Higher Level Vocational Education: The Route To High Skills And Productivity As Well As Greater Equity? An International Comparative Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This international comparative analysis of higher level vocational education examines developments across five countries: England, Germany, Australia, Canada, and the USA. The authors consider how current developments address two key policy concerns: an emphasis on high skills as a means of achieving economic competitiveness and raising productivity; and the promise of increasing access for students hitherto excluded from higher education. We address these questions in relation to specific country contexts, in order to highlight similarities and differences in developments within the European arena and in a wider global context. We locate our analyses in an understanding of the different political and socio-economic conditions within different countries, which render particular reforms and innovations both possible and realizable in one context, but almost unthinkable in another. We argue for the need to recognize and embrace diversity in provision, while using comparison across countries as a means of challenging taken-for-granted assumptions of how things are and what is possible within individual country contexts. Such comparative analysis is a prerequisite for answering questions of policy transfer and learning from others.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 0.007 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".