Established in 2009, Swedish Higher Vocational Education (HVE) gives employers an opportunity to initiate state-funded but locally conceptualised and managed training programmes. This article investigates the system, the ideas used in policy to mandate this arrangement of vocational education and training (VET) and the institutional relations of power and control between stakeholders that it represents. Fourteen Swedish educational policy documents relating to postsecondary VET and the establishment of HVE were analysed. The findings show that policy has placed much of the power and control over HVE with employers and that both public and private education providers are dependent on employers. The system does not create any institutional relations between trade unions and HVE. Nor does it encourage employers to collaborate more comprehensively than locally regarding single programmes, to conceptualise them and their curricula. Hence, the qualifications and positions of HVE graduates in enterprises, unlike those of graduates from initial VET in upper secondary education, are not negotiated by the stakeholders in the conventional Swedish model, where national employers' organisations and trade unions are central actors. The findings also reveal that the HVE students, in policy documents, are construed as input material that, through training, are turned into products with exchange valueinto commodities.
Context: Swedish Higher Vocational Education (HVE) is organised as state-funded programmes provisioned by both public and private education providers in close relation to employers. In HVE programme managers have responsibilities like those that often are vested in vocational teachers. They are responsible both for the day-to-day work of provision and the continuous development of the programme and its syllabi. This article presents a study investigating the work of programme managers, focusing on their work with creating and updating syllabi and on their work organising the students' training. Methods: Five programme managers responsible for five diverse HVE programmes have been interviewed and the syllabi of these programmes have been examined. The analysis is based on a Bernsteinian theoretical perspective focusing on recontextualisation of knowledge for pedagogic discourse by different stakeholders as agents who have different basis for their actions. The study first establishes what knowledge make up the programmes to inform the understanding of what training the programme managers are tasked with organising, then examines how the programme managers take part in selecting knowledge for course syllabi, and how they organise the teaching of these syllabi in in their programmes. Findings: The knowledge that has been recontextualised for pedagogic discourse in the studied programmes is most often vocationally specific or context bound in relation to a particular occupational field. The syllabi are related to clearly defined jobs. The findings highlight how practice thus in several ways may be difficult for programme managers without work experience in the relevant occupational field or knowledge in relation to it. Not only in the work of forming and updating curricula, but also as they must be able to navigate the relevant sector of business and industry to engage appropriate employers for collaborations and to hire teaching staff. Conclusion: The findings presented in this article show that local autonomy allows for major differences regarding knowledge in syllabi and the organisation of learning between programmes within the same nationally organised VET system. This is salient even with a small number of programmes having been studied. This strongly support the importance of examining what happens in autonomous local contexts of VET provision and asking who has influence over publicly funded education in this sort of contexts, and on what these stakeholders base their actions.
Article 3Köpsén, Johanna, (2020). Programme managers: key recontextualising agents in Swedish higher VET selecting knowledge for local course syllabi and organising teaching without regulatory requirements for qualifications,
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