The social composition of VET in New Zealand

Abstract

This paper identifies three, overlapping, phases of restructuring of New Zealand's system of vocational education and training (VET). These are the meritocratic, the market and the managed. In very different ways, each phase has been designed to increase the propensity of students from all social backgrounds to participate in VET. This paper contributes to debates about the impact of reform of VET in New Zealand by reporting on the results of a study that assesses the propensity of students from different social backgrounds to progress to VET in New Zealand. In doing so, the paper assesses the extent to which VET is ‘for other people's children’ and responds to recent calls for research in VET that foregrounds ethnicity, gender and social class.

Keywords:

• vocational education and training
• ethnicity
• gender
• socio-economic status
• inequality
• qualifications frameworks

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges the contribution of Ralf Engler from the New Zealand Ministry of Education, who undertook much of the statistical analysis that underlies this paper. This analysis draws on and extends the analysis in Engler (2010).

Notes

1. It almost goes without saying that the view that training=high-skill/high-wage work, or the ‘training gospel’ has been subjected to critique, particularly in England (Avis 2009; Payne 2000) the United States (Grubb and Lazerson 2005) and New Zealand (Jordan and Strathdee 2001; Strathdee 2005).

2. New Zealand's National Certificates of Educational Achievement (NCEA) are national qualifications for senior secondary school students (see http://www.nzqa.govt.nz/qualifications-standards/qualifications/ncea/ for further details).

3. Wānanga offer tertiary level training that is guided Māori principles and values.

4. It is important to stress that the fact that the official vision has yet to be realised is hardly the point, since completing its role in reproducing social class divisions requires that mythological discourses be established (Bernstein 2000). The purpose of such discourses is to maintain inequality by disguising, or masking, the way in which power relations beyond the school create hierarchies of knowledge within school which legitimate inequalities that arise from individualised and supposedly meritocratic schooling.

5. As noted in the acknowledgement previously, the statistical analysis that forms the basis of this paper was completed by Ralf Engler from the New Zealand Ministry of Education. The data are not available to the public as it contains personal information about individuals.

6. A more detailed analysis of the multi-ethnic group can be found in Engler's (2010) paper.

7. Note that these are not the probabilities of a student leaving school with the particular level of school qualification, since the study population excludes students not in the four main ethnic groups, students who are still at school, and those who gained NCEA level 3 or who met the UE requirement. This latter condition includes students who gained NCEA level 2.