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Foreword: a century of vocationalism

This special edition of the Oxford Review of Education arose out of the work of Theme 3 of the ESRC-sponsored research centre on Skills, Knowledge and Organisational Performance (SKOPE). This theme was concerned with analysing the demand for skills in the British economy, and the role of the education and training system in meeting such demands. What struck those of us working on the various projects within the research centre was how, at the turn of the twenty-first century, education and training continued to be a major focus of public policy across all the countries we investigated. Such policy emphasised the importance of more years of formal education, followed by an individual commitment to lifelong learning, as the means to achieve the twin aims of economic growth and social inclusion. In some countries, such as the UK and the USA, the policy concern was underpinned by a sense of long-term crisis. In others, such as the Nordic countries, a rather more sober approach nonetheless involved a serious questioning of the purposes and arrangements being made for young people. In yet others, such as Germany, a long-cherished set of traditions, such as the dual system, which have apparently served the long-term economic interests of the country well, is being questioned (see Ertl, 2004), whilst a sense that all was not well with the German general education system had been fostered by the PISA study (OECD, 2001). Yet the twentieth century was the century of educational expansion. The ‘educational gospel’ (Grubb & Lazerson, 2004) has been one of mass schooling and more education for all. Such expansion has been financed primarily through general taxation, with the justification for this expenditure from the public purse being that the skills and knowledge learnt in schools, colleges and universities would transfer to productive activities outside of educational institutions, especially the workplace. Increasingly, policy makers seem to be questioning whether this is happening, or happening to a sufficient extent to warrant the continued expenditure on general education for all. The upshot, so the argument goes, has been a turn to vocationalism, the over-promotion of the work–related learning aims of secondary and tertiary education at the expense of the civic, aesthetic and moral purposes of education. In the UK such developments are typically traced to the Ruskin College speech