Employers placing orders and students as commodities: Swedish post-secondary vocational education and training policy

Abstract

Established in 2009, Swedish Higher Vocational Education (HVE) gives employers an opportunity to initiate state-funded but locally conceptualised and managed training programmes. This article investigates the system, the ideas used in policy to mandate this arrangement of vocational education and training (VET) and the institutional relations of power and control between stakeholders that it represents. Fourteen Swedish educational policy documents relating to postsecondary VET and the establishment of HVE were analysed. The findings show that policy has placed much of the power and control over HVE with employers and that both public and private education providers are dependent on employers. The system does not create any institutional relations between trade unions and HVE. Nor does it encourage employers to collaborate more comprehensively than locally regarding single programmes, to conceptualise them and their curricula. Hence, the qualifications and positions of HVE graduates in enterprises, unlike those of graduates from initial VET in upper secondary education, are not negotiated by the stakeholders in the conventional Swedish model, where national employers' organisations and trade unions are central actors. The findings also reveal that the HVE students, in policy documents, are construed as input material that, through training, are turned into products with exchange valueinto commodities.

Knowledge in VET curricula and power in society and labour market Policy and practice: demands-based and employer-driven Swedish higher vocational education

“…In article 1 (J. Köpsén, 2020c), where focus is on how policy have formed the HVE and motivated its establishment, it is mainly the parts of the review above that present how educational systems can be said to represent different institutional relations linked to different conceptions of the relations between education and the labour market which overlap (e.g., Busemeyer & Trampusch, 2011;Dobbins & Busemeyer, 2015;Pilz et al, 2017;Thelen, 2004). However, also previous research presenting the historical development of Swedish VET play a crucial part for this article (e.g., Beach & Dovemark, 2011;Englund, 2005;Lundahl, 2016;Lundahl et al, 2010;Nylund & Rosvall, 2016;Nylund et al, 2017).…”

“…In the first article of this thesis (J. Köpsén, 2020c), the theoretical framework is used to enable an investigation of the HVE system not only as an organisational scheme, but also as a representation of underlying principles and their production and re-production of the positions of actors such as employers and education providers, as well as of identities for the students. To this end, the model of the pedagogic device, its rules and different recontextualising fields, are used.…”

The Work of Programme Managers in State-Funded Employer-Driven Swedish Higher VET

“…One extreme example of market orientation in higher VET is the Swedish system known as Higher Vocational Education (HVE) (Köpsén, 2020a(Köpsén, , 2020b. HVE was implemented in 2009 and is organised as state-funded programmes provisioned by both public and private education providers in close relation to employers.…”

“…Whether the training in a VET programme is more general and aimed at a field of work or if its syllabi is specific for a certain and clearly defined job, or whether a programme is introductory or aim to give the students a complete training making them independently proficient in their trade, make for different tasks for the involved teachers and trainers (Grollmann, 2008). Policy have defined what knowledge is desirable in the Swedish system for higher VET -knowledge generated in the production of goods and services that is selected for syllabi by employers (Köpsén, 2020a) -but policy has also given the local contexts of programme provision great autonomy with much of the power allocated to the involved employers (Köpsén, 2020b). Thus, we do not know what knowledge make up the local syllabi of HVE programmes since there are no previous studies of this, and thus also not what training the programme managers in HVE are tasked with organising.…”

Quality assurance in vocational higher education: A case of Macau

“…In globalization context, vocational higher education would take another responsibility to train adult or young adult so to increase their productivity and readiness to work in the local and global employment market (Yulastri et al, 2018). These adult/young adult should learn and update their skills in order to remain globally competitive (Köpseń, 2020;Mandal, 2013;Owusu-Agyeman, 2017). On the other hand, the competitive job market also created additional complexity for the employers to identify relevant knowledge and skills they needed (Gjorgov & Cripps, 2018).…”