Teachers in Vocational Education and Training (VET) across Europe are working in challenging conditions. Reforms in relation to performance management are challenging established ideas of teacher professionalism in a range of contexts (Hautz, 2020).  In the UK, Vocational Education and Training (VET) is also ‘piecemeal and fragmented’ and lacks the clear ‘narrative’ that can be found in other European systems (Winch and Addis, 2022).  This long-standing problem has been argued to impact, among other things, recruitment into VET teaching (see Hanley and Orr, 2019) and overall economic competitiveness (Winch and Addis, 2022).  There have been impacts of VET teachers too with some work suggesting that the combination of managerial use of targets and curricula designed without VET teacher input has led to a complete loss of agency for UK VET teachers (Lloyd and Payne, 2012). Orr (2019) suggests this is an issue in other European systems too though perhaps to a lesser extent.

In this paper, I explore the various ways that current policies are being enacted in practice in Further Education Institutions (FEIs) in the UK.  Specifically, I am interested in the degree of agency that VET teachers have in their professional lives.  I focus on FEIs specifically as this is where the majority of VET takes place in the UK and these are the types of institutions most subject to the kinds of managerial oversight described above. In England and Scotland, the two countries I focus on here, FEIs cater to a combined total of approximately 2 million students and offer a wide range of academic and vocational courses and apprenticeship provision (AOC, 2022; Colleges Scotland, 2022).  Despite this, work focussing on the interpretation and negotiation of policy within FEIs - or what Ball et al (2012) call ‘policy work’- is relatively rare.    

The theoretical framework informing this work comes from Ball et al (2012) who explored ‘policy enactment’ in secondary schools.  This is slightly different to a focus on ‘implementation’ which, I suggest, only offers a limited insight into the work involved in ‘doing policy’.  In contrast to a ‘normative’ approach (Ozga, 2000) which Cairney and Oliver (2020) suggest doesn’t account for decision-making taking place at sub-national levels, I focus here on practitioners’ accounts of the work they do to negotiate and work with policy priorities in their own settings.

Using Ball et al’s (2012) framework, I explored accounts of ‘policy work’ in two VET settings - one in Scotland and one in England.  Policy work can be thought of as the range of activities professionals, in this case VET teachers, undertake in relation to policy (Ball et al, 2012).  Some of these activities may indicate a more or less critical stance in relation to any particular policy and a more or less agentic position.

In doing this, I am seeking to answer two key questions:  what agency (if any) do UK VET teachers have?  And what constrains their agency?

I conducted semi-structured focus groups and interviews with a total of 6 practitioners to explore accounts of ‘policy work’ in two VET settings - one in Scotland and one in England. The focus on policy work allowed participants to talk through their decision making, explore alternatives and explain the conditions under which their decisions were made. In each case, I centred the discussions around a specific policy issue. In England, my focus was entry requirements for RQF Level 3 (EQF Level 4) options - building on some earlier work (Lupton et al, 2021) where we examined options for those without the expected grades in English and Maths by age 16. In Scotland, I examined challenges around the provision of the Curriculum for Excellence’s (CFE) ‘senior phase’ in FEIs. During the senior phase, young people in Scotland can spend part of their time in school and part in an FEI. In both these policy contexts, VET teachers are responsible for enacting policies that have impacts on admissions, organisation and delivery of provision and assessment. Due to the fast moving policy context in both Scottish and English VET, all the participants were able to draw on their previous working practices and contrast these with their current circumstances. This allowed for an even more detailed consideration of their current policy contexts and the ways in which these created or constrained agency. I used Directed Qualitative Content Analysis (Hsieh and Shannon, 2005) to analyse the transcripts from these focus groups and interviews. The initial codes were formed by considering the types of policy work in Ball et al’s (2012) model of policy enactments for schools and looking for evidence of agency in these accounts of VET practitioners.

I found evidence in the interview and focus group data that VET teachers did have some degree of agency in their work but that this was often constrained. Hautz (2020) suggests that governmentality and its implicit power mechanisms can explain constraints on VET teacher agency. However, in the accounts here, the concept of ‘master discourses’ from Ball et al (2012) proved much more useful at explaining the constraints articulated by the participants in their accounts of policy work. The ‘master discourses’ articulated by the participants focussed on the low reputation of VET routes and institutions - a common problem for VET everywhere (Orr, 2019). The participants recognised the persuasiveness and durability of these discourses for others whilst not subscribing to them themselves. These overarching understandings of the place of VET in the wider education landscape were key in shaping the policy enactments of practitioners and often formed the backbone of their narratives of policy work. Their accounts included discussions of entrepreneurial and creative actions but also detailed how participants had to carve out the spaces to act in this way. They did this through detailed understanding of the managerial mechanisms they were subject to and through their wider knowledge of the education policy landscape. The identification of master discourses in the data helped to contextualise the narratives of practitioners and avoid an overly-simplistic reading of their accounts of their own policy work.The participants’ accounts ultimately show the possibility of professionals to exercise some agency even when working in systems, such as English and Scottish VET, with strict accountability/quality frameworks and lots of policy change - a growing characteristic of VET systems elsewhere in Europe.

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