Introduction

A recurrent theme through the chapters in this book is the desire on the part of policy makers to reform their nation’s education and training systems. A clear objective is to bring education and training systems into closer alignment with perceived labour market needs. To achieve this, a leitmotif in the political rhetoric of education and training reform is the implementation of new technologies of outcomes-based assessment. For example, the discussions of the EC’s Technical Working Group (cedefop.communityzero.com/credittransfer) on credit transfer in vocational education and training (VET) have indicated that:

Identifying and measuring such outcomes and competences, it is believed, will enable a transparent system of qualifications to be developed at both national and international levels. This may be a desirable aim but achieving it, once a technology for describing and assessing outcomes has been developed, is too often seen as a mere matter of changing systems and producing new qualifications that will then be adopted by both the supply and demand side of the skills equation. However, the chapters by Stanton and Bailey (Chapter Two), Ertl (Chapter Seven), Haug (Chapter Ten) and Deer (Chapter Eleven) speak to the social, political and economic challenges inherent in implementing such reform.

The rather naive techno-rationalistic view of reform alluded to earlier is embedded within a wider politics of learning that largely ignores the cultures of learning embedded in the social practices of workplaces. This politics is mobilized within a discourse that:

• • creates unitary constructs of ‘employer’ and ‘worker’ necessary to construct national systems of qualifications;

• • emphasises deregulation of labour markets in order to increase labour flexibility; and

• • redefines concepts such as skill in ways that emphasize the responsibility of individuals to maintain their employability in a globalised economy, rather than the role of the political collective in maintaining opportunities for people to live fulfilling lives.