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In England, the Studio Schools model, focused on developing employability skills in young people, represents a disruptive attempt at educational innovation. Through a documentary analysis of foundational documents, interviews with the model's architects and case studies of five Studio Schools, we map the tensions between theoretical conceptualisations of the model and the messy realities of implementing it. We found that the schools faced a wide range of challenges related particularly to local inter-school competition, centralised accountability measures and structural assumptions about the 'gold educational standard'. When facing these challenges, the course of least resistance for the schools was an iterative abandonment of the distinctive aspects of the Studio Schools model and a move back towards mainstream approaches to schooling. This process of institutional homogenisation is discussed through the lens of neo-institutional theory, with the challenges schools faced and their trajectories framed in terms of coercive, mimetic and normative isomorphism. We argue that the use of isomorphism as a heuristic device provides important insight into the process of educational innovation in an educational system that combines competition and the risk of market failure with coercive accountability measures and embedded assumptions about the 'gold standard' schooling pathway.

The question addressed in this paper is why expanding Higher Education (HE) has become the default policy position in England. One answer concerns the reluctance by employers to train. The paper adopts an historical perspective on the policy reviews into this issue which have displayed a remarkable policy amnesia, employers have not been engaged. Consequently, successive governments have fallen back on expanding the HE sector as the main way to boost skill levels.

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.

This article explores the important role played by higher education in broader skills and economic development policies in England and Scotland. It places the often divergent policy experiments and structural developments in these two countries' higher education systems within an international policy context and explains why England and Scotland are often tackling common problems and challenges in different ways. Scotland's retention of a centralised funding system for higher education, its enthusiasm for a closer integration of higher education with other forms of skills creation and its emphasis on skills utilisation are all leading to greater divergence from England.

In recent years concerns about inequality have been growing in prominence within UK policy debates. The many causes of inequality of earnings and income are complex in their interactions and their tendency to reinforce one another. This makes inequality an intractable or "wicked" policy problem, particularly within a contemporary context in which many of the established policy responses from previous eras are at best discussed in muted terms and more normally deemed to be unavailable. This reflects the eclipse of "equality of outcome" models and the concomitant rise of "equality of opportunity" as the new policy mantra from Thatcher onwards. As traditional policy responses have withered, the role of education and training as a "silver bullet" that can address a host of economic and social challenges has come to the fore. This article outlines policy makers' beliefs that improving the educational attainment of students from lower socio-economic backgrounds can enable them to compete more effectively for elite jobs, and also that increasing the supply of educated employees can transform the level of demand for skills from employers. These beliefs are then critiqued, with reference to occupational congestion, over-qualification and the evidence that skills supply does not always create its own demand.

This article focuses on a range of macro-level issues that frame debates about industry/education interaction in the UK. It explores a number of features that underpin the structure of the debate, including the declining "Britishness" of much of British business and the emergence of business as a for-profit provider of learning. It then reviews both the improvements that have taken place in the supply of skills and in the volume and quality of industry/education liaison, and also attempts by some to perpetuate a deficit model of education's contribution to meeting skill needs. It argues that the fundamental redefinition of the nature and causes of the UK's "skills problem" that is currently under way has profound implications for how thinking about industry/education interaction may develop.

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.)

With 6 billion British pounds of public spending reductions already on the table, and far deeper cuts inevitable, what are the prospects for adult learning in the new Parliament? Some of the regular contributors of this journal were asked what they expected and what they would like to see. Ewart Keep warns that the coalition parties' commitments to schools and apprenticeships will mean bigger cuts elsewhere. David Rogers argues that local authorities need the flexibility to invest locally in adult learning, especially when it saves funding down the line on other budgets. Sally Hunt says ministers should speak to learners and frontline staff to find out what's at stake. Christopher Walden thinks that a small "win" in the initial announcements in the spring will mean nothing if adult funding is slashed in the autumn. Bob Fryer argues that creating the "big society" will demand a renewed commitment to education for independent and critical citizenship. Stephen Gorard says investing in proper research would save money on ineffective solutions and improve provision by backing schemes with the most chance of success. Ceri Williams suggests that there is a need to keep speaking up for adult learning and highlight those parts of the work that resonate with the "big society". Wendy Jones thinks that the new Parliament will see a bigger contribution to learning from outside the formal education sector. Ralph Hartley says there is waste but cuts must be accompanied by a restructuring of the funding system.

This article examines the causes and consequences of the increasing control of English education and training (E&T) by central government and its agencies. It poses three questions--what are the reasons for national government becoming the dominant player in this area of policy, why is the English system so statist in design and operation, and what factors underlie the continuity of this trend in policy over the last quarter of a century? In seeking answers, it argues that policy has become caught up in a cycle of intervention that is heavily path-dependent, and that this is the result of the interplay between a set of paradoxes about what the state believes it can and cannot do within the labour and product market. E&T has come to act as a substitute for regulation in both these areas. The article concludes that unless and until the state "lets go" of some element of control it will be trapped into having to do more and more, as other actors take a passive role and fail to develop their capacity to act as strong partners in the E&T system.

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.

Highlights deficiencies in current British policies on work-based learning for 16-19 year-olds. Discusses problems arising from employers' voluntary participation. Outlines a holistic approach based on the community of practice model. (SK)

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 aspirations of the Leitch Report, although challenging, are very worthy and citizens welcome the positive response of the Government toward them. However, if they are to achieve world-class skill levels in the UK, the implementation must be absolutely right and there are several issues which must, therefore, be addressed. Leitch's targets are rightly drawn from the whole working age population. To achieve them will require a massive increase in the number of adults pursuing high-quality, work-relevant learning. In this article, the authors argue that the Government should create a clear statement of principles for this tripartite responsibility, setting out unambiguously what the State should pay for, and what it expects of employers and individuals themselves, and create a public accord around these principles, linked to the Skills Pledge.

With respect to United Kingdom's economic development policy, the importance of investing in improving the quality of workforce skills for achieving better productivity performance by firm's is analyzed.