Apprenticeships in the UK: from the industrial-relation via market-led and social inclusion models



discuss

Comparison of the AAP and the TA

Principle of skill formation

The ObET replaced the idea of skill formation in apprenticeship frameworks and in VET with
the idea of a performance outcome. This notion was, in turn, based on two assumptions. First,
that vocational practice can effectively be disembedded from the immediacy and idiosyncrasy
of its particular context of origin and from the experience and character of the apprentices in
which that practice actually resides. Second, that it is possible to encapsulate the key elements
of workplace performance in decontextualised and depersonalised statements of competence.
The net effect was, as we have seen, that the concept of judgement was totally eviscerated
from workplace performance and the concept of knowledge was separated from competence.
Knowledge was only deemed to be relevant to workplace performance to the extent that it
underpinned competence and therefore did not necessarily need to be formally taught to
apprentices.

The seal of success of ObET was assumed to lie in the predictive power provided by the new
national system of ‘interpretation-immun
e15 - ‘can do’ assessment, that provided objective,
generalisable and replicable evidence of competence. From now on - and in contrast to the
holistic and un-differentiated notions of vocational practice associated with the I-R model of
apprenticeship, the new outcomes-based vocational qualifications could be presented to both
employers and the employees as a mode of education and training that possessed real
productive efficiency in the workplace and emancipation in working lives. It offered the
comforting illusion to employers it was possible to increase the efficiency of human
performance in the workplace by insisting that people did not deviate from NVQs stated
performance outcome descriptions, and to employees, that the accumulation of units of
competence constituted evidence of the capability to perform effectively at higher levels in
any context. Against this new standard, older conceptions of occupationally-specific forms of
vocational practice and less differentiated vocational qualifications were deemed hopelessly
outdated and inadequate, and concerns for workplace pedagogy were dismissed as a hangover
from the previous liberal vocational era (Mansfield and Mitchell 1995).

In contrast, the TA has restored the principle of skill formation to apprenticeship. Although

15 Dunne & Pendlebury coined this term in relation to their critique of the principles of ‘technical rationality’. I
have borrowed it because it is consistent with the line of my critique of the ObET.

15



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