ABSTRACT
Education and training debates have acquired an international frame of reference. Other countries are trawled for benchmarks for the UK's relative performance or for ideas on how this performance might be improved (DfEE and Cabinet Office, 1996; Keep, 1991). But other countries are at best a source of lessons to be drawn than policies to be borrowed (Finegold et al., 1992, 1993) and even when we keep to lesson-drawing, we find that the lessons from different countries are not equally transferable to our own situation (Rose, 1993). It is not surprising, therefore, that some commentators have advocated the greater use of comparisons within the UK, and particularly with Scotland, as a source of policy lessons (eg, NCE, 1993, Richardson et al., 1995). Such ‘home-international’ comparisons are more likely than those with overseas countries to yield valid lessons for policy and practice (Raffe, 1991). But they need to be based on knowledge and understanding of the different education and training systems of the UK In this chapter, I describe the Scottish system for 16–19-year-olds and developments in this system over the last two decades, in order to inform current debates in England and Wales.
