Knowledge and Nationhood

ISBN: 9780304335800 出版年：1996 页码：209 Denis Glesson Bloomsbury Publishing

need of root and branch reform. This has been said many times by many people over many years but it is worth saying again and again because, in the late 1990s, much of the UK's post-compulsory provision reflects the divisions and assumptions of a bygone age. The academic curriculum retains unquestioned hegemony over the vocational, the middle and upper classes continue to dominate higher education entry, the quality of state-sponsored youth training varies considerably and, the so-called Modern Apprenticeship is a largely white male preserve. In the workplace, mature employees are far more likely to have training opportunities if they are on permanent full-time contracts and have already achieved well at the compulsory education stage, whilst the unemployed are 'sentenced to', rather than offered, a period of training in order to collect their meagre welfare payments. The UK's providers of post-compulsory education and training, both in the public and private sectors, are becoming ever leaner (and meaner) organisations whose staff have come to expect annual budget cuts and have seen the rise of a new managerial class brandishing the torch of Total Quality Management as their buildings submerge under the avalanche of paper which is needed to feed the ever hungry auditors and inspectors from the external agencies who fund and validate. Yet within this seemingly target-crazed and under-achieving (by international competitor standards) world, people are learning, people are producing innovative teaching and the wheels of education and business continue to turn. As I write, the newspapers show pictures of exciting designs from the art colleges' degree shows, GNVQ students are gaining university places alongside their peers with traditional A levels, and my 55 year old cousin has gained her NVQ Level Two in Health and Social Care, her very first formal qualification having left school like so many of her contemporaries in the 1950s with nothing. In trying to understand the world of post-compulsory education and training, the experiences of real people help us to unravel the complexities of the policy versus practice dichotomy. By focusing on an individual or group, or on an organisation, I make myself set boundaries around the policies and practices I am trying to interpret and describe. For, I would argue, that the key problem for anyone who wants to critique post-compulsory education and training in the UK is to remember that the facet of the system they want to focus on forms part of a large and amorphous whole. The term