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

Both notions of transfer have proved to be problematic, albeit for slightly different reasons. In
eradicating that what is distinctive about human beings is that we are sapient creatures who
learn through responding to reasons, the NVQ system severed the link between the
organisation of work, workplace pedagogy and the development and transfer of competence
(Guile, forthcoming). Yet, as numerous studies have demonstrated, learning environments and
learning processes are critical to the development of workplace competence in general
(Billett, 2001; Boreham et al. 2003; Darrow, 1991; Eraut, 2004) and to the development of
expansive rather than restrictive modes of competence in particular (Fuller & Unwin, 2004).

Moreover, the oft-repeated argument that generic skills such as numeracy, literacy, and IT can
be taught as stand-alone skill separate from subject-matter and transferred un-problematically
into other settings has proved to be very hard to confirm in educational and in work-based
settings. In the case of the former, it has been shown that generic thinking skills do not readily
transfer and that the programmes with the best track record for transfer tend to be ones that
make a concerted effort to connect general thinking skills to subject-specific matter (Raizen,
1991). In the case of the latter, researchers have demonstrated that core/key skills are forms of
‘situated practice’ (Wolf, 1991) and that unless learners are provided with opportunities to
‘progressively resituate’ such skill in different contexts, the claims about core/key skills are
purely rhetorical (Guile & Young, 2003). Curiously, this consensus about the absence of any
firm evidence to justify policymakers’ faith in core-key skills has largely gone unheeded by
policymakers in the UK, USA and North America.

The issue of transfer is central to the Rep’s approach to apprenticeship. Instead of making
assumptions about the regularity of human behaviour in the workplace or the value of
developing generic cognitive processes, the Rep started from the premise that the transfer of
skill across theatrical or equivalent contexts such as broadcast media (i.e. television) and
outside events (i.e. live productions) involves multiple interrelated social, cultural and
organisational processes. Although the Rep articulated their ideas about transfer in highly
idiosyncratic terms, for example, vocationality, it is possible to use concepts and ideas from
socio-cultural and activity theory to make their implicit assumptions about transfer explicit.
Beach’s (2003) concept of ‘knowledge propagation’ is particularly helpful because it
combines Lave & Wenger’s (1991) insight as regards the situated basis of learning as well as
Cole’s (1996) insight from Cultural Historical Activity Theory about the trans-contextual (i.e.
‘supra-empirical’) nature of knowledge and skill.

The concept of knowledge propagation is based on a number of interrelated premises. The
first premise is that the process of generalisation is central to transfer (or in Beach’s (2003,
p. ) terms ‘consequential transition’), and that forming generalisations presupposes grasping

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