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

the relations and processes that relate individuals to the social organisation of which they are
apart (Beach, 2003, p. ). This idea stands in stark contrast to the behavioural and cognitive
assumptions of apprenticeship frameworks which assume that the physical or mental task
constitutes the basis of transfer. From this perspective, it is apprentices’ ability to ‘do
something’ - perform a workplace task or a cognitive process that constitute the basis of
being able to do so in another context. For Beach, it is the relationships and processes that
relate individual and organisations that constitutes the basis of apprentices being able to form
a generalisations about their practice, and to use the knowledge of how they formed the
generalisation to help them to form new generalisations to transfer that practice to another
context. Translated into the context of the Rep, it is the pedagogic relationships and processes
created between apprentices, HoDs and John Pitt that establishes the context for apprentices
to visualise, for example, how to hang lights in plays, pantomimes and musicals, and thus to
begin to generalise about how to hang lights in other contexts.

The next two premises are related to one another. First, that as people begin to engage with
the knowledge invested in practice and its associated artefacts, for example, different types of
wigs, costume manuals etc they start to develop a specific vocational identify (Beach, 2003,
p. ). Second, the more that people are able to move or in Beach’s terms ‘boundary cross’
(2003, p. ) between different theoretical and practical activities, they are more likely to
develop the capability to form broader and more encompassing generalisations about their
field of practice and its relationship to other vocational practices. Once again, translated into
the context of the Rep, it is the insights generated by communicating with members of other
work teams, participating in work rotation schemes and visiting other theatres and deepening
these insights through the content provided by a teaching curriculum, that enables the
apprentices to understand their own practice and its relation to other practice fields.

The preceding analysis highlights that the Rep’s model of occupationally-specific skill
formation and transfer is not an attachment to a set of hopelessly outdated and inadequate
ideas from a bye-gone era. Rather, it is based on a principle that is central to facilitating
transfer in the creative and cultural sector and, arguably, in the global knowledge economy as
well, namely the development of the creative insight to see connections between work areas
and to anticipate the implications of their actions for others.

The above notion of transfer is completely foreign to the Blueprint’s discourse about transfer
and employability. That document rests on the neo-liberal notion that accreditation is central
to employability in the global knowledge economy. The Rep operates, however, with a rather
different conception of employability. Although the Rep clearly acknowledge the impact of
market forces on the nature of productions in the modern theatre, Stuart Rogers and John Pitt

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