The profile of the creative and cultural (C&C) sector has for a combination of economic, social and educational reasons, risen dramatically since New Labour came to power in 1997 (Bilton, 2007; Garnham, 2005; Hesmonhalgh, 2005). Economically, the sector has presented itself, and been perceived by ministers, as a paradigmatic example of the ‘information/knowledge-based’ industries which economic gurus assume will be the basis of nation states’ prosperity in the 21^st Century (Porter and Ketas, 2003). Socially, the sector symbolizes the type of cultural diversity that New Labour’s quasi-social democratic project aspired to foster because it generates new cultural products and services and new culturally diverse audiences for those products and services (Guile, 2006). Educationally, an increasing number of young people aspire to enter the sector (DCMS, 2001). Taken in combination, these developments have led the government to accept that all young people should be offered an opportunity to ‘express and channel their creativity through a wide range of activities’ in primary, secondary and tertiary education to both support their creative aspirations (DCMS, 2001, foreword), and to maintain that higher-level qualifications are the vehicle to assist them to gain access to the C&C sector.

This paper questions the link that policymakers assume exists between qualifications and access to employment in the C&C sector. It first identifies how labour market conditions in the C&C sector do not reflect the prevailing conventional wisdom that qualifications are the ‘magic bullet’ (Keep, 1999) for securing employment. Secondly, it demonstrates how the dynamics of policy formation in the UK impose a straitjacket on the education and training (E&T) system thereby denying E&T agencies the autonomy to intervene to assist people post-qualification to gain access to the sector. Thirdly, it identifies the way that non-government agencies -’intermediary organisations’ – address this problem by providing new spaces and pedagogies to assist aspiring entrants to develop the requisite form of ‘vocational practice’ and ’social capital’ to enter the sector (Guile and Okumoto, 2008). The paper concludes that, if the government wants the C&C sector to realize the aforementioned economic and social goals, it will have to foster more ‘heterarchical’ (Jessop, 1998) governance cultures to support demand-and-supply side E&T partners to work together to develop innovative strategies to enhance entry routes into the C&C sector.

The creative and cultural industrial sector

The distinctive features of the sector

It is widely accepted that although some industries in the C&C sector, for example, art and design, broadcasting, film, music, etc, have been a longstanding feature of the UK and for that matter the American, European, and Pacific Rim economies, the process of industrial convergence, centred around the use of digital technology, which began in the late 1980s has gradually established the conditions for these sectors to be to be intertwined economically and technologically in radically new ways (Coffee, 1996; Tapscot, 1995). The C&C sector is a paradigmatic example of this type of convergence. Sometimes the sector is defined in terms of the outputs achieved by the following fifteen industries: Crafts, Design, Fashion, Film, Music, Performing Arts, Publishing, Research and Development, Software, Toys, TV and Radio and Video Games (Howkins, 2002). On other occasions it is defined in terms of the occupations that generate the new ideas that enable those industrial segments to flourish (Florida, 2002). Irrespective of which view of the C&C sector is adopted, it is generally agreed that it is now worth worldwide about $2.2 trillion and, according to the World Bank’s estimation, is growing at 5% per year (Florida, 2002). The largest market is America which is now worth in excess of $1 trillion while Britain is ranked third in the creative economy behind Japan. The UK’s creative and cultural sector generates revenues of around £115 billion and employs 1.3 million people. They contribute over £10 billion in exports and account for over 5% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and, moreover, output from these sectors grew by more than twice that of the economy as a whole in the late 1990s (DCMS, 2001).

Trans-nationally, the profile of the clusters and sectors that comprise the C&C sector are rather different from the historical profile of conventional economic sectors such as the automobile and pharmaceutical industries (Florida, 2002). The latter industries are characterised by strong national identities and vibrant corporate sectors, with strong ’strategies’, ’structures’ and ’systems’ which facilitated the manufacture of standardized products and services (Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1997). Whilst globalization has transformed competitive strategies and work organization in those industries significantly, they still tend to be involved with large-scale production. In contrast, the profile and structure of the C&C is characterised by a mix of a small number of global corporations and national organizations and a very large number of SMEs and freelance work, which is concentrated in specific regions, and who continually form value chains and networks, often for a short duration, to develop a continual flow of new products or services (Florida, 2002).

Furthermore, unlike industrial sectors such as the automobile, engineering and medical sectors which have historically been characterized by very strong ‘occupational labour markets’ (OLMs) and firm-specific ‘internal labour markets’ (FILMs) (Ashton, 1995), the creative and cultural sector is characterised predominantly by ‘external labour markets’ (ELMs). These labour markets function in rather different ways from one another. OLMs enable new entrants to be trained in a range of skills which provide competence in specific occupations. This process of occupational socialization results in the development of an identification with an occupation, for example, engineer, nurse, mechanic, as well as a ’skill base’ that can be enhanced through further training within firms. FILMs provide a series of job or career ladders which, following further training, enable young employees to be promoted and to progress within an organization.

These labour market conditions are only really found in those segments of the C&C sector which have developed equivalent professional identities and education and training traditions, for example, broadcasting and printing, although even here OLMs are no longer as an entrenched feature of these industries as they were in the 196/7/80s (Sutton Trust, 2006). In the main, large swathes of the C&C sector are characterized by ELMs. These markets are formed where the buying and selling of labour is not linked to jobs which form part of a FILM or a long standing and clearly defined OLM. Movement of labour in ELMs is determined by the price attached to the job and/or contract on offer and the requirements of the individual concerned and such jobs/contracts in the creative and cultural industries tend to run the gamut from high to low skill. Traditionally, ELMs were seen as constituting the ’secondary labour market’ and labour market economists tended to treat them as less desirable work contexts for young people than OLMs and FILMs because they did not offer the same form of employment protection and structured opportunities for development (Ashton, 1995, p15).

The impact of globalization, new forms of work and out-sourcing has, however, profoundly increased the prevalence of ELMs within the UK economy in general (Ashton, 1995) and in the creative and cultural sector in particular (Bilton, 2007), with the result that even organizations such as the BBC, which in the past offered its employees permanent contracts, is now inclined to place new recruits on short-term and temporary contracts. The net effect has been the emergence of less structured careers and greater economic uncertainty. Marsden (2008) has characterized this shift from OLMs to ELMs as the introduction of a ‘tournament’ culture in the C&C sector. By this he means aspiring entrants are prepared to seek out a mix of unpaid internships and/or work experiences and tolerate the uncertainties of low-paid freelance work, in the hope that it will enable them to develop the appropriate mix of vocational practice and social capital to secure either a permanent position or longer contracts and better pay as a freelance worker.

Government policy for education and training

The national policy cycle and its implications for E&T policy

The UK’s national policy cycle has been predicated since the late 1980s on a ‘cycle of state intervention’ (Keep, 2006). Both the previous Conservative and New Labour administrations have ascribed a centrality to upskilling that is not shared by other actors, particularly employers, and which render all assumed stakeholders in the upskilling process, for example, educational institutions, Local Learning and Skills Councils (LLSCs), merely as delivery agents for national policy, rather than active contributors to the formulation of public policy. To realise this upskilling agenda, successive governments have engulfed the E&T system with an escalating series of policy dictums which they are obligated to address. These supply-side measures and levers, which reflect the well-established belief amongst policy makers in the efficacy of centrally imposed planning regimes, specify targets, explicitly interface funding, with targets, and severely restrict the scope for any discussion of the direction of policy (Keep, 2006).

The net effect has been to produce a crippling paradox. On the one hand, the UK government’s commitment to free-market neo-liberal policies renders unavailable the potential policy interventions used in other countries – for example, training levies, strong trade unions and statutory rights to collective bargaining on skills, strong forms of social partnership – or a targeted industrial policy to support high skill sectors. On the other hand, the government’s concern to micro-manage all aspects of E&T policy predisposes SSCs and LLSCs to work with the DCSFs to realize national E&T targets by allocating funding in line with those targets, thereby denying them the opportunity to sponsor initiatives which might offer an alternative vision and set of practical measures to facilitate access to the labour market.

This mismatch between demand and supply of E&T has a number of unintended consequences. At present, although the national policy rhetoric constantly affirms the centrality of ‘choice’ and ‘flexibility’ if the UK is to respond to the demands of the knowledge economy, E&T policy is tightly circumscribed by policymakers assumptions there are clear and functioning OLMs and FILMs in all areas of the UK economy whose needs can be met through the creation of sector skills agreements and qualification blueprints. As a consequence, all that the government’s much vaunted rhetoric of choice and flexibility amounts to is an opportunity for the demand-side to tailor pre-given blueprints to reflect their needs. Moreover, when the government encounters opposition to or a reluctance to go along with its E&T agenda, it rarely pauses to consider whether policy is correct for all industrial sectors. Instead, the government tries to realize its goals by offering a limited number of financial inducements, the form of a public subsidy for E&T programmes such as the AAP and task-specific adult training to employers in an attempt to secure greater employer investment in training (Keep, 2006). Consequently, the above labour market assumptions and ideological no-go-zones mean that the UK policy severely restricts stakeholders’ scope to experiment or innovate in relation to their perception of their needs.

Operating within this framework, New Labour’s rallying cry to E&T stakeholders has been that policy must intertwine competitiveness and social inclusion on the grounds that education is the best policy to support employability in, and growth of, the knowledge economy (Lauder, 2004). The emphasis in the first decade of educational policy from 1997 to 2007 fell upon making the supply-side more responsive to government priorities. Firstly, universities were encouraged to address social exclusion by widening participation so as to attract non-traditional learners, for example, learners whose families have little or no previous experience of university study, into HE, rather than to target measures to facilitate access into specific subjects or occupational sectors. Broadly speaking, the widening participation initiatives have been fairly successful in achieving their goals, although non-traditional access tends to have been skewed towards ‘new’ rather than ‘Russell Group’ universities (Burke, 2000). Moreover, new vocational qualifications such as the Foundation Degree (FD) were introduced to address perceived skill deficits at intermediate (associate professional and technical) level and also as a strategy to help the Government to meet its target of ensuring that at least 50% of the population entered HE (DfEs, 2003). FDs have proved to be an effective strategy for ‘credentialising’ high volumes of experienced workers’ knowledge and skill in the public sector (Gallagher and Reeves 2006), and a flexible framework for employers to align degrees more closely to niche needs in the private sector (Evans et al, forthcoming).

Secondly, the government has forced (and continues to force as the announcement on 7.1.2009 demonstrates) the Local Learning and Skills Councils (LLSCs) to present the Apprenticeship/Advanced Apprenticeship Programme (AAP) as a vehicle to attract those young people not proceeding into further and higher education, whom the government perceives to be vulnerable to social and economic exclusion. In this respect, the AAP has become a strategy to secure volumes, in terms of apprentice numbers and participating sectors, rather than on skill formation in those sectors committed to securing economic growth (Fuller and Unwin, 2003). In the past, ‘apprenticeships were demand rather than supply-led. Employers decided when and if they needed apprentices’ (Fuller and Unwin, 2003b). Thus, apprenticeship was very responsive to labour market demand. In contrast, at the present time the prevailing orthodoxy of centrally imposed planning regimes and national targets for education and training, coupled with the nexus of quangos, for example, Sector Skills Councils (SSCs) with responsibility for devising sector skills agreements to deliver those targets and whose livelihood depends on meeting their target quotas, serves to underpin a decidedly supply-side conception of E&T. This has a number of pernicious effects as regards apprenticeship: most employers, despite having a degree of representation on the boards of SSCs and LSCs, and particularly employers in the C&C sector, rarely feel any particular ownership of apprenticeships (Fuller and Unwin, 2003a; Hutton, 2006); and the hands of the SSCs and LSCs are tied as regards financially supporting any new initiatives for learning and development that do not directly support government targets for education and training or their own financial position.

The publication of the Leitch Report (2006), however, inaugurated a shift away from a concern for, on the one hand, incentivising and pressurising the supply-side to respond to government targets and, on the other hand, encouraging individuals to invest in their own training and development. These foci were replaced by a concern to put employers in the driving seat through the Train to Gain initiative and by enhancing the role of the SSCs in order to make the E&T system more demand rather than supply-led (Delorenzi, 2007). Specifically, adult learning policy is now focused on two Public Service Agreements (PSAs) targets – to increase the number of people with basic skills, and to increase the number with level 2 qualifications. Whilst the equity and social justice arguments that underpin a concern for increasing the proportion of the population that have basic skills and hold Level 2 qualifications are unquestionable, the Leitch Report perpetuates the straitjacket that the government has imposed on the E&T system. It fails to acknowledge that the most effective strategy for enhancing regional and national competitiveness is to support adults who already hold Level 3 qualifications to broaden the base of their expertise (Delorenzi, 2007) and that this frequently requires access to short un-accredited provision (Mason, 2008).

The ‘cycle of intervention’ and its implications for the C&C sector

Despite the shift to demand-led E&T that Leitch purportedly inaugurated, the direction of educational policy for the C&C sector continues to remain firmly under the hand of the government. This is, in part, because SSCs and LLSCs in general, and in the C&C sector specifically, perceive that their primary purpose is to function as a delivery agent for government policy, rather than an institutional tier capable of mediating between central government and other groups in the E&T system or even a bulwark against the arms of Whitehall. It is also in part because both organisations are subject to the constantly changing direction and priorities of national E&T policy. This state of affairs is clearly evident from the way in which Skillset, who represents broadcasting, film, video and multimedia, and Creative and Cultural Skills (C&CS), who represent advertising, crafts, cultural heritage, design, music, performing, literary and visual arts, have either responded to their E&T remits or have in the case of HE been affected by other aspects of policy.

In the case of HE, C&C-related degrees have been growing annually since 1994 and resulted in a 55% increase in enrolments in creative and art and design subject areas by 2005 (Universities UK, 2005). Moreover, this growth continues independent of any action on behalf of either of Skillset or C&CS. This is partly because universities have or have established strong links with the C&C sector and therefore have been able to identify/respond to emerging demands. Nevertheless, despite universities’ close links with the C&C sector, studying for a C&C-related degree rarely provides an expectation or understanding of what is required in vocational contexts (Raffo et al, 2000). Hence many graduates with C&C degrees have a post-graduation ‘vocational need’: to acquire the ‘vocational practice’, that is the mix of knowledge, skill and judgement, employers are looking for, via a mix of unpaid internships, work placements, etc (Guile, 2009).

The one, albeit small, area of influence SSCs have in relation to HE is with respect to the design of FDs. Here some very successful, albeit very low volume, FDs have been designed, for example, Skillset and the London College of Communication’s FD in Media Practice. This FD has a strong track record of assisting new entrants and ‘career switchers’ to gain access to their desired niche in the C&C sector (Evans et al forthcoming). The FD’s success is due to its ability to offer learners work placements in the heart of the UK’s C&C sector. This assists them to develop not only their vocational practice, but also the social capital in the form of a network of contacts who might offer them or recommend them for contract/project-based employment.

In the case of apprenticeship, Skillset and C&CS are struggling to persuade employers to participate in the AAP. The C&C sector lags significantly behind traditional sectors associated with apprenticeship such as Engineering, Manufacturing and Construction as well as other non-traditional sectors such as Business Administration. There was not one C&C industry in the list of the ‘top ten’ participants in the AAP (Fuller and Unwin, 2003) and this situation has not subsequently improved; moreover, even in the list of the ‘top forty’ sectors where apprentices begin at age 18 and over, the C&C sector is only represented by industries which have either historically been characterized by a combination of strong OLMs and FILMs, for example, broadcasting and newspapers or recent high growth sectors such as IT where certain segments have developed fairly robust OLMs and FILMs over the last two decades.

This is partly because the flexible blueprints and the provision of a public subsidy has failed to encourage participation in the AAP on behalf of those sectors that are characterized by a high proportion of SMEs, very strong ELMs, and little history of involvement in nationally accredited apprenticeship programmes such as Art and Design, Film, Fashion, Film, Music, New Media, Performing Arts, etc. SMEs are reluctant to participate in the AAP because firstly, they lack the financial and human resources to be convinced that they would benefit from participating in the AAP (Hutton, 2006). Secondly, the mandatory qualification outcomes in the blueprint for AAP – NVQs, Technical Certificates and Key Skills – are perceived in the sector as serving ‘educational’ goals because they are promoted by the DCSF to enhance academic progression, rather than attempts to develop sectorally-relevant vocational knowledge and skill (Guile and Okumoto, 2007). Thirdly, the onus from central government on SSCs and LLSCs to secure high volumes and to roll out apprenticeship frameworks nationally severely inhibits them from supporting employers’ demands for bespoke apprenticeships. SSCs are reluctant therefore to invest in such schemes because they are not guaranteed to offer a sufficient return on the investment when it comes to achieving AAP targets. As a consequence, it took over four years, for example, for the first ever Advanced Apprenticeship in Media Production, which was developed by Skillset in collaboration with the BBC, North West Vision and Media and the LSC, to be launched (Damners, 2008).

Skillset and C&CS have both supported the development of the first creative and cultural Diploma. This is a new qualification that was launched in September 2008. Its aim is to promote diversity, opportunity and inclusion by offering pathways to support learners to enter occupational sectors or progress into HE, including work-related learning opportunities (Huddlestone, 2008). The Diploma in Creative and Media (DCM) has therefore to square the government’s circle of developing vocationally relevant skills and positioning learners to progress at some point in the future into HE. Although it is too soon to judge on the basis of any empirical evidence, the exigencies of the C&C labour market described in the previous section suggest that achieving this goal is a tall order. The DCM promotes the impression that intermediate-level qualifications are the stepping-stone to employment in the C&C sector. Yet, it is clear that not only is access to the C&C sector difficult for people who hold a degree, but also difficult to sustain a career in the sector (Galloway et al, 2006; Lindley and Galloway, 2005; Guile and Okumoto, 2006). For this reason, graduates and recent entrants often resort to ‘multiple job holding’ to supplement their income stream whilst they break in or establish themselves in their chosen niche (Baines and Robson 1999; Creigh-Tyte and Thomas 1999). Thus, Skillset and C&CS run the risk of inadvertently increasing social frustration rather than assisting young people to achieve their social aspirations, as young people discover that DCM does not necessarily constitute a qualification to secure their employment in the C&C sector.

The root of the problem that Skillset and C&CS jointly face is the assumed link that the government believes exists between qualifications and access to the labour market. This is predicated on a notion that there are functioning OLMs and FILMs in the C&C sector, that these labour markets will channel the flow of highly qualified students towards their preferred occupational destinations, and that employers will use qualifications as a proxy measure for vocational practice in the recruitment process (Guile, 2009). These assumptions are, s we have seen, wide of the mark and, as a consequence, Skillset and C&CS’s efforts to support aspiring entrants to gain access to the C&C sector are floundering.

New spaces, pedagogies and expertise

Given this difficulty, aspiring entrants have recourse to two main strategies to gain access to the sector: to exercise their own agency and identify and negotiate internships and work placement to develop their vocational practice and social capital, or to participate in the development activities that ‘intermediary agencies’ offer (Guile and Okumoto, forthcoming). These agencies have grown in number over the last decade as it has become apparent that aspiring entrants require help post-graduation to realise their ambitions (Guile and Okumoto, forthcoming). The term intermediary agencies encompass a diverse range of organisations. Some are found in (i) the formal education sector, for example, education-industry liaison units in universities (ii) the not-for-profit sector, private companies with a sectoral specialization, and possibly some industry funding, providing a range of learning and development programmes for aspiring entrants and longstanding members of their field (iii) the non-formal sector, colleges that do not receive statutory funding, and (iv) the public sector, for example, local government funded community-liaison agencies.

Intermediary agencies are rather different from traditional forms of community education (CE) that is usually delivered by cohorts of trained educators employed by local authorities (Tett, 2002). In contrast, intermediary agencies attempt to co-ordinate segments of the labour market by acting as catalysts to bring conglomerates, SMEs, freelancers and networks together to forge partnerships. The aim of these partnerships is two-fold: to assist aspiring entrants to supplement their qualifications or prior experience to develop the forms of vocational practice and social capital that will help them enter the creative industries, and to increase the flow of experienced people into the sector. Over the last decade, they have achieved this goal by:

• securing funds from sources such as the European Union, UK government departments, charitable foundations and the private sector to provide new spaces for learning. These can include (i) the provision of short courses that usually do not result in a recognized qualification (ii) offering bursaries/access to master classes, and (iii) negotiating internships/work placements with companies
• employing experienced professionals such as tutors/mentors to support aspiring entrants in ways that are appropriate to the needs of the sector
• working closely with employers and educational institutions to design innovative forms of education and training that address pressing skill needs.

The next section of the paper illustrates the vital contributions that intermediary organisations make by summarising research from four case studies undertaken as part of The Last Mile Project (Guile, 2006). This was a three-year project funded via the EU EQUAL Programme.

One example of the work of an industry-education funded intermediary agency is the Jewellery Industry Innovation Centre (JIIC). The JIIC is attached to the University of Central England, Birmingham and has a remit to provide support in research and development in the UK jewellery industry. The jewellery industry presents aspiring entrants with a very specific kind of challenge. Much of this sector depends upon a value network of ‘horizontal’ collaboration between SMEs and freelancers who create new products and services, and ‘vertical’ collaboration between large firms who act as suppliers and distributors (Bilton, 2007). This generates a pattern of economic activity based on local ties where SMEs and freelancers are committed to the creation of new jewellery products and the larger firms are concerned with their manufacture and distribution.

Working in partnership with the Innovation Unit (IU), part of Birmingham City Council’s Economic and Development Department, and funds secured from the European Social Fund, the JIIC designed a new un-accredited project – the Design Work Placement (DWP) Project. This project ran for six months and based on a three-way partnership (a) participating manufacturers gave recently qualified jewellers an opportunity to develop a new range of commercial products based on their research because they had faith in the JIIC’s track record in identifying new talent (b) recently qualified jewellers worked for a small bursary in order to learn how to incubate (ie create, cost, and monitor the fabrication of their designs) because they appreciated that this would provide an invaluable opportunity to develop their vocational practice and their social capital within the sector, and (c) the JIIC acted as project managers and mentors for the participant jewellers (Guile and Okumoto 2008).

The scheme involved an iterative mix of learning strategies. The JIIC ran workshops to support the recently qualified jewellers to develop an industry-relevant approach to designing new jewellery collections. It introduced them to more commercially-orientated methods of working, encouraging them to attune themselves more to the way in which cultural trends influence how people incorporate jewellery into their fashion style, supported the process through one-to-one mentoring, and ran showcasing events with industry representatives for the participants at the end of the project. The jewellery companies provided the participating jewellers with, on the one hand, very demanding commercial projects, for example, graduates enrolled on jewellery degrees usually have a whole term to produce the final design for their degree whereas the company expected forty new designs to be produced within twelve weeks, which the companies expected to be manufactured within the next twelve weeks; and, on the other hand, opportunities to become familiar with up-to-date techniques of production that they had never encountered in college and to participate in production planning meetings. The aspiring jewellers had to learn to take advantage of this mix of formal pedagogic strategies and workplace-generated pedagogic strategies in order to formulate and instantiate their designs.

In addition to achieving its stipulated goal of assisting the participating companies to enhance their product ranges and the participating jewellers to develop their vocational practice, the DWP also achieved another goal. It assisted the participating jewellers to decide whether to remain a jewellery designer and as a consequence become a freelance worker, or to enter management within a jewellery company and therefore be in a better position to secure a full-time position. Moreover, the jewellers who took the former decision recognised that life as a freelancer required them to develop what has been referred to as ‘moebius-strip’ expertise (Guile, 2007), that is the entrepreneurial expertise to demonstrate to national and international jewellery companies and journalists that they are sufficiently versatile to use their expertise to meet the requirements of any contract.

The work of Slough Borough Council’s Arts Development Team (ADT), which is a regional arts partnership receiving some core funding from the local council to ensure that the arts in Slough have the best grounding, resources and connections, is an excellent example of how the networking undertaken by intermediary agencies can result in innovative strategies to facilitate access into the C&C sector. Because the UK’s four largest film studios are located within fifteen minutes of Slough, Creative Academy (CA), one of ADT’s partners, prioritized film as an industrial sector where they were keen to secure employer support to assist young people from the Slough area to gain access to the industry. This led George Kirkham, Director of CA, to meet Carlo Dusi, Director of Aria Films, and negotiate work placements for ten aspiring entrants on Carlo’s forthcoming production.

Carlo was responsive to George’s pitch for work placements because he was aware that ‘the film production community is not a nurturing one’ and that it is difficult ‘to establish a career in the industry unless one can find an opportunity to work within the industry (Guile and Okumoto forthcoming). The aim of the partnership between Aria and CA was to enable people with Level 3/4 qualifications in a film-related field, for example, Special Effects, Make-up Design or Television and Production, or people who had experience of working in television and/or on the production of advertisements, to move into the film industry. To realize this goal, Carlo offered them a two-week work placement on either the ’shoot’ or the post-production for the film he was producing Kill Kill Faster Faster. The film was shot in Rotterdam for six weeks in June/July 2006 with the budget of £3.7 million. Seven participants undertook technical positions in Rotterdam, while three were involved in post-production work in London once the filming was complete.

Given that Carlos’s film crew had no previous experience of supporting interns on a film shoot and the participants equally lacked any experience of such work, George and Carlo devised a multi-faceted system to support both parties. Prior to the Rotterdam shoot, the CA ran a series of workshops to support the participants in understanding the aims of the scheme, and prepared for their roles through one-to-one meetings with experienced professionals in the field of lighting, filming, sound, etc. During the shooting, the CA offered on-site mentoring support by visiting the participants and helping to iron out any misunderstandings and/or difficulties that arose. Post-placement, the CA arranged for information on seminars, events and job vacancies to be sent to the interns. Prior to the participants arriving in Rotterdam, Carlo briefed the experienced technical staff that he had recruited for the film as regards his rationale for agreeing to provide work placements, explained his expectations of the interns’ ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ role, and the technical staff’s coaching and modeling role. Subsequently, he split his time between overseeing the production process and acting as the participants’ mentor throughout the shoot and post-production phases.

This work placement supported the participants in developing their vocational practice and social capital in order to be in a position for an employer to offer them a contract for their services. In the case of the former, the placement demonstrated that although film-related qualifications can provide a conceptual understanding and orientate aspiring entrants towards key issues about the history and social conventions that inform film-making, such knowledge has to be supplemented by experience of practice. This is because much of the knowledge that is an integral feature of forms of vocational practice such as sound, lighting, direction, is invested in action, and involves developing the form of judgement that are inimical to professional performance. In the case of the latter, the opportunity to hear experienced professionals’ ‘war stories’ about which film events to attend and which networks to join, enabled participants to realised the link between vocational practice, social capital and moebius-strip expertise: the latter provides the network that may generate a demand for their services providing they are perceived as someone who can creatively deploy their expertise in a range of situations.

One example of the work of a non-formal intermediary agency is WAC Performing Arts and Media College. WAC specialises in the field of performing arts and raises its income from a mix of EU, Local Learning and Skills Council, and industry sources of funding. In recognition that many of its graduates, who were active in the field of world arts, were unable to supplement their freelance income streams through securing employment as a teacher/teaching assistant because they lacked a recognized qualification, WAC decided to create a degree in world art forms. To do so, WAC turned to the framework provided by Foundation Degrees (FD).

WAC drew on its accumulated experience in running non-accredited courses and designed the FD around an integrated learning-teaching curriculum (Guile and Okumoto 2009). The hallmark of this curriculum was the way in which WAC mobilised its accumulated social capital (ie the number of ex-WAC graduates who were experienced professionals in the field of world arts forms) to work as teachers. Their involvement enabled participants to develop their vocational practice to industry-standards as well as to expand their network of contacts and thus position them to gain access to the performing arts’ notoriously tricky external labour markets. WAC achieved these two goals by using the expertise of its staff and ex-graduates to (i) explain the discipline-based knowledge and skill that underpins different world art forms in ways that extended their existing vocational practice and developed their professional identity and confidence (ii) provide opportunities for learners to plan and then perform in a wide range of contexts and for culturally diverse audiences. This opportunity to participate legitimately, albeit peripherally, with a range of different world art forms in authentic settings enabled participants to develop the forms of judgement that are integral to the development of their practice, and (iii) provide opportunities for learners to bridge and link their existing fledgling network to other existing and successful networks.

The wide variety of learning opportunities enabled FD participants to firstly, develop new forms of vocational practice and bridge and link their existing and new social capital in ways that could, in future, result in them being invited to contribute their specific vocational expertise to a dance, music, etc, contract that others had secured. Secondly, the diverse learning opportunities also positioned the FDs’ participants to develop the entrepreneurial expertise to start looking at themselves as not just performers searching for contracts for their specific world art expertise, but also as arts practitioners who have developed broader-based capabilities that could assist them to secure employment in art-based project management and/or community education.

Finally, the partnership between Birmingham’s Innovation Unit (IU) and the city’s Repertory Theatre (REP) provides an excellent example of how to devise an innovative project to assist aspiring entrants enter the C&C labour market. Using ESF funding, the IU and REP developed a ‘Technical Apprenticeship’ (TA) that offered eight apprentices, none of whom held a qualification above Level 3, to successfully enter the C&C sector. The Rep devised the TA outside the national blueprint for apprenticeship for two main reasons. It felt that the AAP had firstly, been designed to serve ‘educational’ goals because it is promoted by the DfES to enhance academic progression, rather than as genuine attempts to develop the sector-specific vocational knowledge and skill that they feel it is important for apprentices to develop (Guile and Okumoto 2007). Secondly, work in the theatre (and, for that matter, live events in general) is characterised by a ‘project culture’. This work context means that the AAP with its attendant package of NVQ assessment and the requirement for day-release is not a practical option, because it is utterly impracticable to release apprentices to attend courses in FE colleges or private training providers or to stop and assess apprentices’ competence in the middle of a production. To do so would deny the apprentices the opportunity to develop key aspects of vocational practice which are unlikely to surface again within the life span of a production.

To realize its vision of creating a modern culturally diverse and inclusive traditional craft apprenticeship which reflects the realities of the new work context in which it operates, the Rep appointed a Project Coordinator, John Pitt, who had worked as Production Manager previously in the Rep as well as having extensive knowledge and experience in training and development. Working with the Technical Heads of Department (THDs), for example, Lighting, Costume, Wigs, Sound, etc, John designed an apprenticeship that immersed apprentices in the ‘work flow’ of the Rep theatre life so they are involved in every stage of mounting a production. John negotiated with the THDs for the apprentices to have the opportunity to be: (i) ‘legitimate peripheral participants’ (Lave and Wenger, 1991) within their department, that is, activity engaged with the production process and supported in situ by modeling and demonstration activities in order to develop their technical expertise, and (ii) ‘boundary crossers’ (Tuomi-Gröhn and Engeström, 2003) between departments, that is, provided with opportunities to grasp the connections between different forms of vocational practice that exist within the Rep and how they all contribute to the success of a performance.

John also arranged for the apprentices to enhance their on-the-job learning in the down-time between productions by offering them access to a bespoke curriculum consisting of a mix of generic knowledge and skill about the process of production, and occupationally-specific knowledge and skill relating to their technical specialism. Furthermore a programme of limited work rotation and visits to other theatres and events across the country were arranged. These experiences enabled the apprentices to locate their understanding of vocational practice in a wider context and lay the foundation for them to transfer their knowledge and skill into other theatrical contexts.

The Rep’s model of apprenticeship supported the apprentices’ skill formation and transfer because it not only developed distinctive forms of occupationally-specific knowledge and skill which are in short supply and hence for which there is a high demand in the global C&C economy, but it also developed their social capital and entrepreneurial ability. Recognising that the UK’s national system of repertory theatres is characterised by the type of strong mutually self-supporting networks, characterised by high levels of trust amongst all levels of specialism and seniority, the Rep bridged and linked their apprentices into as many of these networks as possible. They did so in the knowledge that, on the one hand, these networks would accept that an apprentice ‘trained’ at Birmingham Rep was well trained and sufficiently experienced to be offered a contract for their services; and, on the other hand, that the apprentices had acquired the ability to demonstrate to prospective employers that they were sufficiently versatile to operate effectively in a range of settings, for example, theatres, television studios and live events.

Coda to the Case Studies: all the participants are now active in the C&C sector with contracts for their services.

Learning to work in the C&C sector: future challenges

The future context

The trend away from OLMs and FILMs and towards ELMs and ‘tournament’ competitions is likely to continue rather than diminish, for a number of reasons, over the next ten years. Firstly, this trend, although not necessarily as pronounced and entrenched in other parts of Europe, is nevertheless occurring globally throughout the C&C sector. The net effect is to position aspiring entrants to the C&C sector, as the EU commissioned report from KEA (2006) observes, as “new workers”/”new entrepreneurs”, between capital and labour because:

“The traditional categories of the “full-time job society” (“here the worker, there the employer”) no longer apply; the cultural content worker is suddenly also a (cultural) entrepreneur (without capital). In academic literature the “new worker” is described as multi-skilled, multifunctional and flexible in working time as well as often being self-employed” (KEA, 2006, p91).

Secondly, policymakers continue to affirm the importance of expanding these industries without paying any attention to labour market conditions and the way in which they inhibit people from learning to work in the C&C sector (Hesmondhalgh, forthcoming). Even the KEA (2006, p9) report that has, as we have seen above, very presciently identified the new conditions in which aspirant workers find themselves, falls back on the current European Union version of the UK conventional wisdom and argues that workers will require higher levels of knowledge and skill. Thus the report ends up perpetuating, rather than offering any fresh thinking on how to overcome, the dilemma described in this paper.

This suggests that the transition of any young people into the labour market, which many researchers had noted even before the impact of the ‘credit crunch’ had become more extended than in the post-war period during the 1990s (Evans, 2000; Chisholm, 1999), is likely to become even more extended in the future. Moreover, given the opacity of the C&C labour market and the fact that access is dependent on the development of the forms of social capital that provide people with access to the networks that gate-keep and facilitate employment in the C&C sector, it also suggests that access is likely to become even more competitive as the C&C sector gradually comes to terms with the implications of the ‘credit crunch’.

Assuming that the depiction of the above trends is correct and that the mismatch between the UK’s national policy cycle and the government’s assumptions about the role of qualifications as a proxy measure for vocational practice continues, then access to the labour market is likely to be exacerbated rather than diminished in any great respect. In the case of graduates, this is in part because the massification of higher education has generated a continual flow of graduates who are prepared, because they are financially cushioned by their families or are prepared to engage in multiple job-holding, to accept fairly insecure and temporary positions in an attempt to develop the forms of vocational practice and social capital to gain access to the C&C labour market (Oakley, 2007). In the case of students holding Level 3 qualifications, the combination of the flexible conditions of the UK labour market, coupled with employers’ preferences to recruit graduates in non-graduate roles (Mason, 2004), is exerting considerable ‘downward’ pressure on such students and has the effect of denying them access to the port-of-entry positions that would otherwise be commensurable with their qualifications and experience. Taken in combination, these developments suggest that there is likely to be an increased demand for the forms of intervention activity and provision of learning and development activities that intermediary agencies have been providing.

New principles for E&T

In light of these circumstances and irrespective of any change of government, there will have to be new direction to E&T policy if policymakers are to support aspiring entrants and career-switchers to realize their ambitions to work in the C&C sector and support the sector to continue to serve as the ‘engine’ of post-industrial growth in the UK. Based on the argument presented in this paper, this new direction presupposes a series of new principles for UK E&T policy. The principles are as follows:

1. The rebalancing of the tension between market (ie ‘demand-led) and state (ie supply-led) provision through the introduction of ‘heterarchical’ (Jessop, 1998) modes of E&T planning and delivery.

The problem generated by the state/market dichotomy in governance strategies has been widely recognized for some time. Jessop (1998, 2000) has argued that this has resulted at the macro government level in the constant substitution of one with another. He argues that rather than trying to manage the relative change between states, markets and globalization within one overall structure, what is required is the introduction of ‘new balancing points’ that enable policymakers to involve stakeholders more directly in the coordination process. Jessop offers the principle of self-organisation, in his terms’ heterarchy’, as an alternative mode of governance. From Jessop’s perspective, heterarchical governance, coupled with the autonomy at the regional level to determine how to deploy national fundings streams, offers a potential key to unlock the totality of the state/market interface at the macro-level.

There is not sufficient space here to do justice to the complexity of Jessop’s argument. I want to suggest, however, that his notion of heterarchical governance can be usefully extended to the way in which E&T policy and provision could be addressed in future in the C&C sector. This claim can be illustrated by returning to the example of Birmingham Reparatory Theatre’s Technical Apprenticeship.

It was argued earlier that in its desire to make apprenticeship part of a vocational ladder within the education and training (E&T) system, the government firstly, overlooked that (i) the primary purpose of apprenticeship is to develop vocational practice, and (ii) the project-based nature of work in much of the creative and cultural sector requires a ‘project-based’ approach to education and training and that existing arrangements and funding patterns for on-and-off-the-job training are incompatible with this type of work. Secondly, the government imposed a policy making cycle, funding constraints and targets that totally limited the scope of regional stakeholders to respond in innovative ways to their pressing needs.

If the principle of heterarchy was used to rebalance the current E&T system, this broadening of the principles of governance would offer E&T stakeholders the opportunity to ‘co-configure’ (Engeström, 2008) innovative solutions to the issue of access. In the case of the reservations expressed in the C&C sector about the AAP Blueprint, this new space could be used to enable employers, working in conjunction with intermediary agencies and Further Education Colleges, to design models of apprenticeship that actually reflect their needs. Such a development would introduce a slightly different twist to the notion of ‘employer leadership’ advocated by the Leitch Report. Instead of assuming that qualification blueprints are the definitive solution to employability in the knowledge economy and arguing that employers should take the lead over FE colleges/training providers implementing the AAP Blueprint, this broader system of E&T governance would create the conditions for employers to develop bespoke models of apprenticeship based on a clear articulation and specification of the principles of occupational skill formation and skill transfer. To ensure that employers do not interpret this new freedom as a license to create a host of new ‘restrictive’ apprenticeships (Fuller and Unwin, 2003), Local Learning and Skills Councils could be required by central government to devise regional ‘kite marking’ systems for such alternative models of apprenticeship. These systems would be based on clearly defined criteria for skill formation, skill transfer and employability so that apprentices developed the requisite form of vocational practice and social capital, thereby reassuring policymakers that the new schemes are educationally robust and offer value for money.

The introduction of these new principles of governance would also mean that E&T funding regimes for apprenticeship and other programmes would have to be re-thought. At present policymakers operate with ‘Welfarist’ notions of labour markets (ie that all employers will or can be persuaded to recruit regular numbers on an annually recurring basis), and ‘Fordist’ mechanisms to control the E&T system (ie funding FE Colleges and private training providers on the basis of enrolling ‘training volumes’ and achieving ‘training completions’). These assumptions about the operation of the labour market and this accountability and funding model is completely at odds with the growth of ELMs and project work in the C&C sector, let alone elsewhere in the economy. Heterarchical principles of governance would involve a shift away from these centrally controlled auditing and funding mechanism. Instead they would require the devolution of budgetry oversight to regional E&T stakeholders and the provision of ring-fenced budgets to support E&T innovation. These conditions would provide E&T stakeholders with the relative autonomy to design bespoke E&T solutions that reflect the needs of the C&C sector at the regional level.

2. Reconceptualising ‘vertical’ (ie education to work) and ”horizontal’ (ie work/unemployment to work) transitions as the development of vocational practice, social capital and moebius strip expertise rather than the acquisition of qualifications.

The recent debate about the role of qualifications and access to the labour market has forgotten that although qualifications are important because they are the long standing way to certify the forms of knowledge and skill students acquired in education, they do not constitute proxy measures for vocational practice, social capital or entrepreneurial ability, despite policymakers and some researchers views to the contrary. Moreover, policymakers have also failed to detect that the growth of ELMs is creating a new type of post-degree vocational need – opportunities for graduates to supplement the forms of knowledge and skill certified by qualifications with opportunities for vocational enculturation and the development of social capital and entrepreneurial ability – an issue that does not currently figure in the post-Leitch E&T agenda.

It has long been recognized that vocational practice, social capital and entrepreneurial expertise cannot be broken down into discrete units of study and taught independent of any contact with workplaces. This is not to suggest that study and simulation cannot provide a grounding and inspiration for learners, rather it is an acknowledgement that vocational practice, social capital and entrepreneurial expertise have to be developed in situ, that is in conditions of work or through the provision of opportunities to gain access to networks and specialist advice, rather than through study or simulation.

Enacting this insight, however, presupposes a further shift in the government’s E&T policy. It requires the introduction of a more multifaceted and differentiated strategy based on an explicit recognition of the different contribution that the following activities play in facilitating access to the C&C sector. They are:

• accreditation activities (ie academic or vocational qualifications)

• industry-recognised activities (ie knowledge and skill acquired from non-accredited activities such as work placements, internships, master classes)
• network activities (ie the development of a personal occupational labour market as the basis of securing contracts and the forms of entrepreneurial expertise to promote oneself in ELMs).

The first step to implement this strategy is for the government to stop predetermining the type of output (ie qualifications), the type of provider (i.e. Colleges of Further Education and accredited training providers) and the funding regime for all aspects of E&T. The second step is to relax the reigns of policy and offer all E&T stakeholders the opportunity brokered bespoke E&T solutions, for example, identifying how to incorporate, what this paper has referred to as access to industry-recognised and networked activities either as integral parts of accredited programmes (see the WAC Case Study) or as part of non-accredited programmes (see the CA and JIIC Case Studies). Because these activities develop vocational practice and social capital in a way that educational programmes in colleges and universities struggle to do so, they need to become a supplement to the national E&T framework of provision rather than a marginal, albeit highly effective, way of supporting transition into the labour market.

3. A shift from conceiving learning as consisting of the accumulation of pre-specified outcomes to seeing it as the development of judgement.

In addition to the UK’s tendency to conceive learning as consisting of the accumulation of pre-specified outcomes, the introduction of the European Qualification Framework (EQF) is resulting in pressure on educational institutions to standardise qualifications throughout Europe through the use of programme specifications and learning outcomes. This development is likely to reaffirm the idea pan-Europe that qualifications constitute a proxy measure for vocational practice and hence access to the C&C sector. This is deeply worrying because, as the case studies presented in the paper demonstrate, the knowledge associated with any field of vocational practice is always broader than any qualification. It requires opportunities for people to ‘conduct inquiries’ rather ‘rehearse procedures’ and, in the process, to develop the forms of judgement that are inimical to practice (Sennett, 2008).

What is required, therefore, is the formulation of a language of description for vocational practice that will offer researchers, policymakers and practitioners a resource to identify the different contributions that accredited, industry-recognised and network activities make to supporting vertical and horizontal transitions into the labour market. The first step towards such a language of description has already been taken (Guile, 2009). It has resulted in the formulation of three concepts of vocational practice. They are the evolutionary (ie the gradual development of a practice through individual and collective agentic activity), laterally-branching (ie the explicit use of professional/vocational field-specific forms of knowledge and skill (ie codified and non-codified) to develop a practice in ways that can be recognised in the field, and envisioning (ie inter-professional activity to envision a new form of practice).

These conceptions offer a way to capture the different modalities of practice and the forms of judgement associated with them. They could be used by E&T stakeholders to (i) identify the forms of working and learning that have to occur outside of educational institutions to facilitate their development; (ii) consider how to build strategic partnerships at the regional level to provide people with access to these forms of working and learning, and (iii) to press the case for the greater recognition for pedagogic activity within national and international E&T policy formation.

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This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

If we are to understand the possible future of personal learning and working environments, we need to examine not only present trends but also the past development of learning and work. In other words, we need to try to understand why we got to where we are today and what have been the main drivers of the development of our present learning and working environments. This introductory section explores some of the main factors behind the emergence of our present learning and working environments

The rise of the schooling system

Education and work environments were not traditionally separated. Prior to the industrial revolution in the UK in the mid 19th century and the subsequent introduction of mass education, for all but a small elite, the community and work were the main localities of learning. Children tended to follow their parents’ occupation, with on-the job learning to acquire occupational competence.

At the same time, in the handicrafts and in a number of other trades, the apprenticeship system, based on the medieval guilds, prevailed, with apprentices following a three or four year period of indenture, before being able to practice as skilled workers.

Although learning and working environments were not separated, it can be argued that at least in the early phase of the Industrial Revolution the level of skills required was limited. Manufacturing depended on the availability of a mass labour force to fuel the factories which resulted in rapid urbanisation. But at the same time there was a growing need for a higher level of education within the workforce (Goody, 1977).

The introduction of compulsory schooling was based on a centrally defined curriculum designed to provide students with the skills and knowledge required for employment in an industrial society. The organization (and often the appearance) of schools was based on that of the factory, with monitors, set work periods, a stream of bells to signal the beginning and end of lessons, etc. (Woodbury, 1991).

In the UK, as in other advanced capitalist countries, there has been an ongoing trend towards raising the school leaving age to deal with perceived needs for higher levels of skills and knowledge within the economy. Despite various programmes to provide more vocational education within the schooling system and the introduction of short periods of work experience, the world of education through schooling and the world of work have remained largely separate.

One major hypothesis to be explored in this paper is the idea that the ‘industrial model’ of schooling is becoming dysfunctional and that personal learning and working environments may converge in the coming decade.

Academic knowledge and vocational skills

It is interesting to note that the divide between learning and working experienced in the rise of schooling systems after the industrial revolution, is also reflected in the earlier post-Renaissance division between academic knowledge (brain work) and vocational skill (hand work) (Rauner, 1998). The use of new technologies may render such distinctions redundant. Indeed, the disciplinary knowledge structure which also evolved from the Renaissance looks increasingly under threat today.

Taylorism and the organization of work

Of course it is not only education structures and institutions which can be traced back to the 19^th century industrial revolution but also forms of work organization. The first industrial revolution was characterized by the development of the factory system of manufacturing, with mass production and a Tayloristic division of labour. In the late 20th century, companies began to adopt new more ‘flexible’ (both internal and external) types of work organisation reflected in new forms of a workforce management strategies, which became known as ‘human resource management’ strategies (Sparrow and Hiltrop, 1994) in response to a decrease in markets for mass-produced goods and a significant increase in demand for more customised goods and the growing globalisation of world trade, According to Nyhan (2001) “These theories of ‘human resource management’ entailed the abandonment of centralized bureaucratic work production strategies (although excluding centralised financial control) according to which everyone had a clearly designed function, suited to an age of sustained mass-production, and the implementation of a new organic workforce model which devolved wider responsibilities (both vertically and horizontally) to employees.” This entailed putting a heavy emphasis on ‘human resource development’ practices such as team building, multi-skilling, work-based learning in order to promote greater degrees of functional flexibility. (OECD, 1999).

Although the term ‘Post-Taylorism’ appeared in management literature, it has been argued that the interest by the management and academic community in these concepts is perhaps more due to their attractive presentation by management gurus rather than solid research evidence (OECD, 1999)

Economic Ideology

At the time of writing, newspapers and other news services are transfixed by the collapse of the world banking system and the slide into global economic recession. The events around the banking collapse have probably signalled the end of the dominant neo-liberal economic ideology of the second half of the 20th century. Neo-liberalism essentially preached the primacy of markets as a mechanism of fostering economic growth and competition, and providing employment. Government intervention should only occur in cases of market failure. The degree to which different countries adopted neo-liberal policies varied. It is notable that in those countries most amenable to free-market liberalism – the USA and the UK – there was a rapid growth in differences in wealth and an increase in working hours.

With the banking crisis and movements towards recession there has been a rapid return to Keynsian economic policies and a seemingly re-found public appetite for regulation, if not nationalization, of key services and industries.

Such changes are important for this paper in a number of respects. Firstly the likelihood of a creeping privatization of education would appear to be unlikely in the foreseeable future. Secondly it is more likely that governments could be persuaded to intervene and to regulate both in economic development and in the organization of work.

Globalisation

Whilst the mantra of globalisation has been invoked by governments and employers to justify all manner of changes in learning and in working, ranging from cuts in pay and employment to the adoption of a common structure for higher level qualifications across Europe, this does not mean that globalization itself is not a very real phenomenon and one which will have an important role in shaping the future of personal learning and working environments. Globalisation refers to the global movements of capital and the associated free movement of manufacturing and services – and hence employment – between different countries and continents. Whilst of course there has been movement of goods and services between countries since the first Industrial Revolution and trading between countries prior to that – today’s economies are increasingly interlocked and interdependent as the present day banking crisis has shown.

A new Industrial Revolution

Unlike a recession, there is no official measure nor indeed definition of what constitutes an industrial revolution. Instead it is a descriptive term used by historians and associated with various phases of economic, technical and social change. I have previously argued that the present period of economic and social development in society should be viewed as a period of industrial revolution (and I have little doubt that it will be by future historians) (Attwell, forthcoming). The industrial revolution is based on the rapid development and deployment of digital technologies, resulting in profound changes in how we learn, how we work and how we live. Whole industries are being created and destroyed; occupations become redundant whilst new occupations are born. The ensuing changes to patterns of employment and of skills demand are leading to large scale population movements.

It is very hard to predict future technology development. So rapid is present development that the seemingly fantastical may become a reality in only a few years. I am sitting writing this at Schipol airport, whilst returning home from a European project meeting in Barcelona. It may well be that in a few years there will be no need for me to physically attend such a meeting, but that instead my avatar will attend to meet with the other avatars of project partners. This paper will focus closely on potential technologies of the future and their possible impact on personal learning and working environments.

Gestalltung (social shaping)

Whilst it may be hard to predict the path of technology emergence, we believe that the implementation and use of technology can be shaped by human agency and that process of what German sociologists call ‘Gestalltung’ or social shaping and the choices in how we choose to use technologies are central to the future of personal learning and working environments.

Of course it is not only technology itself which will shape and in turn be shaped in the future development of personal learning and working environments but also the different economic ideologies and our understanding of the role of institutions in developing knowledge. In this introduction we have tried to look at some of the main influences which have shaped the present configuration of such environments. In the next section we will look at some of the main trends and issues in future development.

2. Work: Integrating personal learning and working environments – main trends and issues

Evidence from a number of European projects would suggest that learning is increasingly being integrated in the work process. However, research in this area can only provide a partial picture of trends.

Within initial vocational education and training in the UK, the move towards competence based qualifications has placed an increased focus on the assessment of authentic work tasks. There is also a trend towards increasing the number of apprenticeship places. In Germany, there have been moves towards integrating the company part of the Dual System of apprenticeship and move training out of training workshops and into the workplace (Grollman and Wittig, 2008). This is both because it is seen as a more effective means of learning and also because it may reduce the cost of apprenticeships through allowing apprentices to undertake more productive work.

Lifelong learning

The European Union and national governments have promoted the idea of lifelong learning. Continued learning is seen as necessary to update skills and knowledge and increase productivity. In some countries, like the UK, this has been linked to a discourse of employability: that individuals are themselves responsible for ensuring they have the competences required for employment by industry. Whilst continuing education and training was traditionally focused on course, seminar and workshop-based programmes, there is some evidence to suggest more learning is now located within the workplace.

In some organizations this is formalised, especially at a team level. In a Romanian cement factory the team leader is responsible for training the team staff and there are regular formal learning sessions in the workplace with individual assessment of workers (Balica, 2007). Other enterprises have established open learning areas to encourage workers to undertake further training and learning (Scottish Office). Some employers have subsidized employee participation in external courses, regardless of subject, in the belief that participation in learning will help in professional development. Many employers have established staff appraisal programmes with regular reviews of personal learning objectives.

It is difficult to assess how wide ranging such initiatives are. A survey of over 100 small and medium enterprises in six European countries found few examples of participation in formal learning – either in or out of the workplace (Attwell, 2007). It may be that sector and occupation are particularly important. For computer programmers continuous updating of knowledge is seen as a requirement. But in low skilled jobs and in workplaces little affected by changing technology, there may be little incentive for learning, either on the part of the worker or the employer. Research also suggests that employers may be reluctant to provide learning opportunities for fear that employees will leave if they achieve higher competences and qualifications and the cost of training is frequently raised as a barrier to the provision of learning opportunities (Attwell, 2003).

Informal learning

One marked trend is towards greater awareness of the potential of informal learning in the workplace and of learning through reflection on practice. This is reflected in a number of different ways. There have been various initiatives to promote accreditation of prior learning although such programmes have met with limited success. However reflection on learning has been incorporated into team meetings and in some – mostly professional occupations such as medicine and teaching – is becoming part of a formal employment requirement. There is also a growing trend towards introducing e-Portfolios as a means of documenting and reflecting on continuing learning – both formal and informal within the workplace (Buchberger, Hilzensauer and Hornung-Prähauser, 2008).

Changing technologies are likely to have a large impact in this area. Firstly, microprocessors are increasingly embedded within machines and tools within the workplace. Such microprocessors can not only provide access to sophisticated documentary information, but will also presumably be context aware and able to provide just in time learning related to work tasks and processes. Secondly mobile devices, including advanced mobile phones, and cheap sub laptop computers provide access to ubiquitous internet-based communication. Google is already probably the world’s number one source of information and learning. In many jobs, the answer to overcoming a problem is to search Google and often there are videos freely available on You Tube providing detailed instructions on how to carry out a particular task.

Communities of Practice and Learning Organisations

If one trend is increasing learning within the workplace and through the work process, another is recourse to informal learning through dispersed communities of practice.

The European study of elearning in SMEs found extensive use of computers in day-to-day business operations and evidence of the extensive use of ICT for informal learning (Attwell, 2007). Most informal learning appeared be learner driven, rather than planned in conjunction with others in the enterprise, and was problem motivated, although some learners were motivated by their own interest rather than in response to any specific problem. In many cases ICT was being used as part of this informal learning. The main means of ICT based learning was Google key word searches. Managers were often unaware of this learning, although they were frequently aware of the problem which inspired it (ibid).

There were considerable differences in the use of ICT for informal learning between different enterprises. It would be tempting to ascribe these differences to age, sector, size or occupation but it is hard to discern such causal factors from the case studies undertaken.

The major causal relationship which appeared was the link between work organisation and the use of ICT for learning. ICT was most frequently used for learning in those enterprises with flatter hierarchies and more devolved decision taking responsibilities and in which employees had greater autonomy in the organisation of their own work. Interestingly, these enterprises also tended to have a more experienced workforce and low turnover of employees (ibid).

Conversely, hierarchical work organisations tended to have the least use of ICT for learning. In some cases only managers and administrative staff in these enterprises had access to computers and the internet. There was no evidence of any organised support or informal learning – either face to face in the workplace or online. However, in some enterprises the learning acquired was discussed with peers as part of everyday collaboration and team work.

Although it could be said that much activity was information seeking the study suggested that activities were:

• Purposeful
• Heavily influenced by context
• Often resulted in changes in behaviour
• Were sequenced in terms of developing a personal knowledge base
• Problem driven or driven by personal interest
• Social – in that they often involved recourse to shared community knowledge bases through the internet and / or shared with others in the workplace.
• Increasing access to internet based technologies are likely to increase such informal learning.

There are important implications of such findings. The study showed learning was more likely to take place in organisations with less hierarchical structures and where workers had more responsibility for their own work. This links to work undertaken by researchers looking at learning organisations. Barry Nyhan (Nyhan et al, 2003) states “one of the keys to promoting learning organisations is to organise work in such a way that it is promotes human development. In other words it is about building workplace environments in which people are motivated to think for themselves so that through their everyday work experiences, they develop new competences and gain new understanding and insights. Thus, people are learning from their work – they are learning as they work.”

He goes on to say: “This entails building organisations in which people have what can be termed ‘developmental work tasks’. These are challenging tasks that ‘compel’ people to stretch their potential and muster up new resources to manage demanding situations. In carrying out ‘developmental work tasks’ people are ‘developing themselves’ and are thus engaged in what can be termed ‘developmental learning’.”

In other words integrating personal learning and working will require both the conscious design of the working environment for learning and the design of developmental tasks. Research tends to suggest this is more likely to take place in organisations with a strong project culture.

Occupational profiles

Whilst occupational profiles have previously tended to be designed from a viewpoint of occupational tasks, it may be that learning potential will be an important future focus. A number of projects in Germany have redesigned broader occupational profiles with both the potential for enhanced work based learning but also increased flexibility to move beyond existing occupational competences to increase productivity and deal with future technology innovation (Rauner, 2007). However there are counter trends towards increased high level specialism in particular occupations.

The role of trainers

There are also profound implications for the role and training of trainers. Whilst ten years ago trainers were a clearly delineated and identifiable occupational group, the European Commission funded TT-Plus project has found that the training function has spread to include many who would not describe themselves as trainers (Attwell, Grollman and Luebke, 2008). This includes managers, team leaders and skilled workers who may have some responsibility for learning and training as part of their job and also learning consultant and ICT based learning designers who may work in conjunction with enterprises. Traditional programmes for training trainers have focused on full time professional trainers. The TTPlus project is calling for ongoing programmes to provide support for continuing professional development, based on peer group learning and accreditation. It is also interesting to note that whilst vocational teachers and trainers have tended to be regarded as undertaking similar work, the move towards greater integration of learning and working may mean the work of trainers is becoming increasingly differentiated from that of teachers.

In terms of role, with increased online learning materials and the move towards more work based learning, trainers are spending less time in classroom based didactic instruction and more time in providing guidance and support for individual learners. Such a change is challenging for some trainers, as is the increased use of technology for learning.

Structuring learning

A further important issue is that of the structuring and content of learning experiences. Structure and content has been traditionally externally defined by experts in the form of curricula or teaching programmes (Cormier, 2008). With a greater integration of learning and working, the learners are structuring their own learning within a work based environment.

There is a question as to how learners are able to incorporate learning within personal knowledge frameworks or structures. Because learning is motivated by problem solving or personal interest, it is far more closely related to practice than the education acquired through formal courses and is often episodic. The immediate context of applying the learning may be an aid to incorporating and scaffolding new learning within a personal knowledge schema. On the other hand the learning acquired is not sequenced in the same way as learning acquired from formal education and training.

From curricula to personal learning pathways

One way to view such tendencies is a move away from formal curriculum as related to its Latin origins and meaning as a race along a predefined course toward the original meaning of the word learning as a pathway (Attwell and Hughes, 2008).

Thus learning and working become integrated not through a formal course based structure but through the development of individual learning pathways. This change is reflected in recent thinking amongst researchers in e-learning.

Personal Learning Environments (PLEs)

Socio-cultural theories of knowledge acquisition stress the importance of collaborative learning and ‘learning communities’ but Agostini et al (2003) complain about the lack of support offered by many virtual learning environments (VLEs) for emerging communities of interest and the need to link with official organisational structures within which individuals are working. Ideally, VLEs should link knowledge assets with people, communities and informal knowledge (Agostini et al, 2003) and support the development of social networks for learning (Fischer, 1995). The idea of a personal learning space is taken further by Razavi and Iverson (2006) who suggest integrating weblogs, ePortfolios, and social networking functionality in this environment both for enhanced e-learning and knowledge management, and for developing communities of practice.

Based on these ideas of collaborative learning and social networks within communities of practice, the notion of PLEs is being put forward as a new approach to the development of e-learning tools (Wilson et al, 2006) that are no longer focused on integrated learning platforms such as VLEs. In contrast, these PLEs are made-up of a collection of loosely coupled tools, including Web 2.0 technologies, used for working, learning, reflection and collaboration with others. PLEs can be seen as the spaces in which people interact and communicate and whose ultimate result is learning and the development of collective know-how. A PLE can use social software for informal learning which is learner driven, problem-based and motivated by interest – not as a process triggered by a single learning provider, but as a continuing activity. The ‘Learning in Process’ project (Schmidt, 2005) and the APOSDLE project (Lindstaedt, and Mayer, 2006) have attempted to develop embedded, or work-integrated, learning support where learning opportunities (learning objects, documents, checklists and also colleagues) are recommended based on a virtual understanding of the learner’s context.

However, while these development activities acknowledge the importance of collaboration, community engagement and of embedding learning into working and living processes, they have not so far addressed the linkage of individual learning processes and the further development of both individual and collective understanding as the knowledge and learning processes mature (Attwell, Barnes, Bimrose and Brown, 2008). In order to achieve that transition (to what we term a ‘community of innovation’), processes of reflection and formative assessment have a critical role to play.

Personal Learning Environments are by definition individual. However it is possible to provide tools and services to support individuals in developing their own environment. In looking at the needs of careers guidance advisors for learning, Attwell, Barnes, Bimrose and Brown (2008) say a PLE should be based on a set of tools to allow personal access to resources from multiple sources, and to support knowledge creation and communication. Based on an initial scoping of knowledge development needs, an initial list of possible functions for a PLE have been suggested, including: access/search for information and knowledge, aggregate and scaffold by combining information and knowledge, manipulate, rearrange and repurpose knowledge artefacts, analyse information to develop knowledge, reflect, question, challenge, seek clarification, form and defend opinions, present ideas, learning and knowledge in different ways and for different purposes, represent the underpinning knowledge structures of different artefacts and support the dynamic re-rendering of such structures, share by supporting individuals in their learning and knowledge, networking by creating a collaborative learning environment.

Whilst PLEs may be represented as technology, including applications and services, more important is the idea of supporting individual and group based learning in multiple contexts and of promoting learner autonomy and control.

Personal Learning Environments offer both the framework and the technologies to integrate personal learning and working.

Digital Mobile devices

The latest technological advancements as well as the progressive reduction in the cost of digital media are having a profound impact on different sectors of society. Even though more and cheaper possibilities of connectivity (the wider access to broadband and wireless) is an important factor, it is the micro technologies and mobile possibilities currently available that are likely to have a major impact on society. It is also influencing the way employers conduct their business and the new demands of employability. As physical mobility is growing more common, so the adoption of mobile connectivity is progressively developing. A new platform for learning is hence taking shape. The recent inclusion of internet connectivity in mobile devices, as well as the wider availability of WiFi in public areas is proving to be effective and influential in the way people communicate and spontaneously broadcast themselves in various formats (from pictures, to text or video). A new culture of multilateral sharing and learning is evolving this way. The development of sophisticated handheld and portable communication tools and their direct link to the connected world make us believe this is an emerging approach for learning and working and for life in general, which will complement other approaches already in place.

Most personal technology and artifacts are mobile, or have been reduced to a size and weight which can be carried. These days, phones can carry more information than any stack of paper or book individuals used to carry in their business cases. The new smart phones not only accommodate digital files, they also enable the creation, storage and reproduction of photos, sound and video files, not to mention their immediate publishing features.

All of this is already having an impact on how individuals are enabled in representing their learning almost as it happens. Most learning is accidental and occurs often unexpectedly. The new mobile devices are providing a rich platform that will help individuals bridge their presence between different learning contexts and thus provide them with the flexibility and the opportunities to focus on their personal learning environment in a meaningful, personalized and immediate way.

The location of work

Thus far we have focused on integrating learning and working within the work process. But there are a number of further trends which should be considered. The first is home working. New technologies allow dispersed collaborative work for many tasks and there would seem little doubt that home based work is increasing, as is a mixture of home based work with periodic attendance at the workplace. Environmental concerns and the increasing shortage of oil would seem likely to add pressure for this trend to continue. Certainly video conferencing is already replacing many meetings which would have formerly been conducted face to face.

However, once more, there are caveats. Home based work seems to be largely concentrated on a limited number of professional occupations such as media workers, consultants, researchers, designers etc. In many occupations the nature of the work still requires presence at a particular workplace – for instance in construction and craft work or in manufacturing. But, even here work may become dispersed. Advanced diagnostic interfaces and computer based control systems can allow management of advanced systems and processes at a distance. Such a development is likely to lead to more dispersed communities of practice for learning, rather than learning being acquired through enterprises or physical organisations. There also remains the issue of the social nature of work. Home based work can lead to social isolation. Whether the (geographical) community or the family can substitute for work communities is an issue which could repay more research. It is also interesting to speculate on how dispersed teams may function in practice. Evidence from European projects bringing partners together from six or seven countries and only meeting face to face occasionally, suggests this is not unproblematic!

Motivation and the ideology of learning and work

In this section of the paper we have postulated a growing together or integration of work and learning. This has profound ideological implications. Whilst it is possible to measure output on a production line and to reward workers accordingly, the measurement of learning is far more problematic. The integration of learning and work requires motivation. Common sense would suggest extrinsic motivation will be of limited value in encouraging learning through work. Indeed in those occupations with the highest level of integration at present, anecdotal evidence suggests high levels of intrinsic motivation. This in turn suggests that work will have to be both stimulating and rewarding. It also suggests a high degree of autonomy in undertaking work and a personal identification with work. In this regard, the findings of the ICT and SME project are interesting in that they suggest the main motivation for learning was personal interest (Attwell, 2007). Encouraging personal interest could be critical to integration of work and learning and might lead to higher levels of innovation and productivity. However learning takes time, even when integrated into work systems, and managers may see such time as non-productive in meeting immediate work targets and maximizing productivity. To that extent, the answers may be more about the ideology of how we choose to organize work within society than a technical or economically rationalist development. Some countries, such as France, have introduced regulation to provide greater learning opportunities at work.

3. Work: Integrating personal learning and working environments – future discontinuities

Whilst the previous section has proposed a relatively optimistic scenario for the integration of personal learning and working environments there are a number of discontinuities which may counter the trends described previously or which may impact in different areas of society.

Globalisation and human resource development

Globalisation has seen the creation of an increasingly open world employment market. Aided by technology, many jobs can now be moved from one country to another. Telephone call centres may be located on a different continent than the customers they are advising. If there is no regulation, jobs may become increasingly precarious with workers competing for employment. Whilst skills and knowledge may be one factor in encouraging inward investment, often it would appear employment is merely located to the lowest cost location. Given that salaries are a considerable part of cost, then this means to the lowest wage economy and that with most limited workers rights. It is hard to see how learning can be integrated with working in such a situation. Governments and regional authorities are more concerned to ensure the existence of a pre-trained workforce to encourage investment in employment than they are to work with companies to develop work based learning opportunities. In this situation, employers can off-load the cost of training and learning to the state.

Regulation offers one way out of this and the recent banking crisis has revealed the problems of an unfettered market economy. Of course, some companies do take learning seriously, both as an issue of social ethics but also because they believe a stable and well trained workforce will result in better profitability. However, other companies have adopted ‘human resource management’ policies determined by the situational context in the external market environment (Nyhan, 2003). This entails adapting human resource policies to fit in with the corporate business strategy. Companies ‘up-skill’ or ‘down-skill’ as the market demands. Brought to its logical conclusion, human resources are a contingent, instrumental factor with no inherent value in their own right. Accordingly ‘human resource development’ as a distinct activity may or may not be a part of the ‘human resource management’ policy, but based on the principle of ‘external flexibility’, human resource stocks can be renewed more effectively through a process of short-term ‘project-based’ recruitment, outsourcing products and services, downsizing staff etc. (ibid). The concept of ‘business process engineering’ (see Hammer and Champy, 1993), entailing an over-night reshaping of one’s organisation with an emphasis on cost-cutting and downsizing the number of employees, offers a way of implementing this form of ‘human resource management’. Such a policy is essentially a continuation of Taylorism in a neo liberal form. Once more there would seem to be little space for integrating personal learning and working environments when access to learning opportunities is strictly limited according to cost.

Thus there is a discontinuity between the idea of integrating personal learning and working environments and the business strategies of many companies, a discontinuity which is fuelled by present policies and trends towards globalisation.

How we learn and the schooling system

A series of reports have shown how young people use computers not just for consuming information but for creating and sharing knowledge (Lenhart and Madden, 2005). Such a development has been facilitated by the emergence of Web 2.0 or more precisely by social software. Whilst platforms may change as one social networking site goes out of fashion and another emerges, there seems little doubt that social networking in one form or another is here to stay.

It is difficult to make a call on future technologies. Semantic web applications may make information search and retrieval simpler and the development of Multi User Virtual Environments may make learning more of an immersive experience. However, the major change is that learners have become practitioners.

Such developments pose a serious challenge to the future of our education and training systems. Institutions (and teachers) no longer have a monopoly on learning. Knowledge and learning can come from many different sources – from media providers, from enterprises and from peer networks. Whilst traditionally knowledge has been produced by experts, the use of the internet is providing a flourishing of community based knowledge (Cormier, 2008). Wikipedia, developed by a community of users, has become one of the most consulted (White, 2007) (and best loved) sources of knowledge. Curricula have also been developed by an experts. With such a move to community knowledge development, it seems likely that curriculum too may become an emergent property of communities (Cormier, 2008) rather than of the expert driven schooling system,

With the availability of multiple knowledge sources, and the way young people are using computers for learning, school or a schooling system looks increasingly dysfunctional (Attwell, forthcoming). Whilst primary schools may serve a purpose in providing a social environment and allowing development of literacy and numeracy, the aim of secondary schooling is becoming hard to fathom, with most countries implementing rapid reform programmes. Indeed, the reaction of schools to social software has at best been ambiguous and often hostile (ibid). Despite the fact that many young people carry around a powerful multimedia-enabled miniature computer, in the form of a mobile phone, which they use regularly for information and knowledge exchange, most schools insist such devices are turned off! Many young people shun the walled garden of institutional Virtual Learning Environments, designed primarily for managing learning, and prefer to share their knowledge with peers though social networking environments such as Facebook. Even at a professional level the social network based Linked In site is increasingly the place for sharing of business and professional contacts. It has been suggested by some commentators that the future role of the universities, apart from research, is as accreditation bodies, with a limited role for teaching and learning (Wiley, 2008).

Once more, there are different possibilities. Whilst for some time the privatization of education has seemed possible, the recent banking crisis and loss of confidence in market solutions makes this much less likely. There is renewed interest in Ivan Illich’s (2007) call for deschooling society with learning being integrated in society and the community and an abandonment of a separate institutionalized education system. Interestingly, Illich, writing in an age before Personal Computers, envisaged a postcard and database system to link and network peer group learners.

Others have called for reschooling of society with education and schooling being extended beyond its present limited target groups (Trevitte and Eskow, 2007).

If learning and working are to be integrated it is hard to see how this can happen with our present organization of institutionalized education.

Up-skilling, down-skilling and learning rich working environments

In this paper we have looked at the potential of technology and computers for learning. Some commentators, for instance Andrew Keen (2007), have an opposite view seeing computers as “dumbing down society”. Whilst this may be an extreme view, there is not an inevitability that advanced technology will lead to knowledge rich and learning rich jobs.

Whilst the use of technology may led to more complex work processes and more knowledge rich work, automation can also led to deskilling. With fast changing technologies and employment, it is hard to have an overview of present trends. Governments talk of the knowledge society and the need for higher levels of skills and knowledge. Whether this is actually happening is another question.

Technology has been widely used to replace jobs in some sectors. The first wave of technology replacement was in manufacturing – for instance with the use of robots in car manufacturing followed by a second wave in administration, eg in the banking industry.

It may be that there are choices to be made in how we shape technology. Some commentators have suggested different patterns of technology development and implementation between countries and continents. Studies of computerized interfaces for machine tools, suggest that whilst in Germany interfaces were developed to provide more control and autonomy for skilled workers, in the USA interfaces and control systems were developed to automate processes and remove operator autonomy (Ito and Ruth, 1998).

Whilst Artificial Intelligence remains a dream, robots are increasingly able to perform complex tasks. How we choose to use and deploy such robots is another issue which requires urgent attention.

There is also an intriguing question which was raised in an interview undertaken for this paper. With increasing access to context relevant and just in time documentation, do we need to know so much? Instead of developing learning will we instead just rely on documents or artefacts to tell us what to do?

The idea of integrating personal learning and working environments is largely predicated on the provision of learning rich working environments. If society chooses to use technology to downskill jobs then this would become a major discontinuity.

Inequalities

The integration of personal learning and working is also predicated on access to resources. However, whilst technology has advanced over the past twenty years, so too has inequality with widening gaps in income, not just between the richer and poorer countries in the world, but also within countries (Jaumotte, Lall, Papageorgiou and Topalova, 2007).

Such inequalities are not limited to income but also include inequalities of status, inequalities in access to technology and inequalities in access to knowledge based work.

Research into access to continuing education and training has long suggested those most qualified were gaining more resources than those less qualified. Equally those in higher paid and higher status employment such as managers were much more likely to gain access to further e-learning opportunities (Attwell, 2003).

Despite a suggestion that younger workers more comfortable with computer technologies would be those most likely to use ICT technologies of informal learning, the ICT and SME project found this not to be the case (Attwell, 2007). It was most likely to be older, better qualified, more experienced and more senior employees who would interact with peer groups and communities of practice through the internet. This appeared to be because they had more autonomy in their work and tended to be in more knowledge-rich and learning-rich jobs. So, even at the level of informal learning and internet based learning inequalities are being perpetuated.

Whilst the digital divide remains a discourse at an academic and political level, there appear to be few real initiatives to overcome it. Indeed, it is doubtful whether the digital divide can be overcome on its own, without actions to address the more fundamental inequalities in society. Whilst access to learning may be postulated as a way of overcoming inequalities, those very inequalities may prevent such a development. Without action to tackle inequalities, integrating learning and working may only be available to the ‘haves’ in society and be denied to the ‘have nots’.

4. Work: Integrating personal learning and working environments – Uncertainties and tensions

Over the years learning has been confused with the outcomes of formal, institutionalized teaching and training (Illch, 1970). However, research (Cross, 2006) suggests most learning happens accidentally, and most frequently in informal scenarios, often through work and leisure activities. Many individuals acknowledge that ‘reality learning’ begins when they start their working life. However, national educational bodies have paid only limited attention to informal learning. National curricula all around Europe have been targeted with numerous reforms, in an effort to promote the prestige of schooling. Nevertheless, the key issue that would potentially develop an autonomous knowledge-based society is lacking – the curricular freedom to meet learners’ needs. School, in its role of educating or training, has always reserved for itself the activity of regulating, standardizing, restraining or keeping knowledge within limited boundaries prescribed by a curriculum often out of focus with the current reality.

Even though in the last decade efforts has been made to foster curricular innovation, especially through the introduction of ICT, it is our belief that this will not succeed with the mere introduction of new technologies inside the classroom. A classroom will always be the territory of the teacher, not of the learner, and therefore will never help foster personal learning in a continuous effort, let alone combining it with a work environment. A new learning, not teaching, policy, requires not the re-adaptation, but rather the design of a brand-new curriculum, where teachers’ roles and their preparation are newly defined, and new learning spaces are also provided. It is curious to notice that as it stands now, school is mainly thought of as for teachers and is not targeted at their main and exclusive costumer: the learners, and their needs. This per se is the antithesis of what happens in the ‘real world’.

Today’s learning needs are more than ever directly related to metacognition skills, even if learners do not realize it. In the changing world we live in, schools which are still attempting to teach their audience as a way of preparing them for the future will fail their main goal. On the other hand, those who focus on granting their learners the skills and the know-how they need to keep up in their field and re-orientate their practice to suit the competences required in an unpredictable tomorrow will have a greater chance to succeed.

For this change to happen, however, institutions will have to establish close cooperative relationships with the world that they have until now tried to distance themselves from, and which is still regarded by learners as an ‘outsider’. The work sectors and daily life activity, in general, need to be embedded in the learning process from the very beginning of the teenager/adult learning process. This will, of course, imply a major change for the role of the individual as an active learner, who is directly involved with the outcomes and process of their knowing, as opposed to a passive responsibility as a knowledge receptor. This also implies a shift in the activity of educators from knowledge prescribers to knowing advisors, from teachers to mentors, from owners of the ‘truth’ to co-workers and co-learners. In this sense, training and education will be combined into something more meaningful to the individual: integrated personal learning based on the reality of experience.

Reality Learning

As noted by Buckley and Caple (2004), training is a “planned and systematic effort to modify and develop knowledge/skill/attitude through learning experience”, whereas education is the “process and a series of activities which aim at enabling an individual to assimilate and develop knowledge, skills, values and understanding that are not simply related to a narrow field of activity but allow a broad range of problems to be defined, analyzed and solved.”

Both definitions in a way support the distinction we attempted to start portraying above, training associated with practice and education with a more theoretical understanding of a broader reality. Nonetheless, it is our understanding that the preparation of the individual for a constantly changing society needs to approach their training and education as an integrated unity where practice and theory, work and school are combined as an integral personalized unit. And the same above cited authors provide an answer with their understanding of learning which, in their views, consists of a “process whereby individuals acquire knowledge, skills, attitudes through experience, reflection, study and instruction”. In other words, today’s professional world cannot divide the two pillars of improvement and innovation based on practice and the individuals’ constant reflective observation of a society in progressive transformation and redefinition of its demands. In this sense, the future of tomorrow is hard to guess, but the future of today can hardly be ignored. It relies more and more on the individual perception and consequent willingness to pursue further development, as at the same time it urges education and practice to be integrated. It also implies a new culture of active and autonomous collective learning to be encouraged, valued and recognized, in and outside the workplace.

In a way it implies revisiting Schneider’s proposal of cooperative learning with the idea of not alternating institutional education with glimpses of real life, but embedding both as unseparated constituents of an ongoing, real and situated learning reality based on performance, exchange of practices and reflection on that same activity.

This will mean a massive change in schools and the change from a teaching to a learning curriculum (Lave and Wenger, 1991) based on situated learning contexts offered by the placement of the individual in relevant working scenarios and learning opportunities. Such provision will necessarily also imply the establishment of cooperative relationships and strong collaborative involvement of staff from both schools and real life sectors.

In this sense the latest advancements of technology, with an emphasis on social software and web applications, are already making a difference in how individuals learn and pursue further development in their areas of interest. When embedded in a new strategy where theory and work are bound with experience-based learning, the communication and information technologies will help enhance environments where the exchange of practice, communication of experiences and weaving of new ideas can take place.

Furthermore, it will eventually also promote the ongoing construction of one’s digital professional profile, where the individuals learning activity and reflective outcomes will come together in a personalized space.

Access, data ownership and privacy

However the issue of formal schooling is not the only tension. Whilst technologies can facilitate and support the development of personal learning and working environments, these in turn require the freedom for individuals to develop networks and share ideas and knowledge. Many employers limit access to the internet to approved sites and are hostile to social networking which is seen both as time wasting and a potential risk for company data.

Furthermore there remain major issues over privacy and data ownership. A Personal Learning Environment implies personal ownership of data. Will employers allow this and how can we ensure personal data is secure. Where will data be stored and how can we ensure longevity of personal data? What is the relation between a Personal Learning Environment and an organizational learning environment? What data should be shared and who takes decisions and responsibility for this? And if we have ubiquitous connectivity and multiple mobile devices meaning we are all on line most of the time, how can we preserve personal privacy? What level of privacy should we have? Geospatial and contextually aware technologies can be used for monitoring activities as well as for learning. These are important societal issues. There would seem to be some differences in terms of national and cultural attitudes. But without a public and a resolution of these issues, there may be a backlash against the use of new technologies for learning and working.

Open knowledge, knowledge sharing and copyright

If personal privacy is one issue, a second is that of knowledge ownership. Recent years have seen a growing move by universities to make knowledge openly available through the development of open knowledge initiatives. This has extended to journals. The widespread use of the Creative Commons licenses has also made reuse of learning materials easier. Despite this movement, the use of restrictive copyright regulations has been extended, particularly in the USA. In Europe, the European Commission has repeatedly attempted to extend copyright to include software. Furthermore, universities are under pressure to develop new sources of income and may see the outcomes of teaching and research as a potential source to be exploited. The idea of personal learning and working environments is largely predicated on open knowledge sharing. Prohibitive copyright regulations and the development of a ‘knowledge market’ would make difficult the realization of this idea.

How we use technologies

Changes in pedagogy and approaches to learning will allow us to bring personal Learning Environments and Personal working environments together. But this is also dependent on how we value and organise work. Learning-rich working environments require conscious design. They also require opportunities for individuals to shape the work environment for their learning and the potential for taking decisions over the organisation of their work. Once more, technology may offer many possibilities both at an individual level and at a cooperative level. However, technology can also be used in different ways, to reduce choice and flexibility in work, to automate processes and limit decision making, and thus reduce learning opportunities.

Key issues for the future and initial reflections on the implications for education

Scenarios for the future of work and learning are dependent on wider issues than those included in this paper. But it’s possible to present a series of possible futures, the resolution of which will determine how future personal learning and working environments evolve. These different statements for the future are not discrete and may overlap.

Possible Futures

1. The schooling system embraces pedagogic and technological change. Instead of the present massification of education, learners are encouraged and supported in developing personal learning pathways, supported by Personal Learning Environment toolkits. Informal learning is valued and the PLE brings together learning for formal learning programmes, from the home and from work.

2. The schooling system continues to be the subject of reform but fails to recognise the new ways individuals are using technology for learning. Formal education and informal learning become ever more separate. Whilst the education system is based on formal qualifications, employers increasingly look for evidence of what a potential employee can do. Learners develop their own e-Portfolio. As the education system becomes fragmented, learners increasingly turn to private online education and training providers.

3. A new model of open education emerges. Schools retain a role as accreditation providers, but learners develop their own learning pathways based on open online learning programmes. Trainers and developers are paid from accreditation fees by institutions.

4. As the education system fails to cope with changing society, new forms of education evolve based on learning in the community, both face to face and online. Learning is ever more embedded within community and work structures and systems, and schools become community learning resource centres. Society is effectively deschooled.

5. The growing scarcity of employment, linked to increasing regulation, means that formal qualifications become the only accepted way to gain employment. Schools retain a monopoly on the provision of education leading to qualifications. There is a growing divide between those with formal qualifications and those without.

6. Technology to support learning is embedded in the workplace. Employers increasingly see the importance of learning for innovation and seek to develop learning rich work environments. Learning and working become part of the same process.

7. Privacy of data becomes a major issue. Workers increasingly refuse to participate in processes where they are forced to reveal personal data. Learning becomes a private activity to be undertaken in the home or with trusted friends.

8. Copyright laws are progressively extended. Technology is used to produce an online knowledge auction house. Whilst a minority benefit financially by selling their learning, knowledge becomes a scare commodity and cannot be accessed by many.

9. Open knowledge sharing models are increasingly adopted. There is widespread open sharing of artefacts and resources. Educational resources are abundant and cooperation and knowledge sharing leads to a rapid growth of small knowledge based enterprises.

10. Informal communities of practice, based on social networking technology, become acknowledged as the major source of learning. Such networks embrace both the education systems and the workplace leading with seamless movements between working and learning.

11. Technology is used widely to replace employment with computerisation of processes and the increasing deployment of intelligent robots. Work becomes scarce. Whilst a small minority of workers require high skills to programme and develop robots, most employment is in those occupations where low wages and therefore cost of human labour inhibits the use of machines.

12. There is a growing political discourse over the purpose of work and who controls organisations. Work becomes seen as a social process, with workers’ control leading to the design of work environments from a humanistic viewpoint with rich learning opportunities.

We could continue this list almost endlessly. To us, some seem more desirable than others. Technology is a powerful driver of change. But ultimately the issue is how we shape technology and for what purpose we wish to use the different affordances of technology processes.

The ICT and SME project (Attwell, 2007) looked at workplaces where technology was being used for learning. It found that learning was more likely to take place in enterprises:

• Where employees had greatest freedom in the organisation of their work
• Where employees had the greatest opportunities for proposing and implementing changes in the way work was organised
• Where the nature and technologies being used were changing fastest
• Where ICT was most involved in the work process
• Where employees had most responsibility for the outcomes of their work
• Where team work was most important
• Where employees were integrated in communities of practice
• Where employees had opportunities to develop their own occupational profiles
• With networks with other enterprises

It was precisely in those organisations where workers had the most opportunity to co-shape their working environment that learning took place. It is highly likely that such factors will continue to determine the future development of personal learning and working environments.

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This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

Whilst the flaws, ideas and arguments of this piece are my responsibility, I want to thank a number of people and institutions who I interviewed or spoke with as part of the process. They include: Rajinder Sanghera (Atkins), Doug Brown, Vanessa Pittard, Theo Wright (BECTA), Dominic Flitcroft (DCSF), Michael Simmons (English and Media Centre), Richard Sandford (Futurelab), Dr. Neil Selwyn (Institute of Education), Intellect, Helen Beetham (JISC) Richard Hadfield (Logica), Ed Tranham (Meissa), Phil Hemmings (RM) and Geoff Stead (Tribal).

1. Introduction

The aim of this essay is to explore the relationship between the IT industries and the education system with a view to understanding how the mix of private sector interests and public provision might influence one another in the future. The IT industries here are understood to mean the full gamut of digital technology providers from national and global multinationals to one person businesses and teacher curriculum development. Included also are models of open source and open content digital technology production and the wider range of allied infrastructure and maintenance services associated with the development, usage and implementation of IT in Education. The same breadth of definition has been applied to the education system. Here it applies to the three main age-delimited arenas of institutionalised learning: statuary provision of school-aged children and young people, in practice, primary and secondary schools (pre-schooling has been considered but as will be seen in section 3 does not currently constitute a significant market); Further Education (FE) and workplace training; and higher education (HE). Although the essay touches on questions of edutainment and lifelong learning broader notions of education as learning (CERI 2008) are mainly considered here in the sense of state-supported institutional provision.

The essay is divided into five sections. Section 2 lays out the terrain and considers the issues involved in looking at the role of markets in state education. It theorises the relationships between and across education sectors and raises questions about values. Section 3 is more descriptive and draws the shape and structure of the IT marketplace in education. It looks at current and immediate (3 year) trends. Section 4 examines market drivers and looks at the implied teacher/lecturer models of technological control versus aspirations for technological transformation, issues of supply and demand, tensions created by the relationship of capital versus revenue funding, and considers questions of market failure, key policy drivers and some of the issues relating to the differences between the development of open source and commercial growth. Section 5 explores questions for policy offering four kinds of levers for change. These include evaluations of, and responses to, change models, the role of the techno-elite, and questions of market growth, failure and normalisation. A concluding section lays out possible directions for future scenarios.

1.1 Method and Approach

This is obviously an enormous and challenging topic. Whilst the theoretical questions of political economy and some of the economic concepts are not original and grounded in academic enquiry, there is a paucity of current empirical and sociological research in this area. I have drawn on policy documents, ‘grey’ literature, and confidential market information. Interviews with key actors across the IT and education markets have been enormously helpful although some informants have asked for comments to be unattributed. There is often a problem of determining factual accounts of arenas where commercial interests often obscure financial matters. Some of the issues here are currently ‘political’, both in terms of ideology (in respect of the function of markets) and in relation to ongoing decisions – especially Building Schools of the Future, BSF, which at £45Bn. is crucial to a wide range of public expenditure issues, let alone the IT and education markets. The key challenge has been to draw on theory which will lay out structural relationships in a way that is productive for consideration of understanding futures. Here I have drawn on Monahan’s (2005) US based study of the interrelationships between education system level, school, district, region and nation state as well as his focus on globalisation as a way of avoiding a polarity between private and public interests. Selwyn’s (2008) delineation of different ways of theorising the technological and the social shaping of technological use has been helpful in thinking about technology and change – which on one level is what is at stake in this essay.

2. Key Themes

This introductory section aims to establish an understanding about the key frames with which we might approach this topic.

2.1 Markets and the Private Sector.

There is still considerable uncertainty about the role of the private sector in education. One of the most extensive analyses of the significance of the changing role of private sector interests by Stephen Ball describes markets as one component of a series of structural changes in the contemporary education system and explores them in concert with managerialism and performativity as tripartite levers in the process of structural reform as the whole state undergoes deep change (Ball, 2007). We shall return to this macro-social perspective in Section 5. Ball also draws attention to the questions of discourse and rhetoric and the ways in which a new language of description and understanding about profitability, impact and efficiency has entered debates about the public sector in general including a long-standing institution like that of education. Whilst the state does not directly manufacture or provide IT (excepting how employees in schools and universities might create software or teaching materials), private companies are going to have a role in education but the extent to which marketisation remains an optimum or necessary process for this, is, as Ball would contend, significantly a question of definition, given how the language of privatisation has percolated into how we now frame state services and responsibilities.

There are ways in which, because of the state, education does not function as a pure market and although there are a number of distributed actors (eg schools, teachers, etc) state money drives the process as does national policy. Questions about who creates demand are key here, as is how the state functions in respect of its protective, permissive and regulatory role. Similarly, profit is clearly not the only motive for private interests, given the low margins in some cases; and notions of public good come into the equation.

On the whole concern about the transparency of market operations, the role and purpose of the profit motive and the possible conflicts between competing definitions of ‘educational good,’ even what constitutes meaningful and valid learning, are at the heart of discussion about the role of private companies in the IT education marketplace.

An important exemplar of these tensions is the role and purpose of the British Education Communication, Technology Agency (BECTA) within the idea of an IT education marketplace. Is BECTA a regulator (in the conventional sense) given that it has a remit to accredit suppliers as part of its role? On the other hand, it also has a key advocacy ‘cheerleading’ function and additionally produces the evidence base on which a wide range of policy is developed and implemented. BECTA is also, as we shall see in Section 3, a hidden cost in the market, given that its c£37M pa expenditure is both part of the IT market but also not. Whether and in what ways BECTA has a future is indicative of the nature of what is meant by private and public interests working in IT in the education system.

2.2 Technology, Education and Learning.

Although the focus on this review is on the political economy of IT and education, the purpose of the essay is to speculate on the ways the IT market might influence (or be influenced by) the future education system and we thus need to consider at least some broad principles of the technology itself. In essence there seem to be two kinds of roles ascribed to IT, both with discrete but important rhetorical effects. The first suggests that the fundamental role of digital technologies is to afford standardisation and massification across large datasets. It suggests that the manipulation of information about pupils (and their learning), schools, local authorities and the state is a question of integrating common technical standards. From that perspective, economies of scale offer unprecedented levels of integrated bureaucratic control. This ‘governmental’ function is thus the logic of large scale investment in digital technologies in the education system. On the other hand, there is a long history of activist inventiveness which stresses how digital technologies offer opportunities for individual progression and this approach with its attention to ‘learning’ stresses the ‘transformative’ (empowering) effect of IT in Education. Here the goal of individualised (personalised) learning routes is made possible though technological affordances (Green, Facer, Rudd, Dillon and Humphreys, 2006). In practice, real world change combines both of these perspectives and neither model could be said to exist in isolation in any meaningful degree, however much we can see glimpses of both approaches in current developments. More pertinently here, each trend is itself complicit in a different business model and needs different kinds of actors – the transformative model, to date, has relied on a cadre of teacher software developers, the governmental approach on Whitehall centralisation. We shall return to these distinctions as we see how the IT market works in practice but the interrelationship of social actors driving each model underpins the future scenarios in Section 6.

2.3 Patterns, Market Trends and Education Sectors

The brief for this essay is to examine the education system as a whole. In practice there appear to be three main and distinct sub-sectors in relation to ICT – though who is the constituent of whose market (education or IT) it is difficult to say. Statutory requirements to educate mean that schools (incorporating pre, special and all modes of school governance) constitute one type of market. Split in market terms between primary and secondary, schools may work in clusters and/or in concert with local authority control but are obliged to follow a range of centrally determined procedures. This leads to a strange economically irrational mix of fragmentation in the market (each school controls its own budget) coupled with conformity. The workforce is, of course, small in each institution, reducing opportunities for school based innovation and development. By contrast the higher education market is characterised by fewer larger institutions, many of which have a highly skilled IT workforce. Additionally universities contract directly with learners and have a curriculum and assessment authority. This is not the case with schools: Gene Glass quotes Kenneth Boudling’s work from 1972 arguing that of course parents (and other adult tax payers) are only the proxy consumers of schooling (Glass, 2008, pp148-9). These differences in market models are important because many people suggest that there is trickle-down effect, that what happens in higher education will happen in schools. (A good example here might be the development of modular, pay at point of assessment courses explored by the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities). This assumption, that the two markets follow similar principles, is problematic and indeed we need to consider how scaling and mainstreaming work in both sectors. The role of an avant garde workforce is important here: see 4.2 below. It has also been suggested that as forms of behaviour (for example how to work independently) inculcated by schooling are brought into HE as students go through life, that that there is equally a trickle-up effect.

Whilst FE colleges are, in institutional terms, operationally distinct they follow features of both the schools and higher education marketplace. The skills, employability and work-training sector may be delivered locally but is very much led by Central government policy (see Section 3 below).

2.4 Values, Ethics and Public Interest

At stake in much of the discussion around the role of private companies in the education marketplace are a deeply contested series of values. Claims for increasing efficiency are offset by concerns about loss of personal contact and attention. On the other hand, personalised learning and data management is set against standardisation. Older concerns about the role of humans within technological futures (as seen in debates about the merits of e-assessments vs professional judgement) mix with anxiety of the purpose of profit as a mechanism for improving standards. There are additionally concerns about the integrity of the market. Are there monopoly providers (or at least forms of oligopolic control), proper and due regulation or is the State a clumsy and ill equipped player here? Frequently expressed concerns about a ‘Microsoft’ monopoly are countered with ‘realistic’ arguments that this is the environment that young people will need to know as they go through life. What notions of public good underpin commercial enterprise and how is this different or the same as broader debates about public broadcasting or even shared culture and the Arts? These are not questions to which there are answers but they thread our discussion here in explicitly political ways. Managing public assent over values is a key part of what it means to develop technology futures in education and are crucial to the checks and balances that underpin the mechanisms of entry and opportunity for IT companies in the education marketplace.

3. The Shape and Structure of the IT Education Market

It is actually difficult to describe the IT education market. There is no consistent overview because the field of IT is so much part of other ways of describing the education sector. This lack of oversight may contribute to anxieties about the perceived role of the private sector. Additionally IT is, of course, only part of other private sector involvement in education. This section, drawing mainly on reports produced by industry intelligence (The Assignment Report, Kable, BESA) and verified by informants, offers an attempt to capture the breakdown of sub-markets and current trends.

3.1 The Structure of the IT Market

Current estimates place the value of IT in Education as worth around £2.5bn pa with roughly 45% being spent on Schools, 16% on FE and the rest on HE. Some companies estimate the Schools market is worth around £1bn and roughly breaks down into around 80% expenditure on hardware (including PCs, networking, peripherals, etc) and between 5-7% on might be called learning software with the remaining 13-15% spent on data management (from pupil tracking to integrated services to payroll type costs). Even this breakdown is difficult to calculate in that in some instances staff costs (technicians, etc) are included in some budgets but not others. The BSF effect (in which IT plays a significant role as part of the BSF offer) is a current bias in the market. A recent report by Kable calculates hardware as around 31% of expenditure, Services at 21%, all types of software as 10%, in-house ICT staff at 30% and the remainder on communications.

The share of these categories vary across schools, FE and HE, with HE and FE spending as much on in-house IT staff as on equipment. In fact figures for HE actually almost show the inverse of the school model, spending twice as much on in-house IT staff as on equipment, whilst schools spend around two thirds on equipment as on in-house staff but proportionally more on outsourced services. The proportion on software spend is slightly higher in schools than in FE and HE but this doesn’t offer an analysis of software use or penetration especially where software may have been produced in-house in the FE or HE sectors.

The margins for each area are different and changing with the selling of equipment coming down in cost (and profitability) and many companies predict that services will offer the greatest returns in the next few years (between 10-20%). The balance of complete software packages and other software types across sub-sectors is again skewed with schools purchasing more of the former than the latter.

Other kinds of IT expenditure by local authorities or at government level are probably excluded from these cost analyses.

As already mentioned, procedures for the commissioning, procurement,  and negotiation of expenditure and development varies across educational sectors and within market sub-sectors. For example around 70% of schools act as individual actors in the marketplace by developing direct relationships with suppliers. Expectations about post-purchasing support vary. Companies like Espresso are developing ongoing relationships with staff, supported by licensing and usage costs as opposed to up-front one-off purchase costs.

3.2  Current Market Trends

One often repeated observation is that this is not a big market: once BSF is removed from the equation and given the decreasing margins on re-selling hardware, it becomes even smaller. Each part of the market has its own distinctive competition model. For example, there are nearly 800 creators of school education software (chasing a market of between £50-80M).  In the managed services area a quite ‘pally’ group of half a dozen companies regularly competes. As Ball’s (2007) study noted, often the personnel working in these companies know each other and constitute a distinct cadre, formed as a result of their earlier, common experience working in public service.

Company size is an issue. There are signs of forms of horizontal and vertical integration with large global publishers. Pearson is most often used as an exemplar owning the examination group EdeXcel and using its dominance to contract suppliers to produce curriculum materials and possibly develop forms of e-assessment. Here it is suggested the small scale of the English education market is of interest to larger companies because of the reputational value such participation offers and how the English product can act as leverage in a global marketplace. Additionally, it is often suggested that global multinationals are interested in establishing patterns of uses for young ‘consumers’ to learn as they grow older, both in the general sense (using Microsoft desktop software) and in specialist cases with the use of propriety- database software in high end University courses being the most often quoted types of examples. Equally tie-ins with other kinds of publishing and edutainment (estimated some years ago at around £350M (Buckingham and Scanlon, 2002) may be long term commercial drivers. Similarly, larger integrated services companies (eg Logica, Tribal, Capita etc.) may be interested in education because of synergies with their work across Government in general (above and beyond their commitment to the current market). Logica’s portfolio of interest, for example, includes The Medical Research Council, Home Office, DWP, MoD, HMRC, etc. These kinds of integration offer economies of scale and experience and additionally align with a wider political concern to integrate government services.

As the market developed selected forms of market share were often disrupted over a 5 year period, by small companies exploiting niche opportunities in respect of curriculum initiatives or changing policy trends (for example, Rising Stars is an example cited by many informants at the current time). Whilst short term interest (3 years) lies in meeting policy demands (for example, in respect of Every Child Matters, Real Time Reporting, Home Access, Train to Gain, etc), it seems as if the mix of global multinational, medium and small size companies were well positioned to meet these demands. However, the tendency towards vertical and horizontal integration (again the range of fields in which Pearson operates were most often cited as examples here), may suggest a future with fewer larger companies operating across hitherto discrete sub-markets. As the lead national ‘education specialist’, RM’s acquisition and diversification strategy was also cited as an example of this process. This directly raises the question of how policy and central government drive the market or whether it is the market itself that creates conditions for such growth.

4. Market Drivers

This section considers a range of determinants on the IT education market. Some drivers are internally produced, that is, they are a consequence of present arrangements; others are external to the market and relate to broader macro-social issues.

4.1 The Role of Policy

A number informants noted the power and importance of central policy in defining growth and opportunity in the marketplace.  Although there are groupings of suppliers, raising questions about cartels, oligopolies and, as is the case about the kind of examination board/publisher tie in, monopolies, it might be more provocative to think about the monopsony power wielded by the government as an even bigger driver of unequal and unfair markets at a macro level. Suppliers talk about meeting need and centrally determined objectives and although central government does not act as a single purchaser any more, essentially they argue that policy creates the need and delegated financial arrangements then create (more or less) competitive markets.

Policies to put computers in schools, students on databases, integrated management systems and so on is thus the main engine for growth and it could be argued that the current structure of the IT in Education market has emerged to fit those ends. Some critics of contemporary education systems have suggested that, in effect, the state has been manipulated by private interests to disburse money in this way and on these types of products (eg Berliner and Biddle, 1999: Glass, 2008). Ball’s (2007) analysis of the English education system suggests more of a paradigm change than a conspiracy account of these matters but as suggested in 2.4 above, these kinds of politico-ethical questions will always return to haunt debate.

4.2 Supply and Demand

Some of the issues relate to the deeper question of need in the first place. Scholars like Larry Cuban who have analysed the introduction of computers in school have pointed to the complex and not always productive way in which new technologies have been incorporated into dominant ways of teaching and learning (Cuban, 1986). This is the main finding of the Interactive Whiteboard initiative, that IWBs have been successful precisely because when analysed over time, they do support dominant whole-class teaching methods. In some respects this process of incorporation has been frustrating to policy makers, who, as Neil Selwyn has shown, are concerned with the rhetoric of modernising and the future-oriented nature of IT as much as being persuaded by accounts of innovative practice (Selwyn, 2007). Furthermore, the ‘mandatory’ nature of much policy – however mediated through a kind of pseudo-autonomy in the marketplace – results in institutions effectively buying what it has been suggested they need.

Policy makers would always point to their stimulus-making function; that they need to drive change and alter the possibilities for local actors. Economists might question how much this is an exploitation of monopsony power or a way of redressing market failure. As Monahan (2005) shows so well, all levels of the market learn to use the same language of aspirations which is how policy creates demand.

In terms of supply and demand, then, analysis of policy sits between a ‘false needs’ and a transformative future-oriented approach. Either way, policy is of course dependent on politics but this perspective does point to how debate and study of IT in Education has been more supply-side focused than demand-side inspired. We shall return to demand-side issues as we look at the workforce, and in Section 5, consider the limits of the current policy-driven model of IT development.

4.3 The Implied Teacher

A common way of talking about need by all parties in the market is to offer hypothetical models of what teachers want. By definition larger companies stress products which offer convenience, simplicity, and government issues of standardisation, indeed the underwriting of standards. The HE sector has a greater sense of scholarly autonomy and thus emphasises ways of facilitating different kinds of pedagogic relationships, including online support and tutoring and even, as one respondent speculated, a move away from knowledge production towards a coaching role. In this model the HE workforce would stratify with specialised ‘teaching’ staff focusing on supporting students, online resources and developing student performance rather than purely developing disciplinary research. Similar far reaching aspirations have been raised at school level with examples of entrepreneurial teachers developing online materials in a number of schools and trying to find ways to exploit resources both in the UK and in an international marketplace.

The developer-teacher, the coach, and the deficit in-need-of-support wanting convenience, paradigms all inform speculation about who drives the market.

4.3.1

In the Training/Skills sub-sector of the marketplace, there is an attention to producing complete tutorial packages with online and distance learning support. This is shared with some innovations in HE which builds the teacher role into the pedagogic structure of the software completely. Here the implied teacher is removed from the teaching institution and it is not surprising that such delivery models are more common amongst third sector and other franchised providers. The discourse talks of the ‘delivery of education’ as if learning has been reified and exists in commodity form which, in theory, can be purchased and used in any context. Like speculation about changing coaching roles, it is unclear whether this paradigm has any trickle-down effect: see section 2.3 above and 5.2 below.

4.4 Capital and Revenue Expenditure

At present government budgets on a 3 year cycle and of course is to a great extent is determined by the 5 year election period. IT money is paid as forms of capital expenditure. Within BSF (a classic capital programme), revenue costs like IT staff are included as part of the initial investment. Part of the argument here is that such revenue costs will become normalised by institutions which will realise that they need such staff as part of their establishment (see the balance of kit, staff and software between education sectors as described in 3.1 above). As we have seen, this may be the case in larger HE institutions but is not the case in schools. How and in what ways managed services and a local authority role create clusters of expertise and how such investment can be exploited are, in practical terms, crucial to future developments. Working as a part of capital expenditure establishes a certain kind of market behaviour, encourages time-limited effects, and possibly displaces deep questions about sustainable change.

4.5 Open vs. Commercial Business Models

This question of sustainability will be explored from a different perspective in 5. 1 below, but it is also part of the debates surrounding discussion about open source and commercial business models. A number of commentators additionally conceptualise the question of open source as a business model with their imagining of the workforce. The work of Diana Laurillard has been influential in proselytizing for a teacher workforce which works as an open source community and generates curriculum innovation through such mechanisms: see also Hargreaves (2003).

In practice, companies are almost disinterested in this question. Many companies see a value of added services wrapping open source or open content in support services and some respondents suggested that private sector disciplines might well be a productive way of developing some open content material in the future. Key to any questions about the viability and distinctiveness of open vs commercial business models is that of a trained labour force as it remains a key assumption that we are still some way off from transparent, always work-able, technologies and nobody seemed to envisage that equilibrium point in any vision of the future.

Whilst there are many off-the-shelf packages to support the authoring of open content (eg Moodle), and considerable excitement and interest in the development of open content materials, with genuine market share claims from some HE practice and interesting opportunities with some teachers, working as entrepreneurs selling (or sharing) materials at home and abroad, research is needed to quantify the effect of this segment of the market and to compare and contrast it with more dominant business models. Questions about this balance are raised in 5.1 below.

5. Policy Levers

This section considers issues in policy thinking which may drive how the market develops in the future. I have tried to focus on the areas within each ‘lever’ that offer grounds for change as well as considering whether such thinking is solely determined by its own ‘logic’ or political direction in preparation for the scenario thinking which concludes this essay.

5.1 Innovation, Norms and Rumps

As is often noted, discussion about IT in Education possesses huge symbolic weight and is crucial to the imagining of system change: see, for example, Buckingham (2007). How the IT market functions is thus central to these aspirations for change. However, as a wide number of sources including BECTA note, the percentage of schools demonstrating high quality innovative practice using IT in Education, and the quality of the teacher workforce developing and innovating, is actually small, around 5%. This is not a distilled meta-review calculation but an informed feel for the rate of innovation on the ground. It has significant implications for claims about the type and depth of change that could be said to be led by IT reforms.

At the same time as Government is interested in raising common standards, a sense of what might be considered normal or average continually returns to the challenge of reforming the rump of practice. Aspirations for scaling up innovation often form the mechanisms designed to bring about such changes. On the whole the English education policy supports a market-driven form of innovation as opposed to state-led practices. For example the Scottish programme, Glow, attempts to set a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) common standard. To date, English change models have steered always from this kind of leadership, perhaps mindful of the inherent problems of obsolescence as exemplified by the London based project, Digital Brain. Although it should also be noted that built-in obsolescence or the need to continuously upgrade, are perhaps part of many IT products and built into IT companies’ business models: see 4.4 above in relation to questions of capital expenditure. The question remains however as to what kinds of change models will be most espoused by the market, given that it is not motivated by the same issues of educational reform as policy – or, and in what sense, policy needs to make demands on the market to achieve its aims.

These questions are partly political and partly an issue of workforce, governance and economic logic.

5.2 The Techno-elite: decision making and governance

Mindful of concerns about the ways that debate about IT is implicated in assumptions about forms of determinism (Williams, 2003; Marvin, 1990), I have tried to draw attention to the role of teachers and other IT professionals, the key social actors who make change happen, throughout this essay. As already noted, the cadre of IT in Education professionals has often been forged in public service and shares common values. This will change. Expectations that as new teachers come into the workforce that they will, by virtue of their generational competence, possess deeper and better understanding of IT is unproven and is redolent of assumptions about digital natives critiqued by Buckingham in other contexts (Buckingham, 2007).

Not only then are questions about implementing IT changes dependent on this (unknown) workforce but purchasing choice and questions of governance (especially about the ethical issues involved in surveillance technologies) are potentially left hanging. This is also a key question for directions in market growth. Proponents of Open Source and those who espouse the driver of in-house IT-led innovation rest such assumptions on models of workforce investment. Even questions about how those with responsibility for purchasing IT can make informed choices and in whose interests, especially as noted in 4.3 above, needs analysis in relation to assumptions about colleagues.

5.3 Market Integration

Over time, it now seems clear that the IT education market behaves in a certain way and to an extent is enjoying a period of relative stability (although this may be a BSF effect). As noted above in Section 3, margins may be decreasing and the rate of growth of new sub-markets much slower than in previous years. A number of informants have suggested that this stabilisation will necessarily lead to forms of integration with larger companies emerging across hitherto discrete sub-markets. The way that RM (the largest English specialist education company) has changed its business model reflects this process of incorporation although, to date, there have not been tie-ups with the publishing side of the market – even though that sub-sector demonstrates its own mode of integration with curriculum and assessment. It has also been noted that here, the centralisation of the curriculum supports better returns on investment in the production of high quality teaching materials over a reasonable time period and thus establish the conditions for higher capital investment, only made possible through forms of market integration.

The increasing trend of UK companies to acquire foreign partners enhances the integration process (see also section 3.2). There are a number of points within the procurement and consultancy process where greater transparency has been urged and where an agency like BECTA has almost taken on an anti-competitive regulatory role (in respect of Microsoft licensing, for example). In other words the logic of market exhibits a tendency towards forms of oligopolic and even monopolistic control. A key argument for the role of the private sector in education is precisely the opposite: that it undoes the state’s tendency to uniformity of provision. If the economic logic unfolds as I have suggested then questions of political legitimacy for these arrangements will be asked and equally importantly, evaluations of where the market is producing the desired kind of educational reform will also need to be answered.

6. Future Scenarios

This section draws together the internal and external logics to the IT in Education marketplace to draw attention to the kinds of interventions which could change direction for the processes analysed above.

6.1 Summary of key themes

This essay has thrown up two fundamental tensions. The first describes the functions and nature of the current IT in Education marketplace and points to the trends which suggest greater integration of specialist and multinational companies. This is a continuum at whose opposite pole is the diversification and growth of small companies, especially galvanised by open source, open content developments and an increase in the opportunities for education institutions to join a plethora of suppliers. This continuum suggests that at the integration end there are problems with the integrity of the market. The other tension relates to the impact of technologies on the education system. It suggests that there is a continuum of technological effects with Transformative (learning) technologies counterpoised with Governmental control forms of centralisation and standardisation. Finally, I have argued that economic logic is thus bound up with questions about the capacity for innovation within segments of the education workforce.

6.2  The directions for Change

These tensions can be represented diagrammatically

FIG 6.2.1 Model of the relationship between Market tension in the IT Industries and the impact of technologies on Education

This shows that policy intervention can be directed towards each quadrant to try to lever desired effects, for example if more small companies trying to achieve transformative learning impacts are desired. On the other hand, some analysts suggest that the opportunities for interventions are limited and that the tendency towards increased governmental effects as part of greater market integration is inescapable.

Whilst the kinds of effect and the nature of developments are clear, such a formulation is uncertain about the possibility for intervention in that some approaches suggests only the unfolding of ineluctable logics. In other words the analysis brings together different conceptions of structure and agency. The former belongs to traditions where the new corporatism implicit in changing forms of global capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007; Graham, 2005) is inescapable: and as I have already indicated, Monahan’s work (2005) is positioned in the tradition. Of course, inducting learners into the corporatized world of IT is a preferred mode of preparation for work given the place of such scenarios in the new world order suggested by this model.  Here educational practice is enacting a kind of social reproduction. Similarly, Stephen Ball’s (2007) analysis of privatisation is also located in a larger theory of macro-economical political change. Here a binary opposition between private and public provision is ‘overruled’ by the larger macro-economic forces of neo-liberalisation. Of course this is a form of economic determinism (acting maybe in this context as surrogate for technological determinism?) suggesting an inability to take political control.

The theorists offering support for spaces of intervention tend to stress politics and the human dimension. In terms of educational policy this focus on technology is part and parcel of larger concerns about the future of education. A new OECD publication, for example, suggests that we are on the cusp of deep change as new understandings of learning challenge the conventional paradigm of mass education (CERI, 2008). Interest and speculation about the effects of learning technology both drive, and are driven by, this orientation. However, this essay shows that aspirations for the use of transformative technologically driven learning are substantially mediated by the actual functions and operations of the IT in Education market and that it is irresponsible not to take these into account when developing and implementing policy change.

6.3 Timescales for Change

At the moment the huge investment of BSF seems likely to support the trend towards governmental uses of technologies driven by an increasing integrated form of market control. It may be that the ways in which more diversification will impact on a fragmented and stratified education system depend on a reduction of policy interventions (see 4.1 above). Current financial difficulties and the prospect of a new political settlement may indicate this scenario in the short term. Although it seems clear what the potential direction of change might look like, it is unclear, beyond these facts what other timescales might suggest.

6.4 Final Thoughts

One respondent speculated that if all the money made available though polices for IT in Education were simply made available as unrestricted funding within education, would it be spent on IT? This again begs the question about the nature of the demand side and puts the onus on the workforce. On one level, state policy would want the answer to this question to be ‘of course it would be’, which would be a way of justifying to itself the decisions it has already made. Many technology companies laughed when I put the question to them and suggested that such choice might not be great for business (which of course, as was pointed out, is also a responsibility of government along with education). But whether good business is good education clearly depends on who is asking (and answering) the question. Who gets to ask (and answer) that question will determine the future shape of IT in Education.

7. References

Ball, S.J. (2007) Education Plc: Understanding Private Sector Participation in Public Sector Education. London, Routledge.

Berliner, D.C. and Biddle, B.J. (1999) Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America’s Public Schools. Perseus Books, U.S.

Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. (2007) The New Spirit of Capitalism. Verso.

Buckingham, D. (2007) Beyond Technology: Children’s Learning in the Age of Digital Culture. Cambridge, Polity Press.

Buckingham, D. and Scanlon, M. (2002) Education, Entertainment and Learning in the Home.Open University Press.

CERI (2008) Innovating to Learn, Learning to Innovate. Paris, OECD.

Cuban, L. (1986) Teachers and Machines: Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920. New York, Teachers’ College Press.

Glass, G.V. (2008) Fertilizers, Pills, and Magnetic Strips: The Fate of Public Education in America. Charlotte, North Carolina, Information Age Publishing.

Graham, P. (2005) Hypercapitalism: New Media, Language, and Social Perceptions of Value (Digital Formations).Peter Lang Publishing.

Green, H., Facer, K., Rudd, T., Dillon, P. and Humphreys, P. (2006) Personalisation and Digital Technologies. Bristol, Nesta Futurelab.

Hargreaves, D. (2003) Creating an Education Epidemic in Schools. In: Bentley, T. and Wilsdon, J. (eds) The Adaptive State: Strategies for Personalising the Public realm. London, Demos.

Marvin, C. (1990) When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. New York, Oxford University Press, USA.

Monahan, T. (2005) Globalization, Technological Change, and Public Education (Social Theory, Education, and Cultural Change). New York, Routledge.

Selwyn, N. (2007) Curriculum Online? Exploring the political and commercial construction of the UK digital learning marketplace. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 28 (2), pp.223-240.

Selwyn, N. (2008) Developing the technological imagination: theorising the social shaping and Consequences of new technologies. In The educational and social impact of new technologies on young people in Britain: Report of the seminar held on Wednesday 12 March 2008 Department of Education, University of Oxford.

Williams, R. (2003) Television: Technology and Cultural Form (Routledge Classics). London, Routledge.

An example of this approach can be can be seen here: http://labspace.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=4341

http://www.theassignmentreport.com/

http://www.kable.co.uk/kabledirect/index.php?option=com_contentandmCCountryOrgID=410andtask=viewandid=1229495

http://www.besa.org.uk/besa/documents/view.jsp?item=1118

http://www.espresso.co.uk/services/primary/features.html

http://www.risingstars-uk.com/

http://partners.becta.org.uk/page_documents/research/wtrs_whiteboards.pdf

See for example: http://www.ttsonline.net/

Commentators were intrigued by the Espresso <http://www.espresso.co.uk/> business model here which has been successful in Primary schools and exploits the issue of IT staff expertise (or lack of) through a licensing model. Its success was contrasted with the front loaded capital model of software like Pearson’s knowledge box.

http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/glowscotland/about/Whatisglow.asp

http://www.dbeducation.co.uk/home

See RM report to shareholders September 2008

Counter arguments which suggest that that lower barriers to entry in publishing might encourage more smaller-sized competitors often do not allow for the cost of copyright material and other IP assets. Legal protection would have to change for such assets to become affordable to other than large companies.

Selwyn, (2007: 228), quotes DfEE arguments to this end in respect of ‘market failure’.

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.