Value added in further education and vocational training in Northern Ireland

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. (DfEE, 1998). Terms of use: Documents in EconStor mayAt the age of 16, many young people decide to leave school and enter vocational education or training, either at a college of Further Education (FE) or on a Government training scheme. This sector, both regionally and nationally, has received considerably less attention in the literature than the school sector. This is likely to be related, at least in part, to the fact that information on school performance ( ie: in terms of qualifications obtained and subsequent labour market outcomes) is much better developed than the corresponding information for FE colleges and training schemes 1 . A strong argument for conducting such a study specifically for Northern Ireland is the importance of vocational education and training, in terms of the proportion of young people who choose these routes, relative to the UK average. For example, the proportion of 1993 5 th form leavers who entered vocational education and training in NI was 44%, as compared to 40% for Great Britain 2 . This is largely due to higher numbers on training schemes, which may be a symptom of higher regional unemployment or selective secondary schooling, for example. Equally, it may be that participation in youth training in NI is higher than in GB as a result of the differences between Northern Ireland's Youth Training Programme (YTP) and that of England and Wales (YT, formerly YTS). 4In this paper, we seek to begin to redress the imbalance in the literature through a detailed examination of the performance of the Northern Ireland vocational education and training sector in terms of qualifications value added. Controlling for background characteristics of young people in vocational education and training allows us to analyse the relative intrinsic merits of the two alternative routes themselves. The remainder of the paper is set out as follows. The following section briefly discusses the structure of Government training schemes in Northern Ireland and reviews the existing literature on value added in education and training. Section 3 discusses our empirical model and econometric methodology. Section 4 presents details of the data set used for the analysis and highlights some important regularities. Section 5 presents and discusses the results and section 6 concludes. those who chose the traditional academic route. It was found that those who chose FE were less likely than their counterparts in the academic route to get qualifications, but the d...

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