Vocational Education Initiative Research Articles

Impacts of NEP 2020 on Vocational Education and Emerging role of counsellors

The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 in India has brought about significant reforms aimed at transforming the educational landscape, particularly in the realm of vocational education. This paper provides an in-depth analysis of the impact of NEP 2020 on vocational education and the emerging roles of counsellors within this context. NEP 2020 emphasizes the integration of vocational education into mainstream curriculum from the secondary level onwards, aiming to equip students with practical skills and job-oriented training. This shift necessitates a revaluation of the role of counsellors, who are now tasked with guiding students towards diverse career paths and facilitating their transition into the workforce. Additionally, NEP 2020 underscores the importance of providing holistic support to students, including psychometric assessments, career guidance, and skill development. The paper examines the challenges and opportunities presented by NEP 2020 in implementing vocational education initiatives and highlights the crucial role of counsellors in supporting students' career aspirations and personal development. Furthermore, it discusses the need for counsellor training programs to adapt to the changing educational landscape and equip counsellors with the skills and knowledge required to effectively fulfil their emerging roles. Overall, this paper provides valuable insights into the transformative potential of NEP 2020 in shaping vocational education and the evolving responsibilities of counsellors in guiding students towards success in the dynamic job market of the 21st century.

Enhancing Employability and Empowerment: Unveiling Factors within PERDA-TECH for Sustainable Development

In the contemporary landscape of education, fostering graduates' employability has emerged as a vital concern for educational institutions and policy makers, particularly within the framework of Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4) and Sustainable Development Goal 8 (SDG8). This paper delves into the employability dynamics of graduates from the PERDA-TECH program, a Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) initiative operating under the auspices of the Penang Regional Development Authority (PERDA). In the quest for a competitive edge within the workforce, TVET programs hold the promise of cultivating a skilled labor pool that aligns with the workforce demands, thus bolstering economic growth (SDG8). However, a comprehensive analysis of the graduate employability facets is indispensable to address the nuanced requirements of the job market. Existing studies have outlined seven pivotal employability skills, encompassing interpersonal skills, critical thinking, self-improvement, resourcefulness, ICT proficiency, fundamental aptitudes, and information literacy. Additionally, employers place premium emphasis on attributes such as social acumen, management proficiencies, creative thinking, problem-solving capabilities, and critical analysis. Aligned with these imperatives, the PERDA-TECH Malaysia Skills Training Programme seeks to equip graduates with competencies tailored to amplify their employability prospects. Nonetheless, the insights from the PERDA 2020 Outcome Assessment report reveala gapin the comprehensive understanding of graduate feedback and employability determinants. This study endeavors to bridge this gap by methodically examining the factors influencing graduates' employability within the PERDA-TECH program.Employing a quantitative approach, the study encompassed survey responses from 226 graduates. The findings unveiled a noteworthy 71.3% (162 graduates) employed, 21.2% (48 graduates) pursuing further education, and 7.1% (16 graduates) currently unemployed. Encouragingly, a significant proportion of graduates secure employment within six months of graduation, substantiating the program's efficacy in catering to market needs (SDG8). The factors influencing employability were dissected into three categories: graduate attributes, learning outcomes, and market dynamics. This holistic analysis enhances the alignment of the program's objectives with SDG4's emphasis on quality education and SDG8's pursuit of decent work and economic growth.This study underscores the symbiotic relationship between relevant and skill-centered education, graduates' market readiness, and sustainable economic development. As a result, it contributes not only to the advancement of knowledge but also to the realization of SDG4 and SDG8, enlivening the overarching mission of fostering inclusive education and propelling economic progress.

The Role of Competence Profiles in Industry 5.0-Related Vocational Education and Training: Exemplary Development of a Competence Profile for Industrial Logistics Engineering Education

Industry 5.0 and the associated transformation into Society 5.0 require a complete realignment of the skills required of the engineers of tomorrow. Thereby, the pre-dominant and policy-driven drivers of digitalization, and sustainability in particular, demand a complex variety of enhanced special competencies (e.g., lean thinking, data science skills) and transversal competencies from engineers working in manufacturing companies which must be systematically developed and continuously expanded. Since methodical approaches to systematic competence development in the environment of Industry 5.0-related engineering education are scarce, this article develops a competence profile for industrial logistics engineering education as an example of Industry 5.0-related vocational education and training initiatives. After elaborating on the relevant theoretical aspects of systematic competence development in adult education, an exemplary competence profile for industrial logistics engineering education is developed. Moreover, this paper presents a preliminary investigation of the impact of competencies on job performance and job satisfaction. The research results serve as a basis for the development of new teaching and learning concepts as well as for the investigation of causal relationships between competence-orientation and individual performance for industrial engineers in manufacturing enterprises.

Skill and vocational educational in the socio-economic development of rural youth in India: An empirical Study

VET (Vocational Education and Training) is an essential part of the country's educational strategy. Both quantitative and qualitative research methodologies were used in this study. The present paper is a small attempt to describe and see the overall skill and vocational education system and its impact on rural youth in India using Quantitative as well as Qualitative Research techniques. A descriptive study approach was used to assess the thought process, degree of awareness, and perception of skill-based training among a chosen population. Because education is widely regarded as the most effective weapon for development, our government is attempting to educate almost all individuals, particularly those in rural regions, via a vast vocational Education initiative. The concept is that via education, unskilled employees will become skilled, peasants will be taught in new crops and will be able to adopt new agricultural practises and educated people will develop strategies for self-employment after learning new methods and skills.

Myth of the Inferior Status of Vocational Education: The Case of Hong Kong

In this article, factors contributing to the poor perceptions and inferior status of vocational education in Hong Kong are discussed. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is employed as the methodology in examining the discursive construction of vocational education in the policy context. A total of five policy documents published between 1970 and 2015 are included. Our findings show that the socioeconomic transformation of Hong Kong in recent decades, massification of higher education, and cultural factors such as parental expectations are pertinent to the stigmatization observed in vocational education. This article discusses the implications from the findings and concludes with possible solutions for the future development of vocational education in Hong Kong under the novel vocational and professional education and training (VPET) initiative launched by the government.

Apprenticeships and Regeneration: The Civic Struggle to Achieve Social and Economic Goals

ABSTRACT Apprenticeship has always played both a social and economic role. Today, it forms part of the regeneration strategies of cities in the United Kingdom. This involves the creation and management of complex institutional relationships across the public and private domains of the civic landscape. This paper argues that it is through closely observed analysis of these meso-level developments (in contrast to studies of national systems) that we can reveal how the sustainability of vocational education and training initiatives depends on the generation of civic social capital in the pursuit of collective goals. At the same time, the path-dependent nature of the clustering of social and economic inequality in urban post-industrial settings remains a constant reminder of the scale of the problems confronting all those involved.

Women in science, engineering and technology: three decades of UK initiatives

This book presents an accessible overview of the recent history of initiatives taken in the UK to encourage girls and women into non-traditional fields such as science, engineering, technology, construction, and the trades. It examines girls and science projects in schools, training programs for women in manual trades, activist groups for students and women professionals, and programs sponsored by the government such as the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative and the Resource Centre for Women in Science and Educational Technology. Using archival and interview data spanning the 1970s to the early 2000s, it explores the aims and frameworks of the initiatives, examines the practices developed, and comments on the mixed results achieved. Although there is policy and academic research on the causes of women’s under-representation in non-traditional fields, the important initiatives designed to address the problem are under-researched. Consequently there has been little opportunity for educational practitioners, activists, policy-makers and scholars to analyze and learn from the practices and politics that were developed. This book will be an invaluable aid to their reflection and for future development, with relevance far wider than the UK context.

Monitoring What Matters

STATE legislatures across country are struggling with how best to monitor what matters. Although federal guidelines to help standardize collection of data on school dropouts came out several years ago with goal of improving consistency in how districts and schools gather numbers, guidelines did nothing to help establish information systems necessary to simplify process and ensure more accurate numbers. Now, with nearly every state requiring districts to produce cards, policy makers are realizing that data being reported leave much to be desired. For example, when a student leaves a high school, next school he or she attends may or may not request a transfer of student's records. But student might not attend another school. Or student might prefer to start fresh and attempt to prevent contact with previous school, perhaps by using a middle name. And counselors at first school don't usually have time to determine where student enrolled next or whether he or she enrolled anywhere. In some large schools, it's even possible for students to drop out and be gone for several months before record keeping jells enough for someone in office to discover that he or she has not been attending. Addressing this problem requires a way to make it easy to learn whether a student has enrolled elsewhere - an identification number, for example, that can be easily tracked across districts. Few states have infrastructure to support this type of data collection. Moreover, a number of legislative proposals would ban use of identification numbers, such as social security numbers, from being used to track student data. Georgia navigated this politically touchy area by passing a state law that permits student data to be tracked as long as doing so doesn't associate that data with individual students and maintains student and family privacy. The Georgia law stipulates that student identification numbers must be encoded to prevent unauthorized use. Statewide Models Ohio is one of several states that have taken lead in tracking student-level data. In same omnibus bill that established a strong accountability system, state legislature created Education Information Management System, an infrastructure to house type of data necessary to determine how well schools and districts are doing. In 1999, Massachusetts legislature required each school district to adopt and maintain a reliable data collection system. Part of system requires each district and charter school to have a unique, permanent, and unduplicated ID for each student. The Texas legislature established a similar system in 1995. For accountability report cards published in Texas, data are disaggregated by student groups: African American, Hispanic, white, and economically disadvantaged. The Outside Perspective In another aspect of using data to monitor what matters, New Ohio Institute published a report this spring titled Smart Schools: Does Ohio Put Its Money Where It Matters? (www.newohio.org). In it, New Ohio Institute concludes that, while state had set higher student achievement as primary goal of elementary and secondary education, it had failed to align its resources fully behind that goal. The Institute points to a lack of strategic planning, charging that the state spent $4.8 billion a year on public education in programs that were largely devoid of a structure that would make attainment of high academic achievement a priority. Setting aside such noninstructional activities as school nutrition services and pupil transportation, Institute examined such instructionally targeted programs as gifted education, teacher recruitment, special education, proficiency testing, public preschool, school improvement models, vocational education, and reading improvement initiatives. …

The effectiveness of personal development planning

ABSTRACTOver recent years, the development of strategies in schools and colleges to support individual student needs and encourage autonomous learning has influenced the work of most teachers and tutors. Personal Development Plans (PDPs) draw on good practice in careers guidance and on many of the educational initiatives introduced over the past decade, particularly, Records of Achievement (RoAs) and the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative (TVEI). The focus of PDPs is a dialogue between student and tutor which clarifies choices, identifies goals and plans appropriate actions. This process aims to raise personal understanding and motivation and, ultimately, school effectiveness. This article arises from an evaluation of the Personal Development Plans (PDP) project in Wiltshire.The Wiltshire project was initiated in January 1992, and was a joint venture by the Careers Guidance Service, the local authority advisory service, TVEI and Wiltshire Training and Enterprise Council (TEC). These agencies perceived PDPs as a co‐operative project which, first, could make a highly positive contribution to the TEC's aim of promoting and sustaining a lifelong learning culture in the county; second, could provide the impetus to attain the National Targets for Education and Training (NTETs) which have been articulated for the year 2000 (DES, 1991) and hence, increase school effectiveness; and third, would ease the introduction of youth credits in the county by enabling 16‐year‐olds to make well‐informed decisions (Ruthven and Pike, 1993). Findings from the evaluation of Wiltshire PDPs are discussed. Positive strategies for supporting PDPs are suggested, the nature of the one‐to‐one dialogue is probed, and a hierarchy of concerns for practitioners is suggested.

Breadth and the Core

This article describes a staff development process aimed at promoting flexible approaches to ‘A’ levels and places it in the wider context of student achievement and teaching and learning styles. In addition to a number of Barnet College English Literature team INSET activities, staff and curriculum development has also involved a Technical and Vocational Education Initiative (TVEI) funded collaborative project with Ravenscroft School in Barnet and involvement with the London Six Consortium for the AEB's ‘A’ level English Literature 660 Syllabus.

Whatever happened to TVEI's equal opportunities policy?

The funding criteria for the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative included a high‐profile commitment to equal opportunities for boys and girls. By including such a commitment, the architects of TVEI implicitly assumed that it was possible for TVEI to act as an agent of change with respect to gender divisions within schooling (and, indeed, beyond). This paper firstly considers whether TVEI was actually setting itself a theoretically impossible task given that socialist feminist critiques of education are largely based on the premise that schools overwhelmingly serve as agents for the reproduction of sexual divisions of labour. It then briefly considers the emphasis which the policy developed once TVEI was in operation, and finally questions the origins of the policy, suggesting a number of alternative reasons for its inclusion, in contrast to the somewhat contradictory ‘official’ justifications. The paper concludes that “whilst TVEI undoubtedly had an important catalytic effect in putting gender issues on the educational agenda, it failed to deliver even in its own terms for success, not least because of a failure to engage in the theoretical issues which lay at the heart of the equal opportunities project.

Continuing Vocational Education (CVE): the training needs of records management practitioners. Report of a research project

This article describes a survey carried out in the Department of Information and Library Management (DILM) at the University of Northumbria at Newcastle, in relation to the training and education needs of records management practitioners. The survey was conducted as part of the 4 year Continuing Vocational Education (CVE) initiative funded by the Higher Education Funding Council for England. The context of the study within DILM is described and the results of the research are presented along with suggestions for further areas of research.

Dealing with Work: secondary students’ work experience and the curriculum

ABSTRACT The Technical and Vocational Education Initiative (TVEI) was introduced as a major programme in the United Kingdom that would relate secondary schools’ curricula to the ‘world of work’. Since its launch in 1984 TVEI has developed and taken on many forms but one of its continuing universal elements has been the requirement that secondary school students’ should have some form of work experience. Although TVEI has been much evaluated and researched little attention has been paid to how students’ work experience is perceived to be of educational value and used by their teachers. The research described in this paper is an examination of how students’ work experience was managed and used in a sample of secondary schools. The paper argues that what students learn from work experience is held to be of no value in terms of the formal curriculum. However, teachers in the school sample do consider work experience as adding value by the social development of students who are of average or below average academic ability

One step forward, two steps back? Work experience, equal opportunities and TVEI

Abstract The funding criteria of the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative included a high profile commitment to equal opportunities for boys and girls, as well as a commitment to the provision of work experience. This paper presents data from a case study of work experience provided under the auspices of ‘Masonfield’ TVEI project, a project which had a strong commitment to tackling gender inequalities in education. It is argued that the nature of work experience ‐‐ by definition explicitly allied to the needs of the labour market ‐‐ made it virtually impossible for the project to meet its equal opportunities objectives in this area. Furthermore, work experience may have served to reinforce — if not exaggerate — existing sexual divisions within the local labour market. Whilst TVEI may now be consigned to educational history, work experience continues to thrive — yet increasingly within a policy framework which ignores equal opportunities considerations.

Public school reform in Puerto Rico: sustaining colonial models of development

Acknowledgments Introduction: Self-determination and Puerto Rico Development: Two Models Reconstituting the Economy: Orthodox Development as a Form of Control Silencing the Culture Economic Growth and Underdevelopment Changing Schools in a Changing Economy: The Response of Vocational Education Initiatives Looking Ahead: Current School Reform Initiatives Bibliography Index

The Technical and Vocational Education Initiative and school autonomy in the management of curriculum change

Abstract This paper arises out of wider, ESRC‐funded research on the legacy of the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative (TVEI) in a national sample of original pilot schools. The paper draws on two periods of fieldwork in the schools, the first in 1985 and 1986, the second in 1991 and 1992. This methodology allows the adoption of a longitudinal perspective in studying TVEI. The paper focuses on attempts to manage curriculum change through TVEI. This was to be achieved through the novel means of providing funds in return for contractual commitments by local education authorities to implement programmes which met the national TVEI aims and criteria specified by the Manpower Services Commission (this method of allocating resources became known as categorical funding). The paper begins with a brief description of TVEI and draws important distinctions between the pilot and extension phases of the Initiative. This is followed by a review of the claims for, and critiques of, the categorical funding mechanism. The rationale and rhetoric of TVEI management is then compared with the practice in the schools. The data reveal a considerable gap between rhetoric and reality. The boundaries of TVEI are shown to have become increasingly blurred and to have allowed considerable scope for local variations. Arrangements for monitoring and reviewing are revealed as something of a facade. The procedures and criteria through which TVEI resources were distributed within the schools are shown to have been subject to a whole range of contextual factors, rather than being governed by identifiable TVEI aims and criteria. TVEI management was pervaded by complicity between participants at various levels and strong pressures to proclaim ‘successes’ and highlight ‘good practice’. A picture of the domestication and subversion of TVEI emerges from the data. Explanations are offered for this state of affairs and the paper concludes by summarizing the reasons for the comparative failure of categorical funding to bring about the changes sought by the political originators of TVEI.

Whatever happened to TVEI?: TVEI, curriculum and schooling

This paper analyses some of the policy‐practice lessons learned from the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative as its influence comes to an end. Historically, perhaps, TVEI will be remembered as a moment in education policy and practice, characterizing the transitional phase from local to central determination of the curriculum. This paper considers how TVEI affected the culture of teaching, learning and curriculum in ways unintended and not envisaged at the time by teachers, schools, LEAs, unions and government. It argues, however, that if TVEI radically embodied crucial changes going on in British society its influence has been limited. The fact that there has been resistance and opposition to the straitjacket of the National Curriculum and testing nevertheless suggests that there is a critical lesson to learn from TVEI: namely, that education policy which fails to engage with the culture of the school, college and teaching profession is unlikely to achieve meaningful reform.

The Fate of the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative in a Pilot School: a longitudinal case study

AbstractThis paper arises out of wider Economic and Social Research Council funded research on the legacy of the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative (TVEI) in a national sample of original pilot schools. It describes and analyses the development of TVEI in one school over the period 1983‐91 and draws on field‐work at the school in 1986 and 1991. The development and demise of a radical cross‐curricular course are explained. It is argued that the particular fate of the innovation was the result of the interplay between a range of system level, local ‘market’ and in‐school factors.

Local variation in the Scottish pilot projects of the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative

Abstract This report is a statistical evaluation of the Scottish pilot projects in one of the largest experimental innovations ever to have been undertaken in British schools ‐‐ the Technical and Vocational Education Initiative (TVEI). The TVEI had deliberately exploratory aims, to encourage the technological and vocational education of students at school and college. The evaluation is based on data from the 2‐yearly Scottish Young People's Survey: thus the Initiative, and its development over time, can be evaluated in the context of an entire national system. The outcomes which are measured include attainment in public examinations, the propensity to truant from school, staying on in full‐time education beyond the minimum leaving age, and (for those who left education) gaining employment or a place on a training scheme. The analysis is conducted by multilevel modelling. Statistical controls at the student level allow for individual differences between students who were and were not on the TVEI programme....

The Management of Educational Change: a case study

ABSTRACT This report examines the issues inherent in the management of curriculum change. The change in question was initiated through one of five national Technical and Vocational Education Initiative (TVEI) projects in modern foreign languages for post‐16 students. In the light of the expanding opportunities in Europe post‐1992, and the place of a modern foreign language as a foundation subject in the National Curriculum, the main purpose of the project was to find ways of generating a place for modern foreign languages in the post‐16 core curriculum. A brief background to developments in TVEI is given, and the identification of required changes against this background and that of a new European awareness is described. A description of the project itself highlights the processes by which change was established and the management issues inherent in the initiation of change. Following the monitoring and evaluation of the project, the author concludes that change at a local level was very effective. Viewed...