Adapting inclusive systems development (ISD) to vocational education and training and skills development

• In Event: Applying Ideas from Systems Thinking to International Education and Development

Proposal

Vocational education and training (VET) reforms have made progress over the years to increase access, relevance, and quality. However, many countries still struggle to provide an enabling environment for people to obtain the relevant skills to become and remain employable and productively engaged. Many reforms seem not to have had the expected impact on learning and labour market outcomes. Systems thinking has not been widely applied to VET. Systems thinking can be used to obtain a deeper understanding of the current situation, while taking advantage of the inherent capabilities of stakeholders to come together and solve increasingly complex problems. While systems thinking has been used to involve VET stakeholders in decision making (CEMETS, 2021; European Training Foundation, 2021), many VET reform projects have only done so on an ad hoc basis and have failed to engage stakeholders at a deeper, more systematic level.

In this chapter, we argue that a narrow framing of the VET ‘system’ causes fragmentation that leads to failure of reform efforts. By system, we mean a bounded set of interacting elements (including actors) and their relationships, with a common purpose. Conventional VET development projects hypothesize that government is the fundamental leverage point for change, and thus define the system as government-led coordination of publicly supported VET and labour market insertion programs and offerings. While the provision of an enabling environment and normative principles are clearly the responsibility of the state, well-functioning VET systems operate in close connection with other sub-systems (e.g., labour market institutions, general education, and economic systems including businesses and industry associations). Therefore, we draw on the skill ecosystems approach (Buchanan, Anderson, & Power, 2017) to define a VET ecosystem with wider boundaries, to include a mix of public and private providers, industry and professional associations, employers of various types and sizes, actors from other levels of education, and learners themselves. The government is one key actor among many, ensuring favourable framework conditions to ensure access and inclusion and provide an enabling environment for the VET ecosystem to thrive. The term ecosystem implies interconnections and interdependence between education, social and economic policies and the respective legal and regulatory environments, industry structure, and firm-level strategies.

Building on the ideas advocated by skill ecosystems researchers and policymakers, we promote an Inclusive Systems Development (ISD) approach that recognises that complex systems are non-linear, constantly shifting and changing. An ISD approach identifies and defines the boundaries of complex and overlapping ecosystems and subsystems to understand their inter-relatedness. It involves an analysis of system elements and the interactions and feedback loops between them, to reveal bottlenecks and surface root causes. The analysis then feeds into design of inclusive solutions that alleviate the challenges and deliver benefits to marginalised actors, including the people needing to access VET services. By mapping and analysing key actors, capacities, and roles in an ecosystem, it is possible to understand roles, responsibilities, dysfunctional relationships, power dynamics and conflicting interests, and actively unlock the motivations and capabilities of actors to contribute to overall coherent system change.

Author

• Mike Klassen, Springfield Centre