1. Skills Beyond School
Post-secondary Vocational Education and Training
Deborah Roseveare
Head, Education and Training Policy Division
OECD
Accession Seminar for Slovenia
26th May 2011

2. Outline
1. VET landscape across countries
2. Policy challenges and questions
3. OECD Skills beyond School project
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3. VET landscape across countries
• Major expansion in post-secondary education in last 20 years
• VET programmes may be offered
– at dedicated vocational institutions
– within regular universities
– in multi-purpose institutions
• Range of programmes on offer becoming more complex and dynamic
• Boundaries between VET and academic programmes becoming more blurred
(medicine, law, business, engineering?)
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4. • Variety of governance, funding and strategic oversight arrangements in
countries
– Unified framework for whole tertiary sector or
– Separate approaches for each type of institution
• Growing mix of public, private non-profit, private-for-profit institutions
– Neutral regulatory framework or
– Different rules for each type
• Trend towards greater autonomy for public tertiary education institutions
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5. • Cost drivers are often not well understood and/or difficult to manage
• Quality of VET programmes and institutions is difficult to measure
• Pathways within VET and between VET and academic programmes are
poorly connected
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6. • Recognition that demand for skills is dynamic:
– changing skill requirements within jobs
– increased demand for certain existing occupations
– new types of jobs, driven by innovation in products and services or new
demands from society
• Projections of future skills demand becoming more common and more
sophisticated
• But data on labour market outcomes of different study paths are often patchy or
only highly aggregated

7. Growing concerns about completion rates -- drop-out rates are often high
•Post-secondary VET often takes in less academically inclined and/or non-
traditional and adult students
•Some entrants are poorly prepared for post-secondary
•Many vocational students have disadvantaged backgrounds and less access to
financial support than students in academic programmes
•Public funding may be lower, sometimes due to policy responses to expanding
post-secondary sector
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8. Common policy challenges
How can institutional frameworks, funding and governance arrangements be
designed to encourage:
– optimal balance between post-secondary VET and academic
programmes?
– providers to respond to labour market needs?
– innovation and efficient provision of programmes?
How to manage costs of post-secondary VET
(private and public)?
How to strengthen quality assurance
– to drive improvement?
– to increase accountability?
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9. How well do programmes correspond to labour market needs?
– Do they broadly match job openings?
– Do they lead to better labour market outcomes?
– Do they provide technical, generic, soft skills that
• employers currently want
• are transferable though working life
• underpin lifelong learning
How to make providers more responsive to labour market needs?
How to strengthen “job-readiness” skills?
How to most effectively engage employers, trade unions and other stakeholders in
postsecondary VET?
How to collect, interpret and use data on labour market outcomes effectively?
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10. Which tools are best for sideways and upwards mobility through post-secondary
education?
– Qualifications frameworks
– Credit transfer arrangements
– Recognition of prior learning
How to raise completion rates?
– Tighter and/or tougher student entry requirements?
– Stricter quality control of programmes offered?
– Better orientation and guidance?
– More effective student support?
– Better student preparation?
– Rebalancing funding across providers and students?
– Improve flexibility and mobility through system?
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11. Skills beyond school project
• Builds on:
– Learning for Jobs (OECD review of vocational education and training)
– Tertiary Education for the Knowledge Society
• Feeds into the horizontal OECD Skills Strategy
• Outputs include:
– Analytical reports on the particular circumstances of Korea, prepared as
part of a special OECD-KRIVET collaboration
– Preparation of a set of country profiles of postsecondary vocational
programmes in all OECD countries
– A report on access and dropout
– An initial report on careers guidance and counselling in postsecondary
vocational programmes
– Further working papers in the pipeline
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12. Full country reviews
• Country prepares a background report on their country following guidelines
provided by the OECD.
• Two visits by an OECD team that will produce a report covering:
– strengths of the country system, including innovations and reforms of general
interest and significance
– analysis of the main policy challenges
– OECD recommendations designed to assist the country’s policy development
Country reviews:
• draw on experience from other countries to support the policy advice given
• are designed to add substantial impetus and international perspective to policy
development
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13. Country commentaries
• Country prepares a background report on their country following guidelines
provided by the OECD.
• OECD team makes a short visit and publishes a commentary on the background
report
Country commentaries are:
• designed to assist countries to understand their own country’s system better in
international context
• draw on experience from other countries to support the policy advice given
• are designed to add substantial impetus and international perspective to policy
development
Comparative report
• A comparative report, synthesizing key policy messages for all OECD countries,
with a first draft due at the end of 2012
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14. Thank you!
www.oecd.org/education/vet