Vocational Education in the New EU Member States : Enhancing Labor Market Outcomes and Fiscal Efficiency

Canning, Mary ; Godfrey, Martin ; Holzer-Zelazewska, Dorota

Washington, DC:World Bank

关键词: ABILITY LEVELS;    ACADEMIC STUDIES;    ACADEMIC SUBJECTS;    ACCESS TO HIGHER EDUCATION;    ACCREDITATION;   

DOI  :  10.1596/978-0-8213-7157-2
RP-ID  :  40560

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

This report explores the fiscal aspectsof vocational education reform in the context of secondaryeducation as a whole and considers the implications of anychanges in the vocational education (VE) system forpost-secondary and other modes of skill development. Thereport begins by describing the inherited system ofvocational education in the former socialist countries ofCentral and Eastern Europe which was based on the assumptionthat everyone had to be trained for a specific occupationbefore starting work and that it was the function ofvocational schools to provide such training. The reportexplores the scope for improvements in fiscal efficiency viaa number of propositions about VE in the EU8 countriestoday: a) It would not be possible or advisable to fundadequately a traditional VE system which would provideready-to-work recruits with narrowly specialized skills forthe economy's enterprises; b) One way to reduce coststo government would be to locate practical training entirelyin-plant but this is increasingly difficult; c) EU8employers' traditional expectations of afully-subsidized VE system delivering ready-to-work,specifically-skilled recruits are unreasonable; d)Traditional VE was the traditional answer to the question"What to do with those who have performed less well inbasic education?" but this answer no longer convinces;and e) Parents and students are showing an increasingpreference for general education (GE) over VE. Each of thesepropositions was discussed in this report not with a view toprescribing a detailed "one-size-fits-all"strategy for all the EU8 countries, but rather to derivingsome principles that continued reform of VE could take intoaccount, to the benefit of fiscal efficiency.