Apprenticeships and Regeneration: The Civic Struggle to Achieve Social and Economic Goals

ABSTRACT

Apprenticeship has always played both a social and economic role. Today, it forms part of the regeneration strategies of cities in the United Kingdom. This involves the creation and management of complex institutional relationships across the public and private domains of the civic landscape. This paper argues that it is through closely observed analysis of these meso-level developments (in contrast to studies of national systems) that we can reveal how the sustainability of vocational education and training initiatives depends on the generation of civic social capital in the pursuit of collective goals. At the same time, the path-dependent nature of the clustering of social and economic inequality in urban post-industrial settings remains a constant reminder of the scale of the problems confronting all those involved.

Keywords:

• apprenticeship
• social capital
• urban regeneration
• space
• structures

Acknowledgements

The research on which this paper is based has been supported by the ESRC funded LLAKES research centre, grant reference RES-594-28-0001. We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on this paper.

Notes

1 This is a pseudonym.

2 Under the new government, the careers service is being re-organised; though, at the time of writing, Manchester still retained the existing Connexions service.

3 The Learning and Skills Council was abolished in 2009 and replaced with the Skills Funding Agency and the Young People's Learning Agency.

4 Level 2 is the UK's threshold for ‘employability’. School leavers in England can achieve Level 2 by passing five GCSEs (General Certificate of Secondary Education) at Grades A* to C. Vocational qualifications are also classified using the same level descriptors within the National Qualifications Framework.