Towards a European model of collective skill formation? Analysing the European Alliance for Apprenticeships

ABSTRACT

While the literature in skill formation systems has paid considerable attention to inter-variation between types of national skill formation systems and intra-variation among individual types as in the case of collective skill formation systems, less is known about the role of the European Union in establishing a European model of skill formation. Building on studies in educational governance and decentralised cooperation, this paper analyses the European Alliance for Apprenticeships (EAfA) and explores its relationship to national skill formation systems. We analyse the emergence of a European model of collective skill formation and offer case studies of Ireland and France to understand how this European model relates to these two contrasting skill formation systems. Through deductive qualitative content analysis of official documents, we show that (a) the EAfA, in resembling characteristics of national collective skill formation systems, promotes the emergence of a European model of collective skill formation, and (b) that Ireland and France show signs of moving further towards adopting elements of a collectivist training model centred on apprenticeship training although mediated by path-dependencies of a liberal (Ireland) and statist (France) skill formation model.

KEYWORDS:

• European Alliance for Apprenticeships
• varieties of skill formation regimes
• vocational education and training
• educational policy
• decentralised governance

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Conference of the Comparative & International Education Society (April 2021), the Conference of the Council for European Studies (June 2021), and the European Conference on Educational Research (September 2021). We thank our discussants (Eva Hartmann, Leonard Geyer, and Martina Vukasovic) and all participants for their very insightful comments. We would also like to thank Judith-Rohde Liebenau, Anne-Clémence Le Noan, Anna Prisca Lohse, and Flavio Balistreri from the Hertie School's Educational Governance Team for their very helpful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Database of national commitments to the EAfA: https://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=1149&langId=en (last accessed 25 April 2022).

2. Abbreviations (Vossiek 2018): AUS = Australia; AUT = Austria; CAN = Canada; DK = Denmark; F = France; GER = Germany; IRE = Ireland; JAP = Japan; NL = Netherlands; NZL = New Zealand; SWE = Sweden; UK = United Kingdom; US = United States.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lukas Graf

Lukas Graf is Assistant Professor of Educational Governance at the Hertie School - The University of Governance in Berlin. He combines comparative, institutional, and organisational approaches to analyse educational policies in an international perspective.

Marcelo Marques

Marcelo Marques is a postdoctoral researcher at the Hertie School – The University of Governance in Berlin. He is interested in comparative institutional and organisational analysis to understand transnational governance and Europeanisation processes in the field of education policies.