‘culture of voluntarism’ (Green, 1990) meant that successive governments were reluctance to
impose legal obligations on employers to train and this, coupled with ‘feeble public support
for technical education, weak employer associations, marked social class divisions and low
status for manual skill’, resulted in the UK never developing strong institutional structures for
VET (Boreham, 2004; Ryan, 2000).
The main features of skill formation in apprenticeship in the I-R model was a combination of
‘work experience’ and ‘job training’ and both were ’geared to helping apprentices to acquire a
trade’ (Ryan 1999, p.41). This combination of experiences enabled apprentices to progress
along the continuum from novice to master work experience immersed apprentices into an
occupational culture through a ‘modeling’ relation between those already adept in a
craft/technical area and new initiates and study at a local college of further education enabled
them to acquire craft or technical qualifications (Ryan and Unwin, check date)7. Skill
formation generally took this form in apprenticeship in most countries in the post-war era
because, on the one hand, the internal structure of craft (Gamble, 2001) and technical
knowledge (Layton, 1993) was assumed to have a ‘tacit nature’ and was therefore acquired
best through seeing a master perform the activities of the craft and/or technical field and
thereby catching the implicit knowing of the vocation (Kvale, 1997). On the other hand, a
recognition that apprentices needed access to scientific and technical knowledge which they
could not acquire ‘on-the-job’ (Ryan et al, 2006).
In the stable economic conditions that prevailed in the UK until the early 1970s, , the
combination of rites of passage (i.e. socialisation into workplace and adult roles) and learning
a craft or technical trade tacitly was deemed to constitute the necessary and sufficient
conditions for skill formation (Fuller & Unwin 1998, p. 154). At that time there was little
discussion about either the need for flexibility at work or the transfer of skill by policymakers
and researchers. This was partly because it was generally assumed that craft and technical
work was similar in different companies, and partly because the debate about transfer in
learning theory had not yet surfaced in the literature on apprenticeship. Consequently, there
was an implicit assumption that the transfer of knowledge and skill from one context to
another was a fairly un-problematic process and that jobs were ‘for-life’.
Market-led model
When the Conservatives came to office in 1979 the I-R model of apprenticeship was in a
fairly parlous state not least because the number of apprenticeships had dropped from
243,700 in the late 1960s to 53,000 in the early 1980s (Unwin, 2005). The Conservatives had
7 The introduction of Industrial Training Boards in 1964 resulted in some attempts to improve the quality and
consistency of apprenticeship training, but these were abolished soon after Margaret Thatcher came to power in
1979 (Unwin, 2000).