ABSTRACT
In terms of varieties of capitalist economy, the United Kingdom represents a liberal market economy with a deregulated labour market. Vocational training can be seen as an arena of employer prerogative. Nevertheless, it is a policy arena that has undergone significant change under successive Conservative (1979–97) and Labour (1997–present) governments. Understanding this process of institutional change and its increasing fragmentation is therefore essential to the analysis of vocational education and training in the UK. The changes in the vocational education and training (VET) system must also be examined in relation to changes in the structure of employment. The decline of manufacturing employment has been accompanied by a reduction of skilled manual labour employed in the secondary sector. Employment has grown in relatively highly paid occupations requiring higher levels of qualification and in low-paid, routine occupations where there is little demand for formal qualifications. This has led to the creation of an ‘hourglass’ economy (Nolan and Slater 2003: 78). Finally, despite the increased supply of qualifications held by young people entering the labour market, this has not been matched by changes in employers’ demand for skills. Analysing the 2001 Skills Survey, Ashton et al. noted that ‘the overall supply of qualifications outstrips demand by a comfortable margin’ (2002: 63).
