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This paper explores opportunities and challenges presented by the development of graduate skills in Australian universities. We challenge the dichotomy that conceives of a fundamental disjuncture between the idea of universities as institutions of vocational education and the more traditional conception of universities as key institutions in the formation of reflective practitioners, social critics and good citizens. Despite the challenges inherent in implementing the graduate skills project, we conclude that a consensus around the value of graduate skills represents a valuable opportunity for universities to regain control of the higher education agenda and renew their traditional, higher purpose.

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Background: Incentives have been proposed as a method to improve attendance in adult literacy classes. In the UK, several areas have piloted the use of incentives to promote attendance at adult literacy classes. To date no rigorous evaluation of this policy has been undertaken. This paper describes (as far as we are aware) the only UK-based randomised controlled trial to evaluate the use of financial incentives in order to promote attendance in classes for adult learners.

Methods: We used a cluster-randomised design. Twenty-nine adult literacy classes were randomised in two groups using minimisation. Intervention group learners received 5 (US$10) for each class attended. The main outcome was class attendance; the secondary outcome was literacy scores.

Results: After allocation, one class was found to be ineligible for the study. In the 28 remaining classes there was a statistically significant reduction of about 1.5 sessions (95% confidence interval (CI) 0.28, 2.79; p = 0.019) attended by the intervention group compared with control, after adjusting for cluster size and baseline scores. The difference in reading scores between the intervention and control group, conditioned on baseline scores, was -2.38 (with controls scoring higher than the intervention group), but this difference was not statistically significant (95% CI -7.40 to 2.57, p = 0.33).

Conclusion: Payments to attend adult literacy classes had an adverse effect on attendance. This trial needs urgent replication, ideally with a larger incentive, before this approach is widely used by policy makers.

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Located differentially (and to its detriment) within a status hierarchy of knowledge, vocational education has been called upon to satisfy an increasing range of political and social needs, including meeting the needs of industry and government and catering for increasing pupil diversity. Faced with stubbornly immobile rates of school completion in Australia, policy makers have turned to vocational education and training to play a part in achieving higher rates of school completion or its 'equivalent'. This has been principally in the form of proposing alternative qualifications to the existing senior school certificates and increasing the role played by adult vocational education and training (VET) providers. This article considers the contribution of these various policy initiatives to progress in achieving school completion targets - focusing on current approaches to provision of vocational programs (both in schools and in other providers), the equivalence of qualifications and the relative strength of non-school pathways. It questions the integrity of these 'alternative' measures of school completion and challenges the notion that VET, delivered within a secondary school subject paradigm, can produce the gains in participation required to reach these targets.

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This article describes and analyses some crucial aspects in the latest reforms of Swedish upper secondary education. For decades Sweden stood out as a special case in several respects, in particular the integration of different tracks in upper secondary education; offering second chances to dropouts, and success in terms of equality and equivalence, as well as in terms of socially equal recruitment to higher studies. But, as in other OECD countries, the neo-liberal combination of markets, accountability and institutional rankings has begun to dominate educational policies in Sweden. This development has had a noticeable impact on the upper secondary school system as a whole. For instance, through the independent school reform of the 1990s, there has been a gradual shift from education as a common good to stressing the individual’s freedom of choice. As a result of the new reform that begins in 2011 there will be a stronger division between tracks - academic and vocational education, and apprenticeship training will be organised in separate schools.

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This paper examines occupational attainment among mature graduates as compared with early graduates using data from the General Household Survey (GHS) (1982-1993). These surveys yielded a sample of 1025 mature men and 654 mature women graduates; 5365 men and 3465 women graduates at the conventional age. Mature graduates now compose about one quarter of the undergraduate population and it is believed that the level of mature participation will remain high. It was found that although mature graduates are disadvantaged on entry to the labour market, after about 15 years they have similar attainment to early graduates. Mature graduates primarily work in the public and welfare services, while conventional age graduates increasingly work in the private sector, with rising percentages of both women and men in the financial and business services sector. The concentration of mature graduates in the public sector has consequences for pay, which is discussed in the light of the current student funding system.

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Summary statistics continue to play an important role in identifying and monitoring patterns and trends in educational inequalities between differing groups of pupils over time. However, this article argues that their uncritical use can also encourage the labelling of whole groups of pupils as 'underachievers' or 'overachievers' as the findings of group-level data are simply applied to individual group members, a practice commonly termed the 'ecological fallacy'. Some of the adverse consequences of this will be outlined in relation to current debates concerning gender and ethnic differences in educational attainment. It will be argued that one way of countering this uncritical use of summary statistics, and the ecological fallacy that it tends to encourage, is to make much more use of the principles and methods of what has been termed 'exploratory data analysis'. Such an approach is illustrated through a secondary analysis of data from the Youth Cohort Study of England and Wales, focusing on gender and ethnic differences in educational attainment. It will be shown that, by placing an emphasis on the graphical display of data and on encouraging researchers to describe those data more qualitatively, such an approach represents an essential addition to the use of simple summary statistics and helps to avoid the limitations associated with them.

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The English Learning and Skills Sector (LSS) contains a highly diverse range of learners and covers all aspects of post-16 learning with the exception of higher education. In the research on which this paper is based we are concerned with the effects of policy on three types of learners - unemployed adults attempting to improve their basic skills in community learning settings, younger learners on Level 1 and 2 courses in further education colleges, and employees in basic skills provision in the workplace. What is distinctive about all three groups is that they have historically failed in, or been failed by, compulsory education. What is interesting is that they are constructed as ‘problem learners’ in learning and skills sector policy documents. We use data from 194 learner interviews, conducted during 2004/5, in 24 learning sites in London and the North East of England, to argue that government policy assumptions about these learners may only be ‘half right.’ We argue that such assumptions might be leading to half-right policy based on incomplete understandings or surface views of learner needs that are more politically constructed than real. We suggest that policy-makers should focus more on systematic problems in the learning and skills sector and less on problematising groups of learners.

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Changes in governmental financial support are causing many would-be students to question the value of higher education or to consider attending a local university. Oral history testimonies provide a source for understanding the role that living, as well as working, within an academic community plays in the learning lives of its alumni. An understanding of the cultural and social space provided by an institution offers an insight into how time spent in higher education remains integral to long-term learning lives, often articulated as marking a ‘watershed’ or inspiration. Interviews for the University of Winchester Alumni Voices project invited alumni and retired staff to reflect on the process of learning generated by their time at Winchester (previously King Alfred’s College). At the article’s core is the significance of oral history narratives to the social history of learners and learning. We discuss how we have developed voice relational analysis in order to interrogate the transformative impact of learning on individuals’ sense of self. The richness of the data from a small scale research project and the increasing sophistication of oral history methodology demonstrate the relatively untapped potential that histories of higher education hold for understanding individual learning lives.

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We analyse the prevalence and effectiveness of out-of-school-time (OST) study programmes among secondary aged students, focusing on their potential for reducing socio-economic gaps in educational achievement. Compared to several extant studies, including the only prior study for Britain, whose findings could be affected by heterogeneous participation in the programmes, our results derive from a rich dataset with multiple controls for social background, personal motivation, and school characteristics. We find that programme participation in England is relatively low among students from families with long-term unemployed parents and those in routine occupations. Participation is also lower outside London, and especially outside large cities. Our results show that OST programmes, as long as they are teacher-led, are moderately effective in improving the academic performance at the end of lower secondary education as measured by the GCSE total score. Teacher-led OST programmes compensate for previous social disadvantage. The policy implications include a focus on expanding programme availability and on incentives for participation, and attention to the regional disparities.

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Starting from the present knowledge society with its social overvaluing of cognition and white-collar jobs at the expense of manual labour, this article examines whether school type - academic versus technical/vocational schools - relates to students’ sense of futility. It assesses the schools’ culture of futility and investigates the explanatory value of sense of futility and culture of futility in the relation of school type with study involvement and study culture. Multilevel analyses of data from 6,373 students in 44 Flemish schools (2004-2005) show that students in technical/vocational schools share higher feelings of futility, suggesting the existence of cultures of futility. The students’ study involvement relates to their sense of futility. The schools’ futility culture affects the students’ study involvement independent of their sense of futility. Finally, futility culture explains the association between school type and study involvement, and is responsible for less study-oriented cultures in technical/vocational schools.

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