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Journal of Vocational Education & Training
ISSN: 1363-6820 (Print) 1747-5090 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjve20
Employers placing orders and students as
commodities: Swedish post-secondary vocational
education and training policy
Johanna Köpsén
To cite this article: Johanna Köpsén (2020): Employers placing orders and students as
commodities: Swedish post-secondary vocational education and training policy, Journal of Vocational Education & Training, DOI: 10.1080/13636820.2020.1744695
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13636820.2020.1744695
© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Published online: 23 Mar 2020.
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ARTICLE
Employers placing orders and students as commodities:
Swedish post-secondary vocational education and
training policy
Johanna KöpsénDepartment of Behavioural Sciences and Learning, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden
ABSTRACT
Established in 2009, Swedish Higher Vocational Education (HVE) gives employers an opportunity to initiate state-funded but locally conceptualised and managed training pro-grammes. 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 post-secondary VET and the establishment of HVE were analysed. Thefindings 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 sin-gle 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. Thefindings also reveal that the HVE students, in policy documents, are construed as input material that, through training, are turned into products with exchange value– into commodities.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 26 June 2019 Accepted 23 February 2020
KEYWORDS
Vocational education and training (VET); post-secondary VET; Higher Vocational Education (HVE); education policy
Introduction
National vocational education and training (VET) systems vary because nations have different political objectives involving VET and because VET is differently embedded within national systems of education and the labour market (Pilz 2016). Systems can be said to represent different institutional relations linked to different conceptions of the relations between education and work and between public and private (Busemeyer and Trampusch 2011; Dobbins and Busemeyer2015; Pilz et al.2017; Thelen2004).
CONTACTJohanna Köpsén johanna.kopsen@liu.se
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article. https://doi.org/10.1080/13636820.2020.1744695
© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduc-tion in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
The system of higher VET investigated here is set within the Swedish context, where today most of the national education system is marketised and builds upon the ideas of neoliberal policy discourses (Dahlstedt and Fejes2019; Fejes and Dahlstedt2019). The funding and provision of professional and academic higher education has not, however, been marketised in the same way as other parts of Swedish education. Specifically, the aim of this article is to investigate the institutional relations between education and work, and between public and private, which the Swedish system of vocational higher education repre-sents. Paying attention to the institutional relations in VET systems has been presented as a key to understanding and furthering the debate on the forma-tion and reform of VET (Wheelahan 2015b). The analysis also focuses on the ideas used in policy to mandate the establishment of the higher VET system. Fourteen public documents relating to Swedish post-secondary VET and the establishment of the system of vocational higher education were analysed using a Bernsteinian analysis, in which institutional relations are investigated as rela-tions of power and control (Bernstein1990,2000).
Each VET system is rooted in a specific historical, social and economic con-text, and they are incorporated within different types of welfare regimes (Dobbins and Busemeyer2015; Pilz et al.2017; Thelen 2004). They reflect the societies in which they are found, and different formations of VET may be seen as reflecting different traditions and norms for the transition of students from education to work (Wheelahan2015a). However, most contemporary VET sys-tems and their political formations, like the one explored in this article, are situated within what can be described as a policy paradigm in which education, including initial and higher VET, is construed as pivotal to the idea of national prosperity in a globalised world (Avis 2012; Ball 1998). The idea of the global competitiveness of nations is an essential part of the neoliberal discourses that frame this policy paradigm, and it places great responsibility on educational systems to develop the human capital needed for economic growth and com-petitiveness. This paradigm is manifest in the educational policies, and VET policies in particular, of supranational organisations such as the OECD, the World Bank, the WTO and the European Union, all of which have a strong influence on national policy formations (e.g. Avis 2012; Ball 1998; Pettersson, Prøitz, and Forsberg 2017; Trumberg2019). In the case of VET, these policies today rest on competence-based approaches to system formation and on concepts of employability, adaptability and lifelong learning (Beach and Dovemark 2011; Brockmann, Clarke, and Winch 2008). Twentieth-century Swedish educational policies were and continue to be convergent with those of the supranational organisations. The permeation of the transnational neolib-eral discourse of this paradigm into a national context is, however, reflected in a particular way in the Swedish case (Beach and Dovemark2011; Englund2005; Lundahl 2016; Lundahl et al. 2010). This particularity is due to the speed at which transformations occurred during the late 1980s and 1990s, and to how
the Swedish Social Democratic Party pushed through policies and reforms in line with ideas that they had opposed only a few years earlier, in the process discarding strong traditional egalitarian values of educational equality.
The changes to the Swedish national education system which were in line with neoliberal discourse persisted into the twenty-first century and accelerated following a shift in political rule in 2006 when a Conservative-Liberal coalition government came to power (Beach and Dovemark2011; Lundahl et al.2010; Nylund, Rosvall, and Ledman2017; Virolainen and Persson Thunqvist2017). This new government initiated reforms in both initial and post-secondary VET. The reform of initial VET at upper secondary level established formalised relations between education and employers at both national and local levels. The new policy on post-secondary VET resulted in the establishment in 2009 of the higher VET system, called Higher Vocational Education (HVE). Although it is a system unique in Sweden because of the decentralised formation of its programmes and their curricula, it has received practically no attention in research. However, it has been suggested that the creation of HVE, just like state-funded initiatives concerning initial VET in municipal adult education, reflects the Conservative-Liberal government’s ‘work strategy’ (Andersson and Wärvik2012)– a principle that makes employment the one crucial bearer of social inclusion.
Below is a brief introduction to Swedish HVE. This is followed by a section positioning the 2009 establishment of HVE in its national policy context, as well as relating it to an international example. Subsequently, there is a description of the methodology employed and the studied material, followed by a presentation of the theoretical framework, thefindings of the study and a discussion.
Swedish Higher Vocational Education
The Swedish system of HVE is clearly defined as a specific segment of the national education system. The degrees offered are specific to that system, and credits are not transferable to the system of professional and academic higher education.
Providers of HVE are primarily privately owned education businesses, but programmes are also provided by public adult education and universities, among others. In 2018, there were 220 active HVE providers (National Agency for Higher Vocational Education2018b). The programmes are granted funding and permission to start following an annual call for applications from the National Agency for HVE. The programmes are intended to be initiated locally by employers, and decisions on educational content are made in the local contexts of each programme (Köpsén2019). Additionally, management is car-ried out by a local management board for each HVE programme, made up primarily of employer representatives. The employers represented on these boards are expected to contribute to the programme by creating and updating curricula, offering placements with supervisors for work-based learning and
continuously working on quality assurance. The HVE programmes vary in length from one semester to three years, and work-based learning on placements is typically, but not always, a quarter of the programme. Programmes can be offered at full-time or part-time pace and can be organised as either school-based or distance learning. Students may graduate with the skills to work, for instance, as train drivers, technicians in the waste and energy industry, procure-ment officers, administrators in healthcare, veterinary assistants, driving instruc-tors or pharmacy technicians, among many others.
Over the past two years, the number of students in HVE has stood at around 50,000 (National Agency for Higher Vocational Education2018c,2017b). This is one-tenth of the number of students in Swedish academic and professional higher education (Swedish Higher Education Authority 2017). However, it is intended that, by 2022, there will be 70,000 HVE students, indicating a rapid expansion (National Agency for Higher Vocational Education 2018a). Because many students enter HVE after gaining experience from several years of working life, the average age of an HVE student is 31 (National Agency for Higher Vocational Education 2018c, 2017b). Overall, there is a gender balance among HVE students, although the balance is heavily skewed within the different educa-tional areas relating to different sectors of business and industry (National Agency for Higher Vocational Education2018b).
Neoliberal Swedish education policy and employer influence in VET
In an international context, the case of Australian VET may function as an interesting reference for understanding Swedish HVE. Australian VET, in which public Technical and Further Education providers operate alongside private for-profit providers, is organised as competency-based training based on pre-defined national training packages, which have standardised, industry-defined outcomes (Wheelahan 2007, 2009). Just as in HVE, employers control the definition of outcomes, albeit at a national level, and provision is set up as a market in which providers– both public and private – compete (Pasura2014; Wheelahan2007). This neoliberal competitive training market is considered to have had‘adverse consequences for pedagogy and learning’ (Pasura2014, 580). The debate on the organisation of Australian VET and its formation of quali fica-tions, which is highly relevant to the Swedish case, lays bare the different stakeholders’ positions and preferences (Wheelahan 2015b). Industry bodies argue that the purpose of VET is to provide a skilled workforce and that the interests of educationalists undermine their influence on VET. Conversely, edu-cationalists argue that the qualifications are too tied to particular jobs and not broad enough from an educational perspective, focusing only on narrow tasks and workplace requirements. Industry also advocates that marketisation has adverse consequences for their influence on VET and its provision.
An insight into national education policy and policy on initial VET is important for understanding the context in which the Swedish HVE system was created. Swedish initial VET, which precedes HVE in the education system, is– and has been since the 1970s– school based and part of a unified system of upper secondary education aimed at broadening the participation of Swedish young people in this level of education. Another aim was to give universal access to higher education, as quali-fications from initial VET made people eligible for professional and academic higher education (Virolainen and Thunqvist2017). However, over the subsequent 40 years, the objective of initial VET has changed. The beginning of this change may be traced back to a 1991 educational reform of late tracking. The motives for this reform focused on economic growth and securing a competitive advantage in relation to Sweden’s economic and financial situation. They were not based on the egalitarian and emancipatory objectives often related to late tracking, which have historically held a prominent position in Swedish education policy (Erikson2017; Lundahl et al. 2010). The change has been characterised as a shift from a discourse of‘a school for all’ to one of ‘a school for the labour market’ (Erikson2017). This has been visible in several aspects, including how ideas about students have changed and how the concept of citizenship was transformed from a collective democratic construction to one of individual adaptability and flexibility (Carlbaum 2012; Terning 2016). Alongside this discursive shift, there has also been a change in the provision of education. Since the 1990s, publicly funded but privately owned schools and for-profit education enterprises have accompanied public schools in the provision of education throughout the Swedish education system, including adult education (Andersson and Muhrman 2019; Erixon Arreman and Holm 2011; Fejes and Holmqvist2019; Fejes, Runesdotter, and Wärvik2016). It may be suggested that both the discursive shift and the change in provision reflect the permeation of neoliberal educational policies into the Swedish national context (Ball and Youdell 2009; Carlbaum2012). Today, after the latest reform of upper secondary education, there is a clear-cut division of tracks into either VET or higher education preparatory programmes, with the former distinctively geared towards employability and mar-ket relevance (Lundahl2016; Nylund, Rosvall, and Ledman2017). This reform also created stronger relations between initial VET and the labour market and formalised input by business and industry in national and local reference groups (Virolainen and Thunqvist2017).
Interesting parallels with the organisation of HVE may be seen in an industry-driven initiative regarding technical VET in Swedish upper secondary education. This initiative is said to have been possible because working life had been given a more influential role in initial VET and national control of upper secondary education had been loosened due to decentralisation and marketisation (Persson and Hermelin2018). The initiative is a certification scheme to secure manual skills in technology-based industries which runs parallel to the national regulations. It is based on voluntary, decentralised, regional cooperation between clusters of muni-cipalities (which are responsible for the public provision of initial VET), an
employer's organisation and a trade union. The initiative has challenged the nationally organised system with new organisational structures in which business and industry are important partners in the management and development of VET. It also applies differing criteria for the quality assurance of skills formation, which has led to a lengthening of the national technical VET programme at certified schools, going beyond the national regulations.
Method: a theoretical thematic analysis of policy documents
Fourteen Swedish public documents relating to post-secondary VET and the establishment of HVE were analysed. The process of selecting the material consisted of determining the type of documents to be studied and the relevant time period. The outcome of this selection was a dataset consisting of two categories of documents published between 2006 and 2017.
First, all legislative and national policy documents about Swedish post-secondary VET published during this period were included in the material. This category consists of two Government Official Reports and the directions given to the inquiry bodies responsible for these reports (Ministry of Education and Research2006a, 2006b, 2007, 2008b) as well as the government bill, law and regulations that established the HVE system (Ministry of Education and Research 2008a; SFS 2009:128; SFS2009:130). There is also a report from 2015 based on a review of the HVE system and a subsequent government bill (Ministry of Education and Research 2015a;2015b).
Second, instructional documents from the national agency were selected. This second category consists of the formal outlines that education providers must follow when applying for approval and funding to run HVE programmes. Two versions of this document, published in 2010 and 2017, were included. It also includes three documents of guidelines regarding curricula and course syllabi, work-based learning and management boards (National Agency for Higher Vocational Education2010,2011,2015a,2015b,2017a).
The documents were analysed using a theoretical thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke2006). This consisted of coding the selected documents in relation to the theoretical framework presented in the next section. The questions of what and how, as well as why and who, were also used to facilitate the coding. Using an interpretative approach, the codes were collated into themes such as sys-temic organisation, employers as authority and purpose. Thefindings presented in this article are based on these theoretically grounded themes. All of the material is in Swedish and excerpts have been translated by the author.
Theoretical framework: a pedagogic device and its discourses
Educational and sociological research often focuses on what is reproduced in education, i.e. gender, class and so forth (Bernstein1990,2000). The focus of this article, however, is the systemic arrangement constituting the conditions for
reproduction. Attention is, therefore, directed towards the institutional relations created in the arrangement of the Swedish HVE system. Specifically, this covers the relations of power and control amongst the involved actors, agencies and contexts of practice that the system creates and upholds and that regulate the premises for reproduction, i.e. the relay of social order.
The analysis of the policy documents on post-secondary VET makes use of Bernstein’s theory of the pedagogic device, its rules and principles of recontex-tualisation in different fields and the analytical concept of pedagogic discourse as entailing models of students, teachers and pedagogic contexts in the form of imagined pedagogic identities (Bernstein1990,2000; Singh, Thomas, and Harris 2013). In this article, HVE and its arrangement are considered a pedagogic device. The pedagogic device is a theoretical model of generative principles for power and control. It is the basis of an analytical perspective for under-standing education as reflecting the division of power and as a relay of social order through reproduction (Bernstein2000; Singh2002; Singh, Thomas, and Harris2013; Wheelahan2005).
The what and how of education, the pedagogic discourse, is defined within the so-called recontextualisingfields of the pedagogic device (Bernstein2000). The rules of the pedagogic device, which are ideological and reflect social order, regulate the processes of recontextualisation, as well as the relations of power and control in and between recontextualisingfields and agents in these fields. There are two types of recontextualising fields in which pedagogic discourses are defined, i.e. given specific meaning by recontextualising agents. Official recontextualising fields (ORFs) are directly regulated by the state in legislation and policy, as well as administratively through authorities and national agencies. It is from this field that the documents analysed in this article have been gathered. There are also pedagogic recontextualising fields (PRFs) found in proximity to education practices. The local contexts of HVE programmes, their management boards, the education providers and other agents, such as supervisors for work-based learning, constitute the PRFs in the pedagogic device that is Swedish HVE. The pedagogic discourses given spe-cific meaning in these fields are not, however, discourses in their own right, but principles for recontextualisation that comprise both instructional dis-courses of specialised knowledge and a moral regulative discourse of social order (Bernstein 1990; Singh, Thomas, and Harris 2013). The regulative dis-course is dominant, not only in producing the order of instructional disdis-course– i.e. the organisation of subjects and their sequencing and pacing (the rate of expected acquisition) – but also in regulating the theory of instruction, the how of pedagogic discourse, which entails models of imagined pedagogic identities for students and teachers as well as of pedagogic contexts (Bernstein2000). These identities are projections of the bias and focus of the prevailing order in policy struggles and thus they are discursively constructed by policy actors (Singh, Thomas, and Harris 2013). Bernstein (2000)
differentiates possible identities as one retrospective identity shaped by reli-gious and cultural grand narratives of the past, one prospective identity also recontextualising the past, and two de-centred identities of autonomy. The de-centred market identity is based on the bias towards and focus on peda-gogic practice to optimise the exchange value of its product in a market and the autonomy that is necessary to respond directly to the market and be competitive. The market identity represents a focus on the short term, in what Bernstein characterises as a‘culture and context to facilitate the survival of the fittest as judged by market demands’ (2000, 69) which instals a competitive enterprise culture within the managing and provision of education.
The theoretical framework is used to enable an investigation of the HVE system, not only as an organisational scheme but also as an investigation into its under-pinning principles and their production and re-production of positions for actors, including the National Agency for HVE, employers and education providers involved in processes of recontextualisation, as well as their production and re-production of identities for the students. Singh, Thomas, and Harris (2013) argue that these Bernsteinian analytical concepts contribute to critical education policy analyses, like the one covered in this article, because they enable an investigation of the generative principles of a pedagogic device. They do so by recognising educational policy discourses as producing and re-producing relations of power and control– that is, they provide an understanding of educational policy and education systems as creating and upholding the institutional relations that create the conditions for what education may reproduce.
Findings
The institutional relations created by the HVE system portray the rules and under-pinning principles of the pedagogic device. These regulate the recontextualising process of the pedagogic discourses of HVE, such that the rules and underpinning principles control the what and how, and in a sense also the who, of HVE.
The ideas used to mandate the new system of post-secondary VET have been found to revolve around efficacy, defined as the ability and power to produce an intended result and to do this efficiently. Efficacy is to be established in the HVE system through competition between education providers. This promotes local initiatives with significant employer involvement and influence in programmes that cater to their own needs. The policy has also discursively constructed a model of the learner, a market-oriented pedagogic identity for the students, in which they are construed as input material and as commodities.
Creating efficacy in the system of post-secondary VET
The need for a post-secondary VET system that displays efficacy is used as a pivotal idea to mandate the formation of HVE. The creation of a new part of
the Swedish national education system is supported by a depiction of existing post-secondary VET as inefficient and unsystematic, difficult to grasp and with overlapping forms of training governed by several different regulations and agencies. This chaotic state is to be remedied by the establishment of a system with the clearly determined objective of catering to the needs of business and industry. This is a system that is also set up like a market, where the education providers displaying the greatest degree of association with employers who state employment needs, and the highest level of co-funding of their pro-grammes by business and industry, are the ones that come out on top.
Having the‘right objective’
To determine what may be called the‘right objective’, the idea of a changed working life, which demands higher qualifications, is used as a backdrop, and the new system is presented as an extension of the responsibilities of the public education system. These extended responsibilities and the associated costs are justified by the need for new skills in working life:
The increased knowledge content of products and production methods, as well as the new organisation of work, require deeper and broader skills among employees. The opportunities for students to reach these levels of skill during a three-year upper secondary education have decreased. (Ministry of Education and Research2008b, 16) The need and demand for higher qualifications in an increasingly complex working life is supposed to have created a situation in which employers cannot find employees with the right skills. Finishing a VET programme at the upper secondary level is believed to no longer provide the qualifications required; yet, at the same time, these needs are not met by the academic or professional higher education provided by universities and university colleges:
there is a demand in working life for qualified vocational expertise that is not met by the current range of programmes and courses at universities and university colleges. [. . .] In order to meet this demand, training programmes in other forms of public education and outside the public school system have emerged [. . .] Such education and training contributes to the development of the production of goods and services and thus to economic growth. (Ministry of Education and Research2008a, 14-5)
The fact that training programmes responding to the needs of employers already have emerged, both within and independent of the public school system, is used as support for the reasoning that increased skills needs exist and proof of the necessity to establish HVE. The already-existing training arrangements are articulated as contributing to economic growth and competi-tiveness, and mimicking the functions of these arrangements is pinpointed as the objective of the HVE system.
From this general objective, the purpose of the HVE programmes is formu-lated more specifically as catering to employers. Both the system and the education providers are intended to deliver programmes that provide
employers with the manpower they need for their enterprises to grow and be competitive. The system is set up to ensure supply for employers, and the education providers are construed as suppliers delivering training programmes based on the demands of employers. There is a distinct and prominent direct institutional relationship of supply and demand between the government-funded HVE system and employers, i.e. between public and private:
The regulations of this act are intended to ensure, within HVE, that post-secondary VET which meets the needs of working life is established. (SFS2009:128, 1 §)
The scope of HVE can thus be adapted relatively quickly to suit needs and demands. (Ministry of Education and Research2008a, 22)
When expressions of this relationship appear in instructional documents pub-lished by the responsible national agency, rather than in policy documents emanating from the government, they are more specific and conclusive and present the demand side not just as‘business and industry’ or ‘working life’, but as specific hiring companies and organisations.
In the efforts to instil efficacy into the system, the policy has pinpointed what the‘right objective’ is and presented the purpose of its programmes as catering to the needs of employers. This pinpointed‘right objective’ and the formulated purpose establish the what of pedagogic discourses in HVE. This underpinning principle of meeting the skills needs of employers constructs what may be described as outer boundaries for the recontextualising processes, boundaries that indicate the discourses from which the recontextualising agents in this pedagogic device may derive pedagogic discourse. And these boundaries limit the actors to selecting discourses from the context of production of the involved employers, where the skills are needed. This is the way to achieve the right objective, to have the right what in pedagogic discourse in HVE.
In the documents relating to the establishment of HVE, educational planning to meet the right objective is based on the idea that this is best done in local contexts, on a short-term basis and by employers:
The major technological and social changes are often difficult to predict at the macro level. Employers alsofind it difficult to assess long-term needs for recruitment, and what skills will be required. In the short term, the projection of current trends seems to be the most common – and possibly the most accurate – forecast. However, the planning of education is seldom done in the short term. [. . .] The government, like the government official report, believes that the initiation of a new programme in HVE is mainly to be achieved in an interaction between the world of work, education providers and other stakeholders at the local or regional level. (Ministry of Education and Research2008a, 23)
National and unified planning in the ORF, at what is called a macro level, is considered to be inefficient because it is not accurate in meeting the hard-to-predict needs of employers. Planning, including the conceptualisation of
programmes, is thus cut off from the national level of skills planning by the policy. Implementing educational planning based on these strategies instead positions great parts of the recontextualisation and formation of pedagogic discourse in PRFs and gives employers power and control over the recontex-tualising processes.
However, the strategy of short-term planning is contested in the material originating from the Social Democratic–Green coalition government that came to power in 2014:
HVE is currently focused on short-term labour-market needs [. . .] This has created uncer-tainty regarding the future of the specific programmes. From the perspective of working life, HVE needs to become more long term. (Ministry of Education and Research2015a, 9)
The best strategies for planning to create efficacy in the system are a point of contention, and the studied policy documents vary over time in what they argue to be most strategic, from a shorter to a slightly longer perspective. However, the local and employer-driven methods of planning are not contested. They are presented as pivotal throughout the material and indicate the underpinning principle, which positions power and control over the device with employers. This is one aspect of the unique institutional relations between education and work, and public and private, in the HVE system.
Promoting local initiatives through marketised provision and tendering
In the pursuit of efficacy, legislation has been formulated very precisely regarding how the funds appropriated for HVE are to be distributed to the programmes:
In particular, the National Agency for HVE shall consider, in its allocation of grants or special funds, the degree to which a programme: 1. In qualitative and quantitative terms, meets the needs of working life for skilled workers. (SFS 2009:130, 5 §, ch. 5)
When considering how to allocate funds, the national agency is required tofirst and foremost consider the extent to which an HVE programme is a response to the needs of employers– that is, whether they are meeting the right objective. Provision in the system is set up like a market, and the allocation of funds is achieved through an annual tendering-like process, in which education providers compete with each other and apply for approval and funding to run programmes. In their application documents, the education providers are asked to describe their collaboration with employers and how the suggested programme responds to their needs:
A description that merely highlights a desired need in an industry, without at the same time showing a clear employment requirement, is not sufficient as a description of a demand. It is important that the description clearly shows a specific need for employ-ment in the coming years. [. . .] Which companies will hire and why will they hire? To what extent have these companies employed during the last three years? To what extent are these companies planning to hire within the next three to five years? (National Agency for Higher Vocational Education2017a, 17)
In the excerpt above, taken from the documents that frame the application process, it is clear just how concrete the questions put to the education providers are. Based on the underpinning principles that focus on supplying employers with what they need, the responses to these questions are the most important factor in the selection of programmes for the allocation of funds. Second, the national agency is required to consider the extent to which employ-ers and other organisations representative of working life have pledged to co-finance the programme. In the application documents referred to above, the education providers must include several budget figures, which are used to calculate a percentage that specifies the degree of co-funding of each pro-gramme. The education providers may include figures not only of monetary contributions but also of non-monetary ones in the form of discounts on buying or renting material for the education and training or reductions in the consult-ing fees charged by representatives of employers who contribute to the programme.
This line of questioning, whereby strong employer involvement in PRFs is prioritised, both promotes and is meant to ensure programmes based on local and employer-driven initiatives as winners of the competition. In this competi-tion, it is crucial for the education providers to show agents in the ORF that the programme complies with the rules and underpinning principles regulating the device in order to receive funds and legitimacy. The chosen programmes are allocated funds for between one and five cohorts; to continue running a programme with more cohorts, the education provider must enter the com-petition again. This comcom-petition makes the education providers dependent on employers. It clearly defines the position of power and control in the creation of programmes – the recontextualising process of pedagogic discourse – with employers. Approving or declining an application is also part of the recontex-tualising process, however, and thus also part of constructing the pedagogic discourse. Power and control over this lie with the officers and chiefs at the national agency, who are agents in the ORF. However, these agents of the ORF do not have the power to initiate or conceptualise programmes. Their control is limited to the process of selection and promotion of the initiatives that best adhere to the underpinning principles of the device. In the organisation of this system, the tendering-like process for allocating funds is crucial to realising the underpinning principle of efficacy formulated in the ORF, as well as a crucial aspect of producing and reproducing the institutional relations between actors such as the National Agency for HVE, employers and education providers.
Positioning students as input material and commodities
Emerging in this policy analysis is also an imagined market-oriented pedagogic identity for HVE students. This specific model of the learner, to which the rules of
this device give rise, construes the students as a resource in and an output from production.
There are many articulations in which the students could have been posi-tioned as learning subjects. The lack of students being articulated as individuals and learning subjects is visible, for instance, in the reasoning about why HVE should be established:
They [the HVE programmes] should be established and developed because there is a need for specific qualifications and competences for the production of goods and services. (Ministry of Education and Research2008a, 28)
In the excerpt above, ‘qualifications and competences’ could have referred to students/graduates. These capacities could have been construed as properties of individuals, but are not. Students as learning subjects, individuals or citizens are absent from the definition of the purpose of HVE. However, it is possible to interpret students as an imagined pedagogic identity construed by the logic of supply and demand in a market. With the overarching policy on HVE being to efficiently supply output, this reasoning logically also requires a material or resource to be processed in order to produce this output. In this pedagogic device, students may be interpreted as input material that, through training, are turned into a product with exchange value. The education providers in HVE are thus construed as not only the suppliers but also the manufacturers of the output, the commodity to be supplied, i.e. graduates.
The market-oriented pedagogic identity of students as input material or a resource in production is visible in the excerpt below, in which policy gives HVE the task of using all its available resources, referring to immigrants:
HVE should also help to improve the opportunities for people with foreign back-grounds to enter the labour market. Increased diversity has great value for the devel-opment of society if we are able to use this resource. (Ministry of Education and Research2008a, 32)
This excerpt from the 2008 bill highlights the identity of the student as input material that, when treated in the process of an HVE programme, becomes a resource to be used in the progress and development of society. This reasoning construes graduates as a traded commodity rather than as individuals, and there are no links made between students as individuals and the benefits that they them-selves receive from education. This means that they are not supposed to take part in VET because it is valuable for the immigrants themselves to be part of a developing society. Rather, it is because, if they are trained, they become a resource for business and industry, for economic growth and competitiveness. This can be understood as a separation of knowledge and the knower in the market-oriented pedagogic identity, where the product of education is expected toflow like money in markets to where there is a demand. Thus, HVE students/graduates are required toflow as commodities from the supplying education system to employers’ enterprises
without hindrance due to personal commitments or the inner dedication of staff or students.
Discussion
This article has focused on investigating the relatively new system of Swedish HVE, the ideas used in policy to mandate the system and the institutional relations between education and work, and between public and private, that it represents.
The HVE system has been fashioned in line with the neoliberal idea of education as human capital development and as a tool for national competi-tiveness and economic growth (Avis2012). Similarly, the market identity, based on the bias towards and focus on pedagogic practice to generate exchange value for its product in a market, construes HVE as one part of an institutional supply-and-demand relationship between education and work, in which the production of skilled graduates is to be precisely calibrated to the needs of the employers involved (Bernstein2000). The tendering-like application process to sort out which programmes are to be approved is one crucial aspect of the competitive pedagogic contexts of this market identity.
Because power and control over the HVE programmes are, to a great extent, exercised locally by employers, different types of institutional relations between publicly funded education, education providers, the labour market and employ-ers are created compared with elsewhere in the Swedish education system. In the HVE system, an employer who initiates or collaborates on an HVE pro-gramme can expect, within two or three years, to have some 20–30 graduates to choose from when hiring– graduates who have been trained according to a curriculum meeting the employer’s specific needs (Köpsén2019). By then, the employer has also had the chance to try out students by offering them place-ments for the work-based learning portion of the programme. A Swedish employer can, in a sense, place an order by initiating an HVE programme, pay only a minor part of the cost by contributing to the education and training and receive the state-subsidised commodity when it graduates. Rather than a system offering benefits for both students and a wider labour market, which is common, for instance, in those VET systems characterised as collective skills regimes (e.g. Busemeyer and Trampusch2011; Dobbins and Busemeyer2015; Emmenegger, Graf, and Trampusch2019; Thelen2004), the underpinning prin-ciples of this device focus on the benefits for employers. The concerns raised by Australian industry about losing influence over VET in a marketised system are extraneous in the Swedish case, as both public and private education providers are dependent on employers in the tendering-like process of applications for approval and funding.
Nowhere in the policy to mandate the establishment of HVE is an idea presented that relates directly to the students. This is due to the imagined market-oriented
pedagogic identity of HVE students (Bernstein2000) as input material and com-modities, not as lifelong learning subjects or as workers trading their skills on markets. The construction of HVE students is in severe dissonance with the idea of students as subjects defined by responsibility, adaptability and employability that is part of educational policies based on lifelong learning discourses. For instance, the latter idea is expressed in the contemporaneous European Union VET policies (European Commission2002,2010). This neoliberal student subject, who is to be equipped through education and training with competencies and skills that make them adaptable to changing labour markets, is also part of the discourse in the latest curricular reform of Swedish upper secondary education (Carlbaum 2012; Nylund and Rosvall2016; Nylund, Rosvall, and Ledman2017; Terning2016). Hence, there is a distinct difference within Swedish VET policy. It may be interpreted as a representation of the differences in institutional relations between the two systems, i.e. differences regarding which recontextualising agents hold power and control (Bernstein1990,2000). Although no longer governed by an emancipatory paradigm, initial VET is a structure within which collaboration on forming the programmes and selection of educational content is carried out at national level, with much of the power and control positioned with national agencies and policy-makers (Virolainen and Thunqvist2017). In these collaborations, representatives of trades also consist of the different parties on the labour market. Both unions and employers’ organisations take part. This is also the case in the employer-driven initiative of parallel certification regarding initial technical VET, where the union is a significant stakeholder in the scheme (Persson and Hermelin 2018). In HVE, however, the unions have no official position. This is significant because the struggles over HVE, i.e. over the pedagogic device and pedagogic discourse, con-cern not only the education systems but also power relations in industry and the labour market. The arrangement of the HVE system does not create any institutional relations between workers’ organisations and the HVE system or its programmes because the policy does not position them as actors in recontextualisation (Bernstein1990,2000). Nor does it specifically promote any form of consolidation of employers to collaborate more comprehensively than on the management boards of single programmes. HVE programmes and their curricula are initiated and formed locally and align with specific positions for workers in the involved enterprises (Köpsén2019). Hence, the formation of qualifications and the positions of HVE graduates are not negotiated by the stakeholders of the traditional Swedish model, in which national employers’ organisations and trade unions are central actors. The policy on HVE and the arrangement of the system have thus created relations of power and control that are new to the Swedish context. The limited involvement, by national comparison, of the state, the strong employer influence and marketised provision are clearly divergent from the previously strong Swedish paradigm of nationally controlled VET, the legacy of which still has a strong influence on upper secondary education (Persson and Hermelin2018; Virolainen and Thunqvist2017). Policy and the system of HVE have instead, to a great extent,
positioned power and control over the device and its recontexualising principles– the pedagogic discourse – with the locally involved employers (Bernstein1990, 2000). Power and control have been positioned away from the national level, as well as from the traditional bi-partisan relations of the Swedish labour market, because the underpinning principles of the pedagogic device of Swedish HVE assert that employers and their competitiveness are the entire foundation of HVE and its objective.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
ORCID
Johanna Köpsén http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3150-4853
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