ABSTRACT
This chapter positions the evolution of further education and skills policy, and policy aspirations in England for ‘(higher) technical education’, and higher-level apprenticeships, within the history of its development and the evolving economic and social structures discussed in the opening chapter. The erosion of well-rewarded skilled worker and administrative roles for which further education once prepared generations of skilled workers is shown to have been partly replaced by a middle layer of employees, reduced in numbers but with additional responsibilities. Young people destined for these roles lack recourse to the cultural capital of genuine elites and are diverted into vocational settings: we describe this process as the formation of ‘technical elites’, in reference to Naville’s (1963) observation that they remain subject to ‘consecrated’ elites. The chapter traces the economic and cultural shifts which provide the basis for current discourses of ‘technical’ elite formation.
