What is education for? Learning from North-South engagement on vocational education research interventions

• In Event: Globalization and Education: Practices, Insights and Varied Analyses

Proposal

This paper explores what a critical analysis of North-South engagement on vocational education and training (VET) can tell us about the role of education in development, the role of economic development in educational expansion, and the complex web of north-south dynamics. We reflect on what our analysis means for current trends in educational reform in Africa.

We start with the urgent need for a just transition in which economies are decarbonized in ways that build as opposed to lose good jobs, as well as build broader forms of social support. While this is the most urgent context framing the world today, three other contextual factors have shaped reforms of vocational education in many African countries and are important for our consideration of education and international development. The first is rising youth unemployment as a global issue. The second is the so-called crisis of ‘learning poverty’ in Africa. The third is migration, which is shaping education and labour markets in many countries around the world, exacerbated by famine and drought due to climate change.

The paper presents a synthesis of research and policy engagement by two researchers who have decades of experience both researching education and international development with a focus on VET and skills, and working with donors and development agencies in projects attempting to reform VET and skill provision systems. We reflect on key findings from a number of large and small research projects, funded by research councils, governments, donors, and foundations, as well as engagements with donors, research contractors, and funders in which we balance the frustration we feel with their agendas, the frustration they feel with researchers showing problems and complexity instead of practical solutions, and the nature of the research/ policy/ development interface. As such the research is primarily conceptual, but drawing on many empirical studies, many of which have an applied focus.

A consistent issue emerges across this work: the failure and repeated implementation of reforms of vocational education provision. Our interest has been on understanding why donors and development agencies continue to push policies and interventions in relation to these three areas that clearly fail, or, at best, have no evidence of success, as well as to find ways in which vocational education could be built and supported. What we observe in many interventions in African countries, often with support from or driven by organizations in the global North, is focus on either building vocational education provision, vocationalizing the school curriculum, or, focusing on short term skills interventions with the hope that this will lead to work or sustainable livelihoods. Much of this is driven through governance reforms, usually in the form of quasi-privatization. And it is done in the aim of addressing youth unemployment and building sustainable livelihoods. The implication, of course, is that there is something missing in young people—the right skills—that is preventing them from accessing good jobs or building good businesses.

A dominant trend in reform is to turn to a regulatory mode in which government treats public provision as private. We show how this works and how it has dominated VET reform in Africa. Further, we show why it doesn’t work: it hides problems, absorbs resources, and sells false dreams. It leads to reforms that are about privatization, individualization, pathologizing of individuals and/or countries, and, always, putting education to the rescue for economic problems. While much of this governance turn is also present in the global North, repeated failed attempts to drive it in Africa make is clear how empty it is, and how it draws attention away from what can actually be improved and how this could be done. In the VET space in Africa, it has led to a plethora of busy work—VET as the solution, vocationalizing the secondary curriculum as the solution, building employer-led qualification systems as the solution, and so on.

This trend in reform links to migration through attempts to reform qualifications frameworks and credential systems. Here we see three fundamental logics at play: a neoliberal impulse towards skills for migration; a humanitarian sense of building skills for those who are most vulnerable - refugees; and a xenophobic response to both that then can be made to justify “anti-migration skills” in sending countries. We also see policies in the global North having substantial effects on labour markets and education and training systems through the ways in which they credential and recognize skills.

And it links to a strange kind of angst about educational expansion in Africa. One manifestation of this is concern about the ‘poverty of learning crisis’: educational expansion has not been accompanied by educational achievement, and has not led to increased economic growth and prosperity nor reduced inequality in poor countries or to economic development. This is not surprising to sociologists, but has been to policy makers and economists who have believed that skills are get to enabling individuals to ‘get out of poverty’ through skills, and countries can similarly ‘develop and get out of poverty’ through skills. The disappointment in the so-called failure of schools to educate in the context of poverty, of vocational education to prepare people for jobs that don’t exist, and of education to get nations out of poverty has no theory other than a simplistic notion of human capital theory. Where educational levels are rising, this manifests in critique of the curriculum as ‘irrelevant’ to the needs of the economy. Today, we see considerable focus on ensuring that curricula, at schools, universities, and colleges, ensure that people have a livelihood. Little cognizance is shown for previous attempts to achieve the same, and why they failed.

What all of this highlights is the importance of alternative approaches to institution-building, linked to social and economic policy, and linked to breaking the pattern of the development of under-development.

Authors

• Simon McGrath, The University of Glasgow

• Stephanie Allais, University of the Witwatersrand