(Re)Searching for ‘Quality’ in English Apprenticeship: Reflections on the Past, Present and Future of a Vulnerable Model of Learning

Abstract

In England, apprenticeship and vocational education and training (VET) policies more generally have been driven at different times by three overlapping logics: “employment logic”; “education logic”; and “social logic”. As a consequence of the tense relationship between these logics, considerable variability in the way apprenticeship and VET programmes are organized and experienced remains a key feature of the English approach. Drawing on policy-history and social theories of learning, this chapter explores the impact this has had on the way apprenticeship in particular has evolved and the interventions of successive governments. It asks how quality in apprenticeship might be interpreted and analysed in a policy climate that suggests competing logics are failing to achieve greater consistency across apprenticeship programmes. Philipp Gonon has highlighted the importance of quality as a rhetorical device for maintaining a focus on the aspects of VET provision, which ensure that it is genuinely “significant and successful”. In that spirit, the chapter proposes a conceptual framework for evaluating apprenticeship quality to generate an approach that better meets the needs of apprentices, employers and society.