Abstract
In the fields of sports coaching and higher education, there are significant implications related to the delivery and effectiveness of work-based learning (WBL), learning styles and occupational competency. Alongside this, similar claims are made throughout the academic and policy literature in both fields about the effectiveness and necessity of improving issues of skill development and employability (see SkillsActive, 2010a; SkillsActive, 2010b; Taylor and Garratt, 2010; Pegg et al., 2012). This paper therefore examines, in the context of the sports coaching industry’s relevant skills gaps, the learning experiences of a level five cohort who undertook supported coaching placements as part of a placement module. Using two focus groups (N=15 and N=13 respectively) the findings demonstrate that it is not only preferential, from the students’ perspective, to engage in WBL but that the coaching placements also helped the students meet many of the wider professional sector’s identified skills gaps. The findings also indicated that it is the student-coaches’ learning through incidental learning (unintentional, yet through the planned placements) that most significantly determined their professional competency.
Highlights
There is a current focus within broader policy domains on the development of work-based skills
Whilst at first glance these sectors may seem to be independent of each other, the reality is that there is a necessary convergence in their approaches to understanding the issues surrounding sports coaching as a vocation – principally those issues related to what are considered to be significant skills gaps and approaches to professionalism
Much of work-based learning (WBL) is concerned with using reflective practice in order to improve working habits and capacity for reflective working (Cox, 2005; Hafford-Letchfield and Bourn, 2011) and it is in this context that this paper is interested
Summary
There is a current focus within broader policy domains on the development of work-based skills. Government policy in the UK regarding the provision of a more skillbased economy insists upon employer engagement within the decision making process for developing and/or choosing which skills or professional standards suit different job sectors (BIS, 2010; QAA, 2014; OFFA, 2015) In relation to this and from the perspective of HE, the issue of employability was highlighted as long ago as the Robbins report Additional policy directives of the concept of widening participation were intended to develop a more diverse student and academic body for Britain (DfES, 2003) This policy context continues to this day, with both the ‘National strategy for access and student success’ (HEFCE and OFFA, 2015) and the 2016 white paper ‘Success as a knowledge economy: teaching excellence, social mobility and student choice’ (BIS, 2016) demonstrating continued government commitment alongside a significant investment in the new higher and degree apprenticeship schemes (Universities UK, 2017). Underpinning how it works in the two sectors, are the aforementioned commonalities of the benefits and advantages of a 'learning society' (Kennedy, 1997)
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