Crisis and Change in Vocational Education and Training: Managing the Process of Change

Geoffrey Elliott provides a critical account of the nature, extent and impact of government policy for the further education sector. The range of responses to policy is explored, exposing both intended and unintended consequences of the increase development of human resource management and quality assurance systems, and setting these in the context of competing lecturer and manager perspectives. The theoretical focus is grounded on a study of a large urban FE college coming to terms with increasing pressures from market forces in vocational education. The book examines the conceptual underpinning of a new culture of managerialism in FE, coupled with a resistant student-centred culture maintained by the lectures in the study. While lectures are willing to adapt their practices to accommodate new demands (including the need to meet externally driven performance indicators and quality targets), college managers fail to recognise this critically significant commonality between their own orientation and that of lectures. The author argues that this failure is a major in inhibiting effective institutional development.