UK government policy aims to reshape the English vocational education and training (VET) system into a “world-class Germany-style” system (Belgutay, 2020), with recent policies in, e.g. the Further Education White Paper, intended to realise this intention. Features of the German system perceived as significant by the UK government include:

• A clear distinction between academic and vocational pathways at upper secondary level;
• The role of industry groups in setting the assessments and content of the qualifications that underpin the system; and
• The centrality of apprenticeships and work-based training.

Proposals for UK qualification change would enforce a near-binary decision between academic and technical routes at age 16. A levels would remain the central academic secondary school leaving qualifications, while recently announced T levels would be the main technical pathway qualification. Academic and vocational “blended” learning would likely diminish. There are plans for more apprenticeships and higher technical qualifications post-18 (perhaps at the expense of full university degrees in more “applied” areas).

However, as Mayhew (2020, cited in Goodhart, 2020) notes, policy borrowing absent acknowledgement of the different systems and underpinning institutions in different countries is “dangerous”. In this context, the German system’s success derives from its foundation upon its particular social architecture, which the UK does not share (Deissinger, 1996) - and which the UK government has no intention of fully replicating. For example, the German social market economy relies on partnerships between social partners (trade unions, employers and government), such as works councils. Employer organisations and trade unions both participate in creating training regulations and course content. The UK government wants employers involved in creating qualifications by 2030 (FE White Paper, 2021), through Chambers of Commerce. But this ignores the very different (minimal) roles played by chambers in the UK. As Tom Bewick has noted, these mostly small organisations have no capacity for playing the “powerful” role envisaged by policymakers such as Alison Wolf (Whieldon, 2020).

Moreover, the UK government focus on employers’ (but not unions’) role in qualification design is attributable to ideological opposition to labour playing a major role in education except under government direction. Other examples of this include the intended abolition of government funding to the Union Learning Fund, and recent criticisms of teaching unions. It is argued that this UK government opposition to the involvement of the labour movement, and thus a fuller social partnership model, risks the success of the VET policy.

Other under-explored system problems include the currency of and public support for UK qualifications and the institutionally fragmented structures of vocational teaching. Important distinctions between the UK’s neoliberal market economy and the German social market model, and the cultures they embody, go unrecognised in this attempt to replicate outcomes without their underpinning architectures.

The German system also has its own weaknesses, and is being itself reformed. More young Germans are opting for university over technical education, and in consequence Germany is opening up more pathways to blended vocational and academic learning (Walden & Trotsch, 2011; Ertl, 2020). The system is seen as slow to reform (Studemann, 2020). Indeed, most countries have modelled VET systems on the English model instead (Deissinger, 2015). The German system thus takes on more English model-like features at the very time the UK government condemns key elements of the latter, including its direction towards higher education, focus on individual choice, and openness to change.

This work’s contribution is to draw out tensions between rhetoric and reality in the UK government’s interest in policy-borrowing from the German VET model, highlighting both practical differences between the UK and German systems-as-perceived and systems-in-reality, the ideological underpinnings of these tensions, and potential consequences.

This is a policy-focused thematic analysis of both academic and grey literature across both the UK and Germany. Documents and other literature setting out UK government policy intentions were studied in relation to critical frame analysis (Goffman, 1974; Kuypers, 2009). This allowed a central focus to be placed on the rhetorical implications of policy announcements and how they frame issues. Framing methods can be seen to define problems, suggest causes and imply or indicate remedies; in this context, what the UK government perceived to be wrong with the present post-16 vocational education and training system, the implications for the country and its labour market of these problems, and suggested remedies embodied in the German system. Critical analyses can draw attention to gaps in decision-making, highlight misalignments and counter-vailing tendencies within policymaking, and place at stake issues such as hidden or implicit ideological implications. Government and government-led publications from both Germany and the UK were researched to establish policy intentions and outcomes. These included, for example, the Sainsbury review and Wolf report in the United Kingdom, reports and white papers from the UK Department of Education and descriptive reports from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Analytical reports such as the work of Cedefop on both countries’ systems were consulted for detailed assessments of the nature of the vocational education and training space in both countries. A comprehensive search of relevant peer-reviewed journals, including Oxford Review of Education, Journal of Vocational Education & Training, Vocations and Learning and Empirical Research in Vocational Education and Training, based on a wide variety of key terms, was undertaken. In addition to “literature” as such, political speeches, newspaper articles and other sources were also utilised, as were think tank reports (e.g. The Training We Need Now, ed. Goodhart, 2020).

The analysis shows how the UK government’s policy focus on aping the success of the German model for upper secondary VET has three central issues. Firstly, it mischaracterises the German model, including in failing to recognise its weaknesses; secondly, it ignores the role of the social and economic architecture underpinning the German model and its differences from the relevant architectures in England; thirdly, it is grounded in ideological dismissal of the labour movement’s role in the social partnership model and a consequent refusal to thoroughly establish more similar architectures in England that could allow for greater success of the VET policy. The analysis concludes by exploring deeper ideological tensions between nationalist and neoliberal tendencies in contemporary UK conservatism, and consequent VET policy tensions between state-directed industrial-strategy goals and the more traditionally liberal focus on individual choice and flexibility (Mandler, 2020).

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