What Does It Take to Improve a VET System?

The authors, Katherine Caves and Severin Baumann, reviewed 1,845 literary sources, including scholarly peer-reviewed sources and “grey” sources such as policy reports and documents from international organisations like the OECD, UNESCO, World Bank, and ILO. They searched major research databases for vocational education (including apprenticeship/VET/TVET) reform (including change/innovation) implementation and cut the pool down to 177 fully relevant sources, based on the abstracts.

In order to develop a framework of key items that should influence successful implementation, Caves and Baumann used the existing theory and empirical results from the literature on policy implementation, implementing general-education reforms, and even from the few sources that deal with VET reform specifically. The overall categories used were taken from Nilsen’s (2015) “5C” framework on implementation. Caves and Baumann added theory about apprenticeship and VET and then iteratively coded sets of 20 test papers, all of which provided the final coding framework (see G 2).

The authors fully coded the 177 sources (two independent coders, disagreements were resolved through discussion) and found 1,538 mentions of the 30 items. Almost all of the mentions are positive, meaning that the item is good for implementation and that it goes in the direction predicted by theory. When something is coded as negative, it means that the opposite of the item is helpful for implementation. For example, employer involvement is essentially always positive, both in sources that say employers helped implementation and sources that say that the lack of employers’ involvement had a negative effect on implementation. If employers’ involvement were to impair the implementation progress, it would be coded as negative.

Graph G 2 shows item-level results, categorised into “Key Success Factors,” “Success Factors,” and “Needs Further Research.” Key success factors are items that come up frequently and are always or nearly always positive (in green). These are the critical items for implementers. Success factors (in black) are also positive, but they are mentioned less often. Finally, items that need further research (in pink) have more negative, mixed, or conditional mentions in the literature. These are areas in which researchers need to do more work in order to inform implementers about what might be happening.

The second main contribution of the literature is its exploration of trends and patterns in the data. Caves and Baumann look for four major differences: the publication year (before and after 2009), the type of publication (grey or peer-reviewed literature), the development status of the country described by each source (developed or developing), and the continent of the country described in the reform.

Publications from different times are broadly similar, with the only real difference being that newer papers are more likely to mention intermediaries. It is not surprising that there has been little change over time as they are mostly isolated case studies and there are few sources that consistently refer to one another or build ideological frameworks.

The scholarly and grey literature is also relatively similar. Grey sources are more likely to mention actor types, in particular Employers and Intermediaries. There are three major organizations that figure prominently in the grey literature: European Centre for the Development of Vocational (Cedefop), European Training Foundation (ETF), and OECD. While Cedefop and ETF are similar to the rest of the group, OECD is more likely to mention Employers and Intermediaries, and less likely to mention Political Will and Context Fit.

Developed and developing countries are more or less equally represented, which is an encouraging sign that developing countries have not been overlooked by this literature. The two types are generally quite similar, with Coordination mentioned more in developing countries than their developed counterparts. Though the differences are not as dramatic, Personnel, Finances, and Foreign Aid are all more typical in sources on developing countries. If we look at developed and developing countries within Europe, the pattern is very similar.

Finally, the one major gap in the literature is its neglect of non-European countries. European sources make up half of the sample, while the other half is divided between multi-continent studies and Asia, Africa, Oceana, North America and South America in descending order. This could be caused by a number of factors, including our search language being limited to English, a lack of VET systems in the affected countries, or VET generally not being considered a topic for research. However, it is encouraging to see that multi-continent studies are not that different from those including the mainly-European population, although they do tend to emphasize Context Fit.

The review shows that the literature on VET implementation is larger and more consistent than expected. It is also different from general-education reform implementation, in particular due to its emphasis on actor types and the interactions among them. This literature review is as systematic as possible, but there are always moments when subjectivity might pose a potential limitation. As a literature review, it also has all of the limitations of the literature itself, most notably the lack of non-European countries. The Education Systems Research Division will use this review to further its research on the implementation of VET reforms worldwide.