Implementing VET Reforms
We've just finished the first version of a literature review on implementing VET reforms. Since we know that having a better VET system is a good thing and we’re pretty clear on what a good VET system is, we need to know what it takes to get from a worse system to a better one. That’s a big question, so we start by looking at everything that’s already out there to get a sense of what’s important, what we know, and what we need to look at more carefully.
By Katie Caves
We’ve just finished the first version of a literature review on implementing VET reforms. Since we know that having a better VET system is a good thing and we’re pretty clear on what a good VET system is, we need to know what it takes to get from a worse system to a better one. That’s a big question, so we start by looking at everything that’s already out there to get a sense of what’s important, what we know, and what we need to look at more carefully.
We reviewed 1,845 sources from the literature, including scholarly peer-reviewed sources and “grey” literature sources like policy reports and documents from international organizations like the OECD, UNESCO, World Bank, and ILO. We found all those sources by looking for vocational education (including apprenticeship/VET/TVET) reform (including change/innovation) implementation in major research databases. We read all those results, and culled our pool down to 179 papers that really deal with what we’re looking for.
We used the existing theory and empirical results to develop a framework of key items that might influence successful implementation. This came from the literatures on implementation, implementing general-education reforms, and even a few sources that deal with VET reform specifically. The overall categories we use are from the 5C framework in implementation, from Nilsen (2015). We added in what we know about how VET systems work from the theory on apprenticeship and VET. Then we went through and coded sets of 20 test papers, refining the framework in the process. After doing that four times, we had our final coding framework, shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Coding scheme and results for VET implementation
In the 179 papers we fully coded (two independent coders, disagreements resolved through discussion), we found 1,538 mentions of our 30 items. Almost all of the mentions are positive (meaning the item is good for implementation) because we build our coding scheme so the theoretically helpful end of each item is coded as positive. When we code something as negative, that means that the opposite of the item is helpful for implementation. For example employer involvement is essentially always positive, and that comes from sources that say employers helped implementation in their case plus sources that say the lack of employers hurt implementation.
Figure 1 shows our item-level results, categorized into “Key Success Factors,” “Success Factors,” and “Needs Further Research.” Key success factors are items that come up a lot and are always or nearly always positive (green in Figure 1). These are the items to make sure you have if you’re implementing a reform. Success factors (black in Figure 1) are still positive, but they come up less often. Make sure you have these, but prioritize the key factors above them. Finally, items that need further research (in pink) have more negative or mixed/conditional mentions in the literature. These are areas where we researchers need to do more work so we can tell implementers what’s going on.
There’s more in this review, so we’ll cover that and share a link to the publication in the next entry.