Planning for Education and Work: Alternatives and Issues

Abstract

Planning is vitally important in the world of education and training. There are immense and ever-increasing pressures to provide more and better services. Policymakers in many countries are attempting to fundamentally restructure the ways that youth and adults prepare for employment in order to make more effective use of limited resources, expand opportunity, help alleviate poverty and address the skill demands generated by an ever-pervasive global economy. Policy-makers look to planning as a means of bringing programme development and resource allocation and use into line with labour-market and social development objectives. However, there is considerably more awareness today than in the past of the complexities of planning for technical and vocational education and training (TVET). The outcomes of many national planning efforts undertaken in the past can best be described as highly mixed. Overall, there has been a general failure to take fully into account the critical importance of implementation. Many planning efforts have gone astray because decision-making was too remote from the practical issues of programme implementation. Today planning is approached with a greater awareness of the methodological limitations and complexity of the issues confronted. Planning activities continue to be central to TVET. Despite inherent constraints and limitations, policy-makers within TVET have long-relied on various planning models to supply useful information for making decisions about the implementation of programmes. Typically, TVET planners are involved with formulating policy, exploring the application of various education and training options, determining the level and use of financial and human resources, addressing the concerns of different constituency groups, developing and implementing programme plans and identifying and assessing education and training outcomes. The purpose of this chapter is to examine basic TVET planning alternatives and highlight the fundamental assumptions, limitations and issues underlying their application. We will also examine measures planners are taking to address the conceptual, methodological and technical constraints that they face in the economic, social and political space within which they work. We will also explore alternative planning approaches that offer promising options to TVET decision-makers. These alternatives attempt to go beyond some of the common assumptions that have traditionally driven much of TVET planning and project a more application-guided, inclusive approach to planning.