On Articulating Secondary School, Higher Education and 1992

Abstract

Articulation is the point at which the anatomist and the sociologist each goes his separate way. To the former, it is the point at which the most unkind cuts are made. To the latter, it is that locus where two processes interact with one another. To the sociologist of education who, lacking the equivalent of Grey's Anatomy, must work less incisively, the concept of articulation has a third meaning: that point where two levels of the education system interlink. It is here that the institutional role of schooling, the type of knowledge purveyed, the structure of qualifications available and, finally, the composition of the student body are radically re-defined. This paper is concerned with two such points of articulation. The first is that between secondary school and higher education in general; the second lies between the different sectors within higher education, broadly speaking between the university stricto sensu and other types of higher education that go to make up the non-university sector. The main burden of argument is that the advent of 1992 coincides with major change in the relationship both between secondary and higher education as well as between the different segments within higher education itself. Such change is not simply a question of numbers. It also involves what might be interpreted as a relative destabilisation in the vertical relationship between secondary and higher education. Such 'destabilisation' has little to do with demography although, in the North Sea Member States, its effect may well be to make predictions of 'take-up' of higher education amongst qualified secondary-school leavers even more difficult to estimate [1]. Throughout this paper a distinction will be drawn between 'vertical articulation', i.e. the process of moving from school-age education or training to higher education, and 'horizontal articulation', i.e. cross-linkages between the university and the nonuniversity sectors. That said, 1992 and its consequences will have their impact on existing structures and practices in both the 'vertical' and the 'horizontal' domains of articulation. It is important, then, to grasp the broad lines of development that have introduced a high degree of instability within them.