Employability in the College Sector:

A Comparative Study of England and South Africa

Simon McGrath, Seamus Needham, Joy Papier and Volker Wedekind with Harvinder Attwal, Marius Calitz and Trish van der Merwe

Purpose

• Improve understandings of employability in a threefold manner:

• practically through the experiences and challenges of FE(T) colleges;

• theoretically within the discipline of education;

• and comparatively by looking at contexts and experiences in England and South Africa.

Methodology

• Funding to build partnerships

• Selected ‘beacon’ Colleges to examine above average practice

• Institutional visits supported by• Prior and subsequent data gathering

• Interviews, focus groups

• Site visits

• Seminars

Employability Literature

• Commonly seen as a new notion of the past 25 years (but cf. Beveridge 1909)

• 3 part story• 1. Decline of manufacturing and rise of services

• 2. Rise of Neoliberalism and fall of the welfare state

• 3. Discourse of lifelong learning and the boundaryless career

Dominant Account of Employability

• Personalised account of employability as the

individual’s ability to gain and maintain a job and to obtain a new one as circumstances dictate

• Educational providers must reshape their curriculum and pedagogy in order to focus more sharply on the knowledge, skills and attitudes that will promote their learners’ employability

Lenses on Employability

Staff

Employers Policy

Institution

Students

Students

• Internalisation of individualised discourse

• Focus on skills and attitudes

• Little recognition of the structural features of the employment landscape

Staff

• Access• Epistemological access

• Disciplinary knowledge

• Craft knowledge

• Trade knowledge

• Relational access• Social networks

• Bridging and bonding capital

Staff

• Modelling• behaviour

• employer expectations• e.g., punctuality, dress codes, OHS

• Morale

Institutions

• The employable college

• Going beyond the ordinary

• Specialisation and beacon status

• Negotiating boundaries

Institutions

• Colleges as spaces• combining theory and practice

• disposition building

• Simulating work experience

• The data problem

Institutions

• Specific versus general skills

• Fragile relationships

Employers

• Funding opportunities and constraints

• The ambitions and limitations of joined-up policy

• Regional and national resources

• Curriculum reform• N for Nostalgia

Policy

1. Individual employability is important but insufficient

2. Educational institutions are key to employability

3. FET colleges are making progress here and need supporting

4. Need to remember the social capital dimension of employability

Key Lessons

5. The vocational dimension to teaching and learning shouldn’t be forgotten

6. Importance of striving to be an employable college

7. Centrality of leadership in this

8. More work needed on college-employer relations

Key Lessons