ABSTRACT
Gil Padilla’s chapter combines strong approval for the theoretical directions established by LOGSE for vocational training with extreme scepticism about the ability of the Administration to achieve these in practice. Such scepticism finds more than an echo in a 1994 assessment by Julio Sanchez Fierro, Deputy President of the Escuela de Negocios. He writes:
For many years training has received insufficient attention in Spain, despite its strategic importance for companies, economic competitiveness and for society generally. Lack of cultivation has yielded a pernicious harvest of problems among the most important of which are problems of design; professional training that is conceived as something parallel to but distinct from and without interconnection with conventional education (secondary and university), without opportunities for practice nor measures for relating it more closely to economic conditions nor to ensuring continuity; poor quality leading to low prestige; problems of finance, depending on scarce resources that are not always applied according to clearly established criteria and priorities; difficulties of organizational management on account of the fragmentation of responsibility (MEC, Defence, etc.), lack of procedures for adequate co-ordination, and the virtual non-existence of economic or tax incentives to companies or workers.
