Parallel lines or divergent trajectories? A response to the other contributions

Abstract

He is Director of the Centre on Skills, Knowledge & Organisational Performance. Current research interests include the impact of digitalisation and AI on employment and skills, and the evolution of local industrial strategies and skills policies within Mayoral Combined Authorities. Disclosure statementNo potential conflicts of interest were reported by the author Parallel lines or divergent trajectories? A response to the other contributionsThis article provides a response to the other contributions in this special issue, and explores the range and scale of the opportunities for policy learning across the four UK nations. It addresses the importance of locating FE and skills policy within wider national policy contexts, national choices between markets and systems and the wider implications of these choices, and the vexed role of employers. Behind these lie three over-arching questions that are then interrogatedhave we arrived at a moment when we can conceive of the UK as a policy learning laboratory, is this laboratory open for expansive policy learning, and who might be working in it?

From Lisbon to Copenhagen, London, Helsinki and Edinburgh - a study of vocational education and training (VET) policy making in four European countries (Denmark, England, Finland and Scotland)

“…examined this concept recently in the context of the four nations of the United Kingdom, suggesting that the UK could represent an 'expansive policy laboratory' for learning. Keep (2019) however, observed that manifestations of England's VET policy at present did not readily suggest an appetite for policy learning on behalf of the English government.…”

“…The most relevant of these mechanisms affecting VET policy within the EU were likely to be regionalisation and marketisation. However, Keep (2019), and Gallacher and Reeve (2019) observed that the levels of divergence between English and Scottish VET policy are growing, rather than reducing, with Scottish VET policy potentially more aligned to EU VET policy and English VET policy becoming an outlier within Europe, or, indeed, exceptionalist as identified by Hodgson and Spours (2014) and further confirmed by Roosmaa, Martma, and Saar (2019). This is discussed further in Chapter 2.…”

“…This section draws highlights from two significant bodies of research: the home international studies instigated by Raffe, for example, Raffe and Byrne (2005), and continued by Spours (2012, 2014); ; Keep (2017Keep ( , 2019 and Gallacher and Reeve (2019) very rich descriptions of the characteristics of each country's VET systems between the project did not offer as much comparability as did the two later publications (Jørgensen, Olsen, & Thunqvist, 2018;Michelsen & Stenström, 2018). Within those later publications, as noted by Pither (2020), there was reference both to the convergence of Finnish VET policies with those of the EU, in a Europeanisation mechanism (Stenström & Virolainen, 2018), with a consequent divergence between Finnish and Danish VET policies in this respect although Jørgensen (2018a) noted convergence of Finnish and Danish policies around specific problems of employability, retention and completion.…”

“…As there was relatively little literature specifically about VET policy making in the EU (except for Alexiadou, Helgøy, and Homme (2019), Antunes (2016), Cort (2010) and Valiente, Capsada-Munsech, and de Otero (2020), examples have also been drawn from other relevant literature about education policy in the field of adult education (Milana & Klatt, 2018;Rasmussen, Larson, Rönnberg, & Tsatsaroni, 2015) and in higher education (Brøgger, 2018), as well as in some instances about general education policy making where I believed that it was also applicable to EU VET policy making. Literature about national VET policy making was very often of a comparative nature and there were two overarching bodies of work relevant to my study: the NordVET study of VET in the Nordic countries led by others (2014-2018) which reviewed both the history of and the current challenges to VET in Denmark and Finland until 2016, and the work begun by Raffe (2005) and continued by Spours (2014, 2016); ; Keep (2017Keep ( , 2019 and Gallacher and Reeve (2019) among others based on VET policy (or its equivalent) in the four home countries of the United Kingdom which included England and Scotland. This study builds on the comparison of these distinctive countries, as discussed in Chapter 1.…”

Young people in the middle: pathways, prospects, policies and a new agenda for youth research

“…The focus on job design and reward and the nature of progression opportunities offer examples of policy where support for young people is as much focused on employment demand and career pathways as it is on young people themselves. Of course, in running against the grain of UK government policy framings, institutional arrangements and incentives such initiatives operate within very constrained policy spaces Keep 2019).…”