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Recent changes in education and training policy in England continue to focus on creating a 'demand-led' system in an environment where public funds are dwindling and where more responsibility is being devolved away from central government. This raises questions about governance of the system, among others, and the roles that key system actors are expected to play. This paper broadly discusses education and training system policies that focus on workforce development in England and the US, especially with regard to the role of further education colleges (community colleges in the US), employer engagement, and local workforce development bodies. The focus is on governance at the post-secondary level, as the main interest is skills development after compulsory education.

The US and England share a number of features and problems that affect the education and training system, such as lack of employer involvement, the lower status of sub-baccalaureate education and training providers despite their central role in delivering vocational education and training programmes, and insufficient links between education and training provision and the labour market. The most striking differences between the American and English systems are the governance and authority structures, which are stronger in the US and afford greater scope for strategic planning by states and between states and the federal level. The experiences of community colleges in working with employers to provide workforce training may be worth further investigation as further education colleges further develop this type of provision. The US experience is less instructive with regard to quality assurance or increasing employers' engagement with education.

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UK policy makers continue to focus on increasing skills as a means to economic and social prosperity and social mobility. Qualifications, the certificates and diplomas awarded following education, training or learning, stand as a proxy for skill and many policies aim to raise levels of qualifications held. Policy makers have focused much attention on vocational qualifications and history is replete with efforts to reform the vocational education and training (VET) system. Many studies have identified both strengths and weaknesses in the current system, most recently the Wolf Review (2011). This paper does not attempt to cover old ground, but to look at more basic questions: What are the purposes of vocational qualifications? Are they fit for those purposes? While the first question has been addressed in policy and scholarly circles, less attention has been paid to the second question. This paper draws on literature related to the validity of assessment, because an award of a vocational qualification rests on a candidate's successful performance on particular types of assessment tasks. It examines conceptions of validity and their implications for the interpretation of assessment results. The review shows that judging the validity of vocational qualifications is much more complicated than the architects of National Vocational Qualifications envisioned. The purposes of vocational qualifications have expanded and also vary for different stakeholders. The paper argues that the extent to which vocational qualifications support valid inferences for different purposes remains largely unexplored.

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Changes in the modern workplace, brought about by technology and management innovations and by increased global competition, raise many concerns about the adequacy of workforce skills. In the US and elsewhere, these concerns have led to new ideas about skills, in particular the need for ‘generic skills’ like problem solving, teamwork, and communications. Many employers and policymakers in the US believe that these skills are necessary for work across most jobs and support school reforms to teach them. This article presents empirical evidence from a study in technical work which challenges conventional wisdom about skills and skill requirements and has broad implications for school reform.

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This report was prepared for the National Center for Research in Vocational Education (NCRVE), which set out to study the teaching and learning of generic skills in vocational education settings. Two categories of generic skills were studied: basic or enabling skills, and complex reasoning skills. The aims were to explore what generic skills were taught in vocational classrooms, how they were taught, and how the school context influenced instruction. A summary of the main findings is given in the article. Show less

This paper presents some of the findings of an evaluation of the development of the first fourteen 14-19 Diplomas in England. It focuses on the question [of] whether the government's aim to develop the new qualifications in an employer-led way has been fulfilled. In order to answer this question, the paper evaluates the contributions of employers in the Diploma development process, the strategies used to engage employers and employers' satisfaction with the outcome. The paper concludes that while employers have had a significant role in defining the content of Diplomas, they have been by no means leading or driving the overall process of qualification making. Due to the complex nature of the qualification system and the need for collaboration of a variety of actors, the role of employers may more accurately be described as key partners in the development process.

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Find a Future (FAF) supports the development of vocational talent in the United Kingdom by selecting and training young people to compete in World Skills Competitions (WSC). It also organises The Skills Show, the UK's largest skills and careers event, held annually. Skills competitions, like those at WSC and The Skills Show, are seen as an important strategy for raising the attractiveness of vocational education and training (VET) in Europe, as evidenced by research and policy directives, such as the Bruges Communique. The UK has participated in the WSC since 1953. Under FAF's guidance, the hands-on skills competitions and related experiential careers events aim to develop young people's understanding of and engagement with further education, apprenticeships and skills. Because competitions are carried out under world-class standards, they provide both a benchmark for high-performance and an objective way to assess vocational excellence. They also provide an opportunity to better understand the factors that contribute to the development of vocational skills to a high standard. This research project, supported by FAF, was carried out as competitors prepped for the 2015 WSC in Sao Paulo. The research addressed two key questions: What are the natural abilities, individual characteristics, and external conditions that contribute to the development of vocational excellence? Which abilities, characteristics or conditions are most associated with top-level competitive performance?

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WorldSkills UK, housed within the National Apprenticeship Service (NAS), contributes to the development of vocational talent in the UK by training young people to compete in WorldSkills Competitions (WSC), through partnership with employers and education organisations. As a developer of vocational talent it is interested in understanding what factors contribute to talent development. To that end, WorldSkills UK and NAS are supporting the ESRC Centre on Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance (SKOPE) to carry out research on young competitors. This report focuses on young people involved with WorldSkills UK in preparation for WSC Leipzig 2013.

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This report, presents results of a comparative study investigating the implementation of education programmes for 14-19 year olds in three countries: the Netherlands, Sweden and Australia. The main purpose of the study is to identify lessons that could lead to improvements in implementation and delivery of the new 14-19 Diplomas programme. In particular, the study focuses on two aspects of Diploma implementation: local delivery partnerships and employer involvement. The case study reports provide a general overview of each country's secondary education system; processes for implementation and delivery of qualifications; the nature and level of employer involvement; and comparative lessons. In addition, an overarching analysis, which is presented in the final chapter, draws out the principal themes of the comparison between the case studies and aims to identify lessons for 14-19 Diplomas.

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This chapter examines generic skills in the context of technical work from a socio-cultural perspective. Employers and educators have identified the three skill areas that are the focus of this chapter as being important: problem solving, communications and teamwork. Several topics were looked at: what generic skills are evident in technical work; how do workers conceive of them; how do skills vary across jobs and work contexts; what perceptions do employers have about their skill needs; and what are the implications for occupationally-oriented education.

The volume from which this chapter is indexed may be found at TD/TNC 67.554; individual papers from this collection are indexed from TD/TNC 67.555 to TD/TNC 67.569. Show less

As Iraq's Kurdistan region develops rapidly, it is creating jobs that require a solid education and technical skills. The government has launched an ambitious reform of basic and secondary education to increase its quality and has expanded opportunities for tertiary technical and university education. But expansion of secondary vocational education has lagged, leaving many students who cannot or do not want to pursue post-secondary education without the necessary preparation to compete in the evolving labor market and contribute to its economy. Enrollment in secondary vocational education has diminished in recent years, and graduates often have difficulty finding employment because their programs have not given them the skills required by employers.

At the same time, employers complain that graduates from local general and vocational educational institutions do not possess the skills they need, and are said to resort to hiring foreign labor whenever they cannot find local graduates. As part of its sweeping efforts to transform education, Kurdistan's government asked the RAND Corporation to assess its Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) system. The findings suggest several recommendations for improving TVET, particularly at the secondary level. Rather than implementing all of these at once, the report suggests three phases (short term, medium term and long term) to allow for measured implementation.

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