This article offers an insight into the regulation and conduct of training and education in a globalised industry, and across an international labour market. Focusing on the cargo shipping sector of the maritime industry, it considers the provision of training and education for modern merchant officers within the context of an international…

Training young people in work-related interpersonal skills can be difficult. For them adopting ritualistic tactics such as using an extreme opening statement in a negotiation is a very different approach to communicating than the cryptic and concise technique they use when, for example, they send a text message. This study assesses whether the use…

The notion of competence has received sustained and ongoing critical attention. Despite this, many important matters remain unclear. This article argues that much of the confusion can be traced to both proponents and opponents of competence variously sharing highly questionable assumptions about learning that revolve around viewing it as a…

Since 1998, the "Learnership" model of workplace training has been promoted in South Africa as a creative vehicle for addressing high unemployment rates and a serious skills shortage. This is achieved through fast-tracking the acquisition of skills and increasing a learner's chances of employment. However, because learnerships are a recent…

Further education has become pivotal to English educational policy with the sector being central to strategies that seek to raise educational standards and widen participation. This article derives from a study of trainee further education (FE) teachers on a full-time, postgraduate certificate course in the Midlands. It seeks to examine trainee…

ISO 9000 is a set of quality standards that assists an organization to identify, correct and prevent errors, and to promote continual improvement. Educational institutions worldwide are implementing ISO 9000 as they face increasing external pressure to maintain accountability for funding. Similar to other countries, in the United States vocational…

This article examines ways in which more explicit connections might be forged between students' experiences as humanities students, and their experiences as part-time workers. The purpose is to connect particularisations of meaning with the development of a coherent whole, by using Van Oers' (1998) framework for contextualisation. It is argued…

This article is a critical review of policy and literature relating to vocational education and training (VET) in schools in Australia. Over the past decade in Australia, VET in schools has grown considerably so that not only are nearly half of senior school students now involved, but also VET in schools represents around 10% of total VET…

Thirteen teachers and coordinators of vocational education and training in schools (VETiS) programs in eight Australian secondary schools were interviewed to determine the extent to which their involvement in school-based vocational education and training (VET) was grounded in their contact with contemporary workplaces, to identify the nature of…

Commonly, the task of constructing rationales is used in development programmes as a means of advancing Further Education College (FEC) lecturers' understanding of their practice. Often lecturers also teach this task as a part of student project work. Drawing on psychological research on argumentative reasoning the aim was to illuminate strengths…

The UK Government's recent emphasis on the graduate workforce raises the profile of work placements within higher education. Anecdotally, the authors find that students on their optional bioscience sandwich degrees benefit academically from placement experience but there is little supportive evidence of this in the literature. To investigate…

This article focuses on the interface between the formal learning associated with the curricula of school and college, and the personal knowledge and broader learning lives and identities of two young people as they move into and through their post-16 careers. The interviews reveal the complex interaction between the formal curriculum, contingent…

This report presents the findings of a Project undertaken to address the broad question of how to ensure the engagement with learning of all middle years students and how to encourage in them a higher order of learning objectives and outcomes both now and throughout life. It builds on current nationwide and international efforts at school reform,…

In 2005, the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA) conducted an assessment of Year 6 and Year 10 students across Australia to assess their proficiency in ICT literacy. The 2005 ICT literacy assessment instrument consisted of seven discrete thematic modules. One module, the General Skills Test, included…

In March 1997, all State, Territory and Commonwealth education ministers agreed on the national goal: that every child leaving primary school should be numerate and able to read, write and spell at an appropriate level. To provide focus for this goal, ministers agreed to a sub-goal: that every child commencing school from 1998 will achieve a…