Post-Compulsory Education Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3250 words

Post-Compulsory Education - Essay specimenIt was the emphasis upon elevate education providing a preparation for jobs which underpinned the new vocationalism of the 1980s. However, in more recent years, the proviso of a vocational education has come to be recognised as a more complex matter than that of obviously training students in job-specific skills. While it is true to say that General, Liberal and Social Studies appendages to back -war vocational courses were an search to provide students with a wider educational base to their studies, it was the BTEC curriculum introduced from the early 1980s which took the first significant move towards a preparation for work deep down a broader concept of vocational education. The development of TVEI as an enhancement curriculum, of generic and core skills, and of modular course structures such as GNVQ can be seen as further evidence of some general shift towards a broader, re-focused vocationalism.The reasons behind these shifts a tomic number 18 themselves interesting and result from analyses of the ever-changing needs of the economy, the labour market and, in particular, the reputation of work. Post -Fordist and other analyses of current and prospective transformations in Western societies have stressed a requirement for some form of flexible knowledge worker within collaborative, hightrust, high-skill, work relations (Brown and Lauder, 1991) and it is with some, albeit hasty and dilettante, appreciation of these requirements that curriculum development has been stimulated. I say hasty and superficial because, a high degree of uncertainty still surrounds the extent of, the directions of, and the full implications of the developments anticipated in the locating -Fordist analysis. Indeed, evidence of the anticipated flatter, leaner, hierarchies is not in great abundance, at least in Britain. Moreover, the surface features of post -Fordism are largely indistinguishable from those of the enterprise culture a nd, where curriculum developments do not address fundamental differences between the two, their discrepant contradictions are carried forward into course planning. Student-centred learning, autonomy, entitlement, empowerment, democracy and citizenship, which figure prominently in recent curriculum developments, are examples of concepts in popular use in post-compulsory education whose rhetorical value is their power to legitimise and compel putting green assent to curriculum innovations but whose more sinister function is to obscure the need for critical query of those innovations (Avis, 199313-14). Nonetheless, many of the reforms to have taken place in post-compulsory education since the early 1990s, despite the problematic nature of their underlying evidence and logic, reflect a clear and visible attempt to shift from a narrowly focused preparation for work towards some notion of preparation for life, for citizenship, for multi-skilled work and for collaborative work relations hips. While the effects of such shifts are most evident in full-time vocational courses, and to some extent in A-level programmes, they have accredited little or no recognition in NVQ levels 1, 2 and 3. Consequently, the once clear purpose of vocational education has become bifurcated into vocational education based in some broader concepts of vocation and preparation and occupational training whose primary reach is to equip learners with skills for jobs. We can say that