Implementing VET Reform 2
In the last entry we summarized a recent literature review on implementing VET, focusing on the key success factors and big question marks around specific reform features. In this entry, we’ll talk about the trends and interesting patterns in the literature. The literature is remarkably consistent over time, and doesn’t differ much between scholarly and non-scholarly sources (things like policy reports).
By Katie Caves
The VET implementation literature review gave us some interesting insights into factors that matter for successful implementation, but there’s more to the literature than that. It’s also worthwhile to look at the trends and patterns in the literature to search for biases, uncover interesting developments, and find gaps we need to fill. In this entry, we’ll summarize the patterns by source age and type and countries’ development status and continent.
Source Age
Our sources ranged in age from publication in 1984 to 2017. We divided them into two groups, one before the median year of 2009 and the other from 2009 to 2017. The two groups are very strongly correlated, with Intermediaries more likely to show up in older sources and Finances or financial resources for the reform more likely to show up in newer sources. One tricky thing here is that we can’t tell if Intermediaries are mentioned less often in newer sources because they’re somehow less important or because they’re considered so important they don’t even need to be mentioned.
Figure 1: Older and newer sources are very similar
Source Type
There are two source types: scholarly literature from peer-reviewed journals, and non-scholarly or grey literature including books, policy reports, and other reports generated by governments or international institutions like the OECD or World Bank. Again they’re very similar to one another, with Intermediaries and Employers more likely to come up in the grey sources. Part of the reason for this might be that grey sources are often talking directly to governments, so they might be encouraging the Ministry of Education to cooperate with outside actors. Scholarly works, on the other hand, are speaking to a non-involved audience so they will mention actors only when they are specifically relevant.
Figure 2: Scholarly and grey-literature sources are less similar but still share trends
Continent
The results might be different across continents, so we divided sources into seven groups for each populated continent and for multi-continent studies. Here is our first big bias in the literature: European countries make up fully half of the available studies. Those aren’t necessarily all Western or developed European countries—many are on reforms in post-Soviet Eastern European countries—but it is still a major gap. If European countries are notably different from non-European literature, then they might be driving the results and making the whole review biased towards their needs.
Figure 3: European sources are not different from non-European sources
Surprisingly, European sources are very similar to non-European sources and there aren’t any individual items that are significantly different between the two groups. This is very good news for our review because our results aren’t just driven by European implementation needs, but it doesn’t mean the literature is totally unbiased. It could still be that European research is driving the factors we look for in non-European studies, so we need to keep an eye out for that and keep doing more research.
Development Status
The last subsample we’ll look at is developed and developing countries, both because they might have different needs to support implementation and because there might be a gap in the literature on one side or the other. Surprisingly, we found that developed and developing countries are represented almost equally in the literature.
Figure 4: Developed and developing sources are similar
The two country types are also quite similar, with Coordination the only significant difference as an item that’s more important in developing countries. This information makes sense especially when there are multiple local, national, and international donor actors involved in a single system or reform.
Analyzing the trends in our literature review lets us go one step beyond just looking at what factors matter. This way, we can interrogate the literature itself, look for biases, and determine where there might be differences or problems to investigate with future research. Overall, the field is surprisingly consistent. There are no situations where two subsamples are totally uncorrelated, and that was a real possibility. However, just because the literature is consistent doesn’t mean it’s arrived upon any recipe for successfully implementing VET reforms. We still need to find out why each item matters, how they all interact with one another and with context, and which items are more important than others.