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This article provides a response to the other contributions in this special issue and explores the range and scale of the opportunities for policy learning across the four UK nations. It addresses the importance of locating FE and skills policy within wider national policy contexts, national choices between markets and systems and the wider implications of these choices, and the vexed role of employers. Behind these lie three over-arching questions that are then interrogated -- have we arrived at a moment when we can conceive of the UK as a policy learning laboratory, is this laboratory open for expansive policy learning, and who might be working in it?

This article takes as its starting point David Raffe's pioneering work on "home international" comparisons across the UK, and compares and contrasts current and emerging English and Scottish developments and policy trajectories primarily as they relate to vocational education broadly defined, but also with some observations concerning schooling and higher education (HE).

This article explores the governance structures that cover vocational education and training (VET) in England. The English VET system is highly fragmented, complex and unstable, and has tended to oscillate between centralised command and control, and attempts at marketisation. Its governance arrangements reflect this situation. The various providers of VET are reviewed, and the critical role that national government plays in dictating governance systems in the absence of wider social partnership arrangements or fully functioning employer representation systems is explored. The distinctive form and role of the funding agencies, the national learning inspectorate and the qualifications regulator are noted, and the design principles that underlie systems governance are discussed. Three trends that are disrupting the current settlement are analysed--fiscal retrenchment, moves towards "employer ownership" of provision and the growing drive towards localisation. The article concludes by arguing that the current governance model is liable to come under serious pressure.

The author of this review begins with a declaration of interest--more than a decade and a half ago he, along with Alison Wolf and 13 other researchers, signed a letter to the "Financial Times" protesting at design flaws in National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs). Their missive provoked a grumpy response from the then National Council for Vocational Qualifications, but the issues it raised were ignored by policy-makers. The Wolf Review, in part, explores some of the lasting consequences of government's choice of living with and sometimes even loving a deeply deficient system of vocational qualifications (VQs). Wolf's report runs to 196 pages (including technical appendices), raises a host of complex and contentious issues, and makes 27 recommendations. In this article, the author addresses a few key issues, which raise both immediate questions about policy formation but which also reflect deeper structural issues, such as the nature of the labour market and its wage systems, and vocational education's relationship with employment and with distinctive national conceptions of skill and occupation. By far the Review's largest achievement is to confront policy-makers with problems and issues of which they have sometimes been aware, but also in profound denial of, for many years. Thus most of the Review's conclusions will not come as news to researchers, but their appearance in an officially-commissioned policy review renders it difficult for government to avoid addressing them. This is extremely important because one of the key means by which English policy-makers cope with the counterfactual is by simply refusing to acknowledge that it exists and by therefore not producing any response, reasoned or otherwise, to the challenges raised. The Department for Education has accepted all the Review's recommendations in full, Professor Wolf has been given a watching brief to help ensure follow through, and reviews arising from Wolf's recommendations are under way around issues such as league-table criteria, English and mathematics qualifications, and VQ reform. However, it would be unwise to assume the inevitability of swift and smooth progress. Many policy-makers know that their most powerful weapons are often inactivity, inertia and the ability to "sit it out" until the demand for reform dies down. Their problem is that many of the issues raised by Wolf, far from dwindling, are liable to only become more acute and visible if decisive action is not taken.

A focus of Government policy has been the need to ensure that those at the lower end of the labour market invest in their human capital through re-engaging with learning, which has been assumed to enable progress into better-paid employment. This article explores the problems created by "bad jobs" and the evidence for the existence of a set of mutually reinforcing factors that reduces the incentives acting on individuals in such work, and in many cases their employers, to participate and invest in education and training. Each of these factors, on their own, would be sufficient to cause problems at the lower end of the labour market. Acting in concert, as a mutually reinforcing matrix, they produce powerful reasons why many individuals perceive that the incentives to engage in work-related learning are weak. More broadly, our argument suggests that the fundamental causes of low pay and low-quality employment have been misdiagnosed and the subsequent public policy solution of up-skilling interventions is relatively ill-fitted to achieving the desired policy goals. Imaginative re-thinking on how policy might help those in low-wage, dead-end jobs is necessary. (Contains 3 notes.)

This article explores the previously quite marked absence from English policy debates on 14-19 education of issues that, in other developed countries, would be seen as key elements in the policy landscape. These are: the role of employers as providers of learning; the structure of employers' demand for skills, their recruitment and selection practices and the incentives this creates; the impact of labour market regulation on patterns of post-compulsory participation in vocational education and training. This article argues that these issues help explain our comparatively modest participation rates at 16-18 and that failure to confront such underlying structural factors makes progress on the kind of agenda raised by Tomlinson and the subsequent White Paper extremely problematic. It is suggested that recent developments may mark the start of a change in policy, with labour market issues gaining a new prominence. The article concentrates on the English institutional context, but many of the general points about the labour market and its interaction with young peoples' decisions about education and training hold good across the whole of the UK.

In the past decade employers, market and private sector influences have had a marked impact on vocational education and training (VET) policy. This article critically examines the effect of such impact on the relationship between employers, state and education in England. It is argued that largely unfettered de-regulation practices have gifted employers a 'voice without accountability' that has shifted regulation and responsibility for VET onto the State and education and away from the workplace. The article considers the consequences of this for future VET reform in terms of 14-19, further and higher education, and social inclusion policies, alongside wider changes in economy and society. Looking beyond critique, the article argues for clearer rules of engagement for employer, state and education partnerships, where power and accountability is a shared rather than a privileged option.

In Britain, a "third way" to labor-force development (between U.S. deregulation and the German dual system) includes flexible labor markets and supply-side interventions. However, National Vocational Qualifications and other elements of the British system rely on outmoded concepts of work organization and skills. The third way is likely to fail due to a strategy based on price, not quality. (SK)

The article presents an introduction in which the editor discusses articles contained within the issue on topics such as vocational qualifications (VQ) in Great Britain , educational reform involving VQs, and the relationship between the labour market and VQs.