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Abstract
This paper sets out to explore the case for higher education engagement with workforce development with reference to media studies in the light of recent government policy initiatives including the trilogy of White Papers, 14–19 Years, The Skills Strategy, and The Future of Higher Education. It focuses on the problems and potential solutions to establishing an accredited work-based learning route supported by further and higher education as a major contribution to the knowledge economy. It is inevitable in any analysis of higher education and workforce development that consideration has to be given the nature of the qualification framework and the current schizophrenia between the national qualification framework led by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority and the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education framework. Until this unconnected and disjointed approach to a national qualification framework is resolved it will not be possible to establish coherent credit accumulation and transfer schemes all encouraging extensive use of accreditation of prior learning and experience in the workplace. Higher education, particularly subject disciplines with a direct interest in occupational sectors such as media have no choice but to engage in workforce development. However, this highlights the difficulties of providing a relevant education with the demands of employers often articulated through sector skills councils such as Skillset. The University Vocational Awards Council which is a consortium of 74 higher education institutions and the largest of the further education colleges devoted to higher level vocational education and training, sets out the general arguments for engagement with workforce development, sketches a way forward and indicates a potential role for the Association of Media Practitioners in Education.
Keywords
workforce development, vocational, higher education, qualifications, connectivity
Biography
Professor Simon Roodhouse is the Chief Executive of the University Vocational Awards Council and a Research Professor at the University of Bolton.
University Vocational Awards Council
University of Bolton
Chadwick Campus
Bolton
BL2 1JW
simon@croodhouse.freeserve.co.uk
Introduction
A trilogy of White Papers in 2003, 14–19 Years, The Skills Strategy and The Future of Higher Education, have determined the climate for UK vocational education and training in higher education, particularly the role that can be undertaken by institutions in workforce development.
The 14–19 Years White Paper places increasing emphasis on clearly defined and recognized vocational routes through school, modern apprenticeships, further education and entry into vocational higher education for young people.
Foundation degrees form the centrepiece of the government policy response to the intermediate labour-market skills gap in the United Kingdom described in The Future of Higher Education White Paper. The Skills Strategy confirms the importance of further and higher education in improving the skills and knowledge of the workforce particularly at levels 2 and 3. It also reinforces the importance of foundation degrees, and the role of sector skills councils including Skillset in determining the match between skills demand in the workplace and the supply of learning from further and higher education.
Combining knowledge and skills to achieve vocational excellence has been a fundamental part of university life then and now. It is essentially the everyday business of higher education today: training teachers, lawyers, doctors, engineers, social workers, and health and media professionals. Professor Roger Waterhouse in ‘Widening Participation and the Distributed University’ (University Vocational Awards Council annual conference proceedings 2002) powerfully argues that we are bound up in structure and have forgotten the value of universities:
The oppositions between theoretical and practical study, between academic and vocational education, are not born of some necessary structures in the ways in which people learn.
Still less are they born of some typology of human beings (those who think, and those who do). They are the residuum of institutional structures, which are not only out of date but inhibit our collective learning process.
The ultimate value proposition for universities is not that they can teach, nor even that they can sell research, but that they can assess. They accredit learning.
Whatever position is adopted with regard to these policy papers, there is no doubt that it provides a genuine opportunity for higher education to strengthen its relationship with work-based learning and improves access to higher education...
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