two questions: how successful has the SCQF really been? And can its ‘success’ be attributed to its character as a communications framework? It revisits the celebratory account and compares it with an alternative, ‘sceptical account’ which draws attention to the SCQF’s long pre-history and the role of earlier sub-frameworks in laying its foundations. The paper is thus an exercise in the science of cross-national policy learning, which aims to identify valid policy lessons from other countries’ experience. This is distinguished from the sociology of policy learning, which examines the learning that actually occurs and the cross-national influences on policy behaviour. Both types of policy learning are, of course, relevant to NQFs.

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This chapter examines the early progress of the Higher Still reform's flexible unified system of post-16 education in further education (FE) colleges in Scotland. The authors describe the Scottish system and provide an overview of the Higher Still reform. A conceptual framework addressing unification and flexibility is presented. The authors examine survey findings in order to determine: (1) the level of support for the reform; (2) the extent of increased flexibility; (3) the implications of changes in assessment; and (4) who is empowered by the flexible unified system. The authors' discussion is based around the four research questions. Higher Still has wider implications for vocational education and training (VET) systems in other countries. Provisional lessons are drawn at the conclusion of the chapter based on the findings of the research.

The publication from which this chapter is taken is indexed at TD/TNC 78.468. Individual chapters are indexed from TD/TNC 78.469 to TD/TNC 78.484. Show less

In 1998 Scotland introduced a unified system of post-compulsory education. A national reform, known as Higher Still, brought together academic and vocational education in a single curriculum and assessment system. There are four sections to this paper. The first gives a simplified description of the previous Scottish system. The second section lists some of the problems and pressures to which the current reforms were a response. The third section describes the unified system which Higher Still aims to implement. The final section discusses aspects of the strategy.

The volume of collected papers is indexed at TD/INT 61.334. Show less

Numerous countries are introducing national qualifications frameworks (NQFs), or preparing to introduce them, despite the limited empirical evidence for their effectiveness. This paper takes advantage of recent additions to the evidence base on NQFs in order to assess their impacts, focusing on comprehensive frameworks. It also presents analytical tools for studying these impacts, by distinguishing among different types of framework and among the different ‘change processes’ by which they try to achieve their objectives. The evidence, while still inconclusive, shows that the impacts of NQFs have been smaller than expected, have often taken many years to appear, have varied across frameworks and sub-frameworks and have been negative as well as positive. However, the most important conclusion is the variability of the impacts of NQFs and the complexity of the underlying causal processes.

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These notes identify six issues - parity of esteem; labour market context; educational system; local networking; teacher education/cooperation; qualifications, flexibility of student programs and curriculum development - relating to the Scottish Higher Still reform. It is intended that this set of notes be read as a set of notes drafted to support the process of comparison and synthesis, not as a linear argument. The focus is on forward planning.

The volume of collected papers is indexed at TD/INT 61.334. Show less

Overall, any impacts of the 2012 fee changes that [the authors] have been able to detect have been modest and often uncertain. This partly reflects the difficulties of attributing any changes to the new fee regime. On the one hand, higher education in the UK has not been static; any impacts of fee changes have been superimposed on the impacts of other changes and of longer-term if fluctuating trends. On the other hand, the most evident impact of fee changes has been a disruption in past patterns of deferred entry, which have made the year-on-year changes described in this analysis much harder to interpret. [Flows would need to be observed] over several cohorts of entrants to be more certain about the impacts of the fee changes.

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This paper presents a provisional analysis of the eight country studies. Four strategies for parity of esteem are offered. They are: (1) vocational enhancement; (2) mutual enrichment; (3) linkages; and (4) unification. They are placed back within the context of the educational system and the labour market context. Typical aspects of each strategy are drawn out and this is used to raise a number of questions for further research. Show less

This publication considers reforms of European post-16 education and systems of vocational education and training and their response to the challenge of promoting parity of esteem between initial vocational education and general/academic education. The project surveyed and analysed upper secondary school reforms within and across eight European educational systems. Its conclusions have been drawn from the case studies of Austria, England, Finland, France, Germany, Norway, Scotland and Sweden. This volume is the final report of the Post-16 Strategies Project. The two-year project was carried out with the financial support of the Commission of the European Communities under the Leonardo da Vinci Programme. The Post-16 Strategies Project has been managed by Dr Johanna Lasonen and coordinated by the Institute for Educational Research at the University of Jyvaskyla. European post-compulsory educational and training systems face similar problems and pressures and many countries' educational reform policies have much in common.

This chapter reviews the four different strategies on the basis of the two-country report, which pairs the eight countries, allowing greater comparative analysis. Each of the countries has been analysed within the four different ideal types representing alternative ways of organising the relations of vocational and academic tracks in post-16 education. Vocational enhancement is discussed with reference to Germany and Austria, mutual enrichment of academic and vocational learning are discussed in relation to Norway and Finland, the linkages systems of England and France are compared and the unified system strategies of Scotland and Sweden are discussed. The problems that the reforms are meant to resolve are identified and the objectives are listed. The Post-16 strategies are described and finally current developments in Europe are analysed.

This book is indexed at TD/INT 60.264. Show less