Apprenticeship reforms have paved the way for higher education providers, including universities, to become Degree Apprenticeship (DA) training providers, creating new workbased Higher Education (HE) routes. The changes aim to generate a new cohort of skilled individuals to support national economic growth, as well as improve levels of social mobility. This paper focusses on a HE partnership project which resulted in a number of collaborative models for development that address these aims.The paper focuses on qualitative interviews undertaken during the process of creating DAs through a consortium of higher education providers. It considers the collaborative relationships which were built on and which developed across the course of the short-term project. It assesses the concept of competitive collaboration and its link to social mobility.The paper considers the various manifestations of collaboration which supported the DA developments in a competitive environment: collaboration as embedded; collaboration as negotiation and as a driver for social mobility or social equality.The uniqueness of this large collaboration of colleges and universities is that it has been a vehicle to raise the status of apprenticeships, provide opportunities for development of new DA curricula and enable practitioners to establish this as a new route into HE. The paper questions current but limited knowledge about the impact of DAs on social mobility and equality.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.