ABSTRACT
Business Studies degrees in England have long been designed on the sandwich model with a one-year placement in employment inserted between the second and final years of the programme. In many places, and for a long time, there has been a tendency for this to provide a student with experience in which the work-based placement interrupts academic, classroom-based learning. Students have found very little of use in their classroom-based studies when they are out on placement, and relatively little use has been made of the placement experience during the final year of their programmes. In other words, there has been a state of coexistence between the instructionally driven classroom-based element and the experientially dominated employment placement. The placement year has symbolised a concern to ground the vocational studies of the
student in the realities of the workplace, but this did not signify that the instructional and experiential elements were feeding into each other.
