ABSTRACT
If prizes were given for responsiveness to change, then those working in the learning and skills sector would undoubtedly sweep the board. Since 2001 and the establishment of the Learning and Skills Council in England, there has been a constant stream of policy documents, initiatives and structural changes affecting the sector. This has led to a highly complex landscape (see Figure 1.1, p. 16 above) which, although employing thousands of staff and affecting the lives of over six million learners, is not well understood, even by those who work within it. In this chapter we attempt to paint a picture of the LSS in England in 2007, based primarily on an analysis of 131 in-depth interviews with 123 European, national, regional and local officials over the period 2004-7 and key messages from nine major policy documents mentioned by these policy-makers.1 We will also refer briefly to four more recent policy texts, which have been published since the majority of interviews took place, but figured strongly in our final round of interviews (see Box 4.1). We examine these three years from the perspective of the policy-makers we interviewed who, like the teachers, trainers, lecturers and managers in FE and adult and workbased learning, have had to make sense of (or ‘translate’) rapid successions of politicians’ pronouncements, respond to several major restructuring exercises and take up new roles and responsibilities or even face redundancy during this period. And this was even before the most recent announcements of changes to national ministries in 2007, as described in Chapter 1. We use the policy-makers’ stories to identify what they hope to achieve in the LSS, what structural changes have taken place, how the new arrangements operate, what the new terminology used in policy documents signifies, and what debates and
issues they see as important to the future of post-16 education and training in this country. We conclude with five policy implications for the sector.
