Education and development: thirty years of continuity and change

At the end of the thirtieth volume of IJED and in the year that the journal published its 1000th paper, it is appropriate to look back at the journal’s development. In so doing, this article will discuss a series of important issues regarding the future of the field of international education and development and how it engages with development studies. The paper concludes that the challenge for IJED and for the wider work of its readership is to start imagining a more radical future in which we seek more purposefully to build bridges with other disciplines, engage with new methodological tools and encourage fresh voices but above all else communicate more clearly what we do and don’t know about the wonderful complexity of the education-development relationship

Challenging the vocational education and training for development orthodoxy

The orthodox account of vocational education and training for development is firmly based in Neoliberal assumptions about the primacy of the economic. Yet, there are a range of alternative accounts of development, receiving increasing attention, that stress the importance of a wider vision of humanity and human development. At the same time, there are longstanding, though more marginal, traditions of seeing vocational education as having a moral purpose, linked to learning to becoming more human. This paper seeks to connect these two traditions to offer a new way of thinking about VET for development

Education and development in Africa: lessons of the past 50 years for beyond 2015

As we move to discuss the nature of development targets post 2015, it is timely to consider what lessons can be learnt from 50 years of experiences of attempts to link education and development in Africa. This paper offers a historical account of key themes in African education and development and raises questions particularly about who sets targets and priorities and for whom

Exploring the value of the capability approach for vocational education and training evaluation: reflections from South Africa

In the late 1990s, South Africa was faced with the triple challenge of reforming the Apartheid divided institutional landscape of vocational education and training (VET) institutions; addressing equitable access to skills; and reorienting its skills development system to the nation’s insertion into the global economy. A wave of institutional reforms was enacted and a large programme of evaluative research followed in its wake. Whilst this body of work was both valuable and necessary, as significant practitioners in this programme we can see several of its limitations. Thus, we counterpose an alternative approach to evaluation that draws on the insights of the capabilities approach. By putting the needs of people first – rather than the needs of the economy – the capability approach brings to the forefront of VET evaluation the importance of social justice, human rights, and poverty alleviation. Such an approach pays better attention to what individuals and institutions value and are seeking to do, whilst retaining the economic rationale as an important part of such analysis; and insisting on the continued salience of evaluation for the improvement of delivery and outcomes

Advancing life projects: South African students explain why they come to FET colleges

VET policy in South Africa is based on a set of assumptions regarding the identity of learners and why learners are in public further education and training (FET) colleges. These assumptions reflect an international orthodoxy about the centrality of employability that is located within what Giddens (1994) has described as “productivism”, a view that reduces the lifeworld to the economic sphere. Through exploring the stories of a group of South African public FET college learners regarding their reasons for choosing FET colleges, this paper shows that VET is valued by these students for a range of reasons. These include preparation for the world of work, but also a desire to improve their ability to contribute to their communities and their families; raise their self-esteem; and expand their future life possibilities. Thus, the paper advances the largely hitherto theoretical critique of productivist VET accounts by offering empirical evidence of counter-narratives

The role of vocational education and training in Palestine in addressing inequality and promoting human development

UNESCO’s new emphasis on vocational education and training as transformative, and concerns in particular with equity and sustainable human development, has been strongly influenced by a recent literature on VET and human development that has a particular focus on the most marginalised, especially young women, and is concerned with how their aspirations, agency and achievement of wellbeing can be promoted in the face of wide-ranging structural obstacles. Drawing on ongoing doctoral work by the first author, this article seeks to further develop that account through an even stronger emphasis on VET in the context of extreme poverty, inequality and marginalisation as faced in Palestine. VET in Palestine serves many of the poorest and most disenfranchised in Palestinian society in a context of profound structural obstacles to wellbeing achievement. Our data shows a very positive story of how VET has helped highly disadvantaged young Palestinians, particularly young women, to make progress on their human development

Knowing and doing vocational education and training reform: evidence, learning and the policy process

Much of VET policy internationally draws on a toolkit that has been seriously questioned for its logic, international relevance and effectiveness by considerable amounts of academic research. Reflecting primarily on our experiences of leading a complex, multi-country policy study, we develop an account that seeks to explore ways in which the apparent incommensurability between academic and policy knowledge can be addressed. This leads on to a broader discussion of key issues of contestation in the debates about knowledge for policy as they relate to international education and development more generally. We consider three key turns in the discourse of international education policy and research: to "governing by numbers", "what works" and policy learning, and ask what happens when these discursive trends travel to Southern and VET contexts. We suggest that this analysis implies that policymakers need both to be more modest and reflexive in their expectations of what knowledge can be mobilised for policy purposes and more serious in their commitment to supporting the generation of the types of knowledge that they claim to value. For international and comparative educators, we stress the importance of being clearer in seeking to shape research agendas; more rigorous in our approaches to research; and better in our external communication of our findings. Given the particular focus of this special issue on VET, we end by reiterating the particular challenge of reawakening research on VET-for-development from twenty years of slumbers