Vocational education and training - VET

The COVID-19 pandemic caused fundamental shifts in schools’ and teachers’ practices. At the start of the pandemic, forty schools in England were in their second year of participation in a pilot initiative intended to understand what changes could be put in place by schools in order to implement an entitlement for teachers to high-quality, sustained professional development. This paper explores the impact of COVID-19 on the participating schools’ approaches to professional development. Drawing on findings from the independent evaluation and school leaders’ experiences of the initiative, it describes how, before the pandemic, school leaders constructed professional development plans in alignment with school improvement objectives and address individual teachers’ professional learning needs. During the pandemic, after an initial de-prioritisation of professional development, plans were adapted to new professional development ecologies in schools. Professional learning activities moved to online, hybrid and blended environments and new activities were added in response to emerging teacher professional learning needs. This study demonstrates how schools’ plans for teacher professional development can, even in the most extreme conditions, be reshaped and adapted to changing circumstances and adds to the growing body of knowledge of online and hybrid professional development.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the impact of an action research intervention during a work-based learning (WBL) project among human resource management (HRM) students at a business college in London. The intervention was the researcher’s meeting with the nominated group leaders to facilitate reflection on their leadership and instil confidence.

How the Institute for Apprenticeships will operate, carry out its functions and improve the quality of apprenticeships in England.

Workers with low levels of education or in low-skilled/routine tasks continue to be at greatest risk from automation, particularly in areas such as production, manufacturing and administration. However, artificial intelligence will also impact higher skilled jobs.
Human reasoning and interaction will be important in expected growth areas (such as health, social care and education) as well as in areas more typically associated with the future, such as digital, technological and green industries.
Urgent action is needed to ensure future skills supply and worker employability, given that around 1.5% of the manufacturing workforce in the EU has already been displaced by technology (Oxford Economics, 2019) and 22 per cent of current workforce activities across the EU could be automated by 2030 (Smit et al. 2020).
The pandemic has accelerated the pace of digitisation, automation and artificial intelligence (AI) and exacerbated labour market inequalities, again underlining the need for action.
Problem solving/decision making, critical thinking/analysis, communication, collaboration, creativity and innovation are transferable skills which will be in high demand in the next 15 years and beyond as technology becomes more embedded in the workforce.

So what is the recipe for a good apprenticeship? It includes two essential ingredients: education and training, provided both on and off the job. As with any recipe, results depend on the quality of the ingredients and the way in which they are mixed together. And as any great chef will tell you, the recipe only improves with repetition and continuous refinement.

England is investing more in the development of its apprenticeship system than nearly any other country. Current reforms have created a new structure for apprenticeship programmes developed by employer groups and funded by a new levy on all large employers. Much has been achieved so far, as described in Apprenticeship in England, a new OECD study that compares England’s recent reforms with practices in other countries. Here, though, we’ll focus on a key ingredient in the English recipe that demands closer attention: basic skills.

The aim of this research was to identify world-class apprenticeship standards and to make suggestions as to how these could be applied to the English system. By ‘world class’ we mean that the standards described here are acknowledged to be among the best in the world.