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The importance of tertiary education to individuals and to society is widely recognised, not only in New Zealand, but in most other countries. The fundamental intentions of the Tertiary Education Advisory Commission’s (TEAC) policies are to link tertiary education’s roles and responsibilities to these goals using a stakeholder-based policy development process. This research critiques TEAC’s policies from a university academic staff perspective, investigating how well the policies were articulated, implemented and executed. Taking a case study approach, the researcher interviewed academic staff (n=60), and analysed their answers to quantitative and qualitative questions using content analysis and a stakeholder theory perspective. The quantitative findings indicated general agreement amongst the participants with the policy intentions, while the qualitative responses identified a misalignment between the values and priorities of government and academic staff. It is clear from this study that there are significant discrepancies between the policy makers and academic staff about the meaning of key concepts used in the policies.

This research provides evidence of a gap between TEAC’s policy intentions and the outcomes achieved. Further research would enable the improved use of stakeholder concepts. This would be beneficial for implementing future government policy to ensure that consultation with the key stakeholders occurs when policy is being developed, leading to effective changes and improved policy. While stakeholder theory provides a rational means for understanding the policy process, its present form and application is limited in regard to stakeholder identification and prioritisation. Furthermore, critical discourse analysis needs to be applied from the start of the policy generation stage to ensure that the language used does not pose a barrier to meaningful stakeholder participation. Academic staff were given the opportunity to engage in TEAC’s process, however they consider their input has been largely ignored.

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The traditional 'idea' of labour law is a combination of subject matter and purpose. According to Kahn-Freund's famous articulation of labour law, it is generally considered to be the law which regulates the employment relationship with the goal of correcting an imbalance in bargaining power between employer and employee in order to secure a more just working relationship for the worker.

The overarching goal of this paper is to re-state the case for a broader interpretation of the traditional subject matter and purpose of labour law, and to locate industrial policy within that broader perspective. Over recent years, for reasons which are explored later in the paper, there has been considerable support in labour law scholarship for the reformulation of labour law around a wider, labour market regulation perspective of the subject (the LMR perspective). Efforts to develop the LMR perspective have been particularly strong in Australia. On this view, labour law encompasses various forms of labour market regulation in addition to employment regulation, including social security law, active labour market policy and as [the author argues] in this paper, industrial policy. The paper will use the example of the implementation of the New Protection during the early beginnings of federal labour regulation in Australia to illustrate the importance of industrial policy settings to the subject matter and goals of traditional labour law. [The author] will also consider the advantages to both scholarship and labour policymaking and practice of including industrial policy within the idea of labour law.

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The authors use Hong Kong's policy on initial teacher training as a case study of the relationship between international trends and local policy, providing insights into policy formation. Initial teacher training has traditionally been provided by higher education institutions in most countries. In recent years, the number of alternative pathways have grown in the US and the UK. University-based routes have also been criticised as a barrier to entry to the profession for capable candidates. It is argued that these trends have had a significant effect on initial teacher training policy in Hong Kong. Untrained teachers met shortfalls in teacher supply until 1997, when government policy required all new teachers to hold degrees and be professionally trained. This policy was short-lived and the authors argue that there is substantial evidence that policy has been influenced by international trends in alternative pathways.

The volume from which this chapter is taken is indexed at TD/TNC 98.897. Selected individual chapters are indexed from TD/TNC 98.898 to TD/TNC 98.906. Show less

National (and European) qualifications frameworks which map qualifications in a similar way according to the specification of learning outcomes and then assign them a unique position within a hierarchical system of levels have proved very attractive to policy makers. They offer the prospect of improving transparency between qualifications and aiding mobility, but as with all policies the acid test is how the policy is implemented in practice. As many countries now consider how to implement a National Qualifications Framework (NQF), it is perhaps instructive to look at the reasons for the policy failure of an NQF based exclusively on learning outcomes in England. The major lesson to be learned is that a focus on competence, mapping qualifications, levels and outcomes can become a distraction from the much harder goal of improving the quality of teaching and learning. Shifting attention from a developmental approach to the development of expertise may be more effective by highlighting the importance of processes of learning and the need to support the development of expansive learning environments in education, training and employment. Recognising that the development of an NQF has an important but limited part to play in this process, and that a 'rough guide' to equivalence will often be sufficient in mapping potential progression pathways, may be a useful starting point for this shift.

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The Food, Fibre and Timber Industries Training Council represents a diverse number of business operations and within these industries there are a number of smaller sectors that have low employment numbers yet require highly skilled workers, for example soft furnishings, sewing machine repair, floor coverings, canvas and sail making, shearing, dairy and seafood processing. These markets are traditionally called 'thin markets'. Thin markets in vocational education and training (VET) have been defined as those in which the actual and potential number of learners may be too small to attract training providers (Ferrier et al, 2008). Currently a number of food, fibre and timber industry sectors are experiencing skill shortages in thin market areas and are finding it difficult to source training to meet workforce development needs.

Thin markets are inherently difficult for training providers to service. A survey conducted by the Training Council in 2012 found that over 60 per cent of registered training organisations (RTOs) in the food, fibre and timber industries experienced difficulty in servicing thin markets. The range of reasons provided by the RTOs included low and volatile student numbers, higher costs for the long travel distances for delivery to regional and remote areas and insufficient funding. Over the years, despite the efforts of the Training Council, industry peak bodies and RTOs, little headway has been made in finding sustainable solutions. Consequently the Food, Fibre and Timber Industries Training Council funded this project which aims: to better understand the nature of VET thin markets; and to propose innovative approaches by relevant stakeholders to enhance the provision of training in thin markets in Western Australia including within the food, fibre and timber industry sectors. This project focused on VET thin markets in employment based training. That is, specifically apprenticeships and traineeships as defined under Western Australian law and which receive funding from the Western Australian government under the Future Skills WA framework. While the main focus of the report was on employment based training, the report will make references to institutional based training.

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In recognition of the contested nature of developing methods to consistently identify and classify social enterprises, this paper describes one approach that relies upon cross-referencing large data sets. These empirical statistics are generated by a variety of agencies that regulate a very specific market for the delivery of technical and vocational education and training [TVET]. The creation and maturation of this specific market has corresponded with major studies into the operations of social enterprises in Australia. Instead of attempting to describe features of social enterprises that trade in a variety of markets, this research first identifies a very specific market and then interrogates the information recorded in various regulatory data bases to determine the characteristics of the organisations that operate in the market. The results identify consistent interactions between charity status, the relative role of philanthropy and the type of organisations that meet the local definition of social enterprise. While the limits of this method are acknowledged, it is shown that in a highly regulated market for the delivery of outsourced government services a reliable indicator of social enterprise can be made operational.

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Educational policy-making in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) is still building upon the ambivalences and uncertainties of post-communist transformation. The international support, expertise and discourses - coupled with communist legacies, stalled democratic developments and national discourses - produce unique effects on education in each of these countries. This paper is an attempt to conceptualise educational policy-making (with its disparities between ‘democratised’ discourses and ‘Sovietised’ practices) as a form of emerging governmentality or governmentality-in-the-making on the level of the state, using Ukraine as a case study. Analysing policy-making through the perspective of emerging governmentality brings into focus the genealogy of post-independent reforms, which is (as a part of the technologies of government) threaded into a broader governmental project of restructuring the state and legitimising its rationality. The final empirical part of the paper presents a discourse analysis of selected curriculum choice and assessment policy documents (1999-2003) and embedded in them the complex interplay of internal and external discourses, which work together to construct and justify the emerging governmental rationality of post-communist Ukraine.

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This paper uses a case study of the development of German vocational training policy to address open questions in the emerging literature on partisan politics in the political economy of education and training. So far, this literature has not systematically incorporated the role of vocational training in models of policy preferences and partisan strategies. This research gap is consequential, because in particular for the electoral constituencies of leftist parties, the expansion of educational opportunities in vocational education and training is an attractive policy option. By tracing the development of German vocational training policy since the 1970s, [the author aims] to answer two research questions: First, can systematic differences between governments led by social democrats and by Christian democrats be observed? Second, comparing the 1970s with the recent period, do social democrats in government pursue different policies, suggesting that they have become the party of labour market insiders as has been recently suggested by the work of David Rueda (2005, 2006, 2007)? [The author] finds support for both hypotheses.

Published abstract.

This is a preliminary draft. Do not cite or circulate without the author's permission. Show less

This paper proposes a novel method for identifying and visualising key employment obstacles that may prevent individuals from participating fully in the labour market. The approach is intended to complement existing sources of information that governments use when designing and implementing activation and employment-support policies. In particular, it aims to provide individual and household perspectives on employment problems, which may be missed when relying on common labour-force statistics or on administrative data, but which are relevant for targeting and tailoring support programmes and related policy interventions.

A first step describes a series of employment-barrier indicators at the micro level, comprising three domains: work-related capabilities, financial incentives and employment opportunities. For each domain, a selected set of concrete employment barriers are quantified using the [European Union-Statistics on Income and Living Conditions] EU-SILC multi-purpose household survey. In a second step, a statistical clustering method (latent class analysis), is used to establish profiles and patterns of employment barriers among individuals with no or weak labour-market attachment. A detailed illustration for two countries (Estonia and Spain) shows that 'short-hand' groupings that are often highlighted in the policy debate, such as 'youth' or 'older workers', are in fact composed of multiple distinct sub-groups that face very different combinations of employment barriers and likely require different policy approaches. Results also indicate that individuals typically face two or more simultaneous employment obstacles suggesting that addressing one barrier at a time may not have the intended effect on employment levels. From a policy perspective, the results support calls for carefully sequencing activation and employment support measures, and for coordinating them across policy domains and institutions.

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This study presents early evidence on the effective implementation and delivery of four examples of localised policy interventions that support and/or complement national provision. The case study examples relating to business support are: (1) Greater Manchester Business Growth Hub; (2) Plymouth Growth Acceleration and Investment Network; (3) New Anglia Business Information Portal; and (4) West of England Employability Charter Mark. The research aims to understand the rationale for local differentiation of the policy, how the policies were designed and implemented, the enablers for achieving intended outcomes, the barriers faced and to identify lessons learned. The report includes the main findings and synthesis of the research, outlining the implications for future localised policy interventions.

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