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Why policy is not just collective hallucination GLACIER international webinar series
Glasgow Network for Comparative and International Education Research (GLACIER) presents: Professor Stephanie Allais, University of the Witswatersrand, will lead this webinar which reflects on three decades of work at the policy/research interface in various aspects of post-school education and training, mainly in South Africa but also in other African countries. The central conundrum, when looking at vocational education and youth unemployment, and in searching for solutions in skills training, is why governments, donors, and development agencies continue to push policies and interventions that have clearly failed, or, at best, have no evidence of success, and further, that can be pulled apart conceptually. Competence-based training and occupational standards as mechanisms for workplace-relevance; quality assurance regimes as ways to improve quality; qualifications frameworks as silver bullets for mobility, articulation, quality; are included in the policies under consideration, as well as many skills interventions for youth employment. To do things differently, we have to understand not just why the policy interventions fail, but why they continue to be pushed despite lack of evidence in their favour, and lack of clear conceptual rationale. Policy, like theory, is a simplification of the world, abstracted from the messiness of the real world. Policy makers operate in a complex world with so many moving points beyond their control. Perhaps this leads to operating as if policy IS the real world, or focusing only on developing policy and not thinking about what implementation means. Unfortunately, at this point it becomes a self-contained world and we can’t learn. This is not only a challenge for policy makers, but also for researchers. Many policy evaluations and academic studies remain at the level of collecting little pieces of data that don’t feed into a coherent view of the phenomenon under investigation, and their influence is therefore fragmented rather than developmental. The reverse is also true: many policy evaluations and academic studies fall into the reverse trap—remaining in love with themselves as an abstraction from the world, impervious to data. The challenge is improving the interface between theory, policy, and data, to learn and build robust knowledge about change. Biography: Stephanie Matseleng Allais is Research Chair of Skills Development and Professor of Education at the Centre for Researching Education and Labour, University of the Witwatersrand, where she researches international education and development, focused on education/ work relationships. Her books include Knowledge, Curriculum, and Preparation for Work (Brill/SENSE) with Yael Shalem, and Selling Education Out: National Qualifications Frameworks and the abandonment of Knowledge (Sense). She is an editor of the Journal of Vocational Education and Training, and on the editorial boards of various other journals. Previously, she was a fellow at the Centre for Educational Sociology at the University of Edinburgh, and a researcher at the International Labour Organization.
