Vocational education–industry linkages: intensity of relationships and firms’ assessment

ABSTRACT

Twenty years since educational reforms were implemented in Spain aiming at the modernisation of the vocational education system and at the improvement of its educational and developmental functions, relationships between education and industry have not been widely analysed. This study reviews the recent international literature on the topic and then looks at one advanced regional case within the school-based, Spanish vocational education context. Analysing data from a sample of 330 industrial firms from the Basque Country, binary logistic regression was applied in order to identify factors especially associated to the fact that SMEs have a greater or lower number of collaboration relations with vocational schools. We also examined the variables that have the greatest impact on whether firms assess vocational schools positively. Results indicate a strong association between intensity of relationships and positive assessment of vocational schools’ educational and developmental functions.

KEYWORDS:

• Vocational education and training
• VET
• industry
• SMEs
• Spain

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Mikel Olazaran http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3818-1850

Notes

1 The statements were: (a) ‘The formal education offered by the schools is suited to our needs’; (b) ‘The current vocational education offer (LOGSE) is an improvement on the old LGE Act-based system’; (c) ‘We would like schools to give/offer more continuing education’; (d) ‘We think these schools should play a more active role in support for innovation’. This index totals all degrees of agreement (1–4) with the different statements. Agreement was measured in this way: 1 = Strongly disagree, 2 = Disagree, 3 = Agree, 4 = Strongly agree. Non-replies to any item are assigned a value of 0. The maximum value of the index is 16 (strongly agree with all statements).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Basque Government, Department of Education [Grant Number IT593-13] and Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness [Grant Number CSO2011-29410-C03-01].