NN39, October 2007
Best Practice in Education and Training: Hype or Hope?
Best Practice in Policy Learning in VET: Reflections on Recent UK Experience
By David Raffe, University of Edinburgh
KeywordsPolicy learning; policy memory; policy transfer; vocational education and training; United Kingdom;
Summary
Drawing on recent experience in 14-19 education and training policy in the UK, this article argues that effective policy learning should aim for a deeper understanding of policy problems and processes than is provided by a simple search for ?best practice?.
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Best practice in policy learning involves much more than a search for best practice. This seemingly paradoxical conclusion can be drawn from a recent volume of papers on Policy-making and Policy Learning in 14-19 Education, edited by Ken Spours and myself. The book examines recent experience in England and Scotland, but many of its conclusions apply more widely.
We define policy learning as ?the ability of governments, or systems of governance, to inform policy development by drawing lessons from available evidence and experience? (Raffe and Spours, 2007, p.1). It includes:
The ability to learn from past experience. This in turn requires a capacity to recognise continuities with the past, something which many governments are unable or unwilling to do. Even in stable countries governments often rest their appeal, or even their legitimacy, on their claim to have made a break from the past; this is especially true in countries whose past is marked by colonialism, political repression or economic failure. However, this pursuit of novelty often leads governments to pretend that the old political, social and economic forces have somehow disappeared: that there is nothing to be learnt from past experience. And even when governments are willing to learn, policy-making institutions may lack the stability to accumulate the necessary policy memory. Or this memory may be selective: it may remember past successes but ignore the failures from which there is most to be learnt. One of the first questions which any government addressing a chronic policy problem should ask is: why have previous policy initiatives failed to solve this problem? Governments too rarely ask this question. Several contributors to our book note that current 14-19 policy in England, in particular the attempt to create a broad vocational track based on Diplomas, has made no explicit attempt to learn from past policies which pursued the same objectives, and it looks likely to repeat the same mistakes.
The ability to learn appropriately from other countries. Globalisation and international competition have made governments more willing to compare their performance against international benchmarks and to use international comparisons as a source of policy ideas. However, too often this welcome interest in cross-national comparisons is expressed in attempts at policy borrowing rather than policy learning. Policy borrowing, by which I mean the attempt to transfer institutions and policies from other settings, rarely works (and when it does work, this is often by accident). Policy learning, on the other hand, involves using comparisons both to understand one?s own country better and to understand current policy problems and possible solutions better, by observing similarities and differences across different national settings. Policy-making may have become more sophisticated since the days when, for example, policy-makers across the world seized on the German dual system as a model of ?best practice? and tried to introduce it in contexts where the conditions for its success were notoriously lacking. But policy-makers still tend to see international comparisons as a source of models of good practice, rather than a source of the deeper understanding which not only explains why certain practice may be good but also helps us to understand the conditions under which it is effective and the problems that may be faced in implementing it. As a result the uses of cross-national comparisons tend to be narrow: they typically focus only on countries which are perceived to be successful and they ask questions about the (?best?) practice rather than the broader context in which it is applied.
An ability to lean from local innovation. Effective policy learning should harness and build on the creativity and capacity to innovate of teachers, trainers and other practitioners at the local level. Innovations that are designed and developed locally may be best able to address the practical issues that arise from the local context, which may be less visible to central planners. Several recent policy initiatives in the UK have sought to exploit this creativity through ?pathfinders? which support a diverse range of local initiatives and experiments. The intention is that the lessons learnt from these local initiatives can be shared with other areas, and that the best practices that they generate can be identified and adopted elsewhere. This model of policy learning, of course, requires adequate time horizons and funding. Moreover, it can only work when central government genuinely empowers the local practitioners who are responsible for innovation, and does not impose national policies or accountability systems which unduly restrict their freedom to innovate. It requires that central governments are willing to learn the lessons about their own practices and policies that may emerge from the experience of local innovation. It also requires a more sophisticated view of the process whereby good practice is recognised and adopted elsewhere. Policies promoting local experimentation tend to have been more successful in supporting good practice in the areas where it is developed than in promoting its wider adoption. As in the case of cross-national comparisons, the most important form of learning across local initiatives is that which leads not to an identification of good practice but to an understanding of the underlying processes ? of the factors which make some practices good and of the conditions in which they do so. And the experience of UK pathfinders suggests that if local practitioners do not go through this deeper process of learning they are unlikely fully to understand and ?own? models of good practice developed elsewhere.
In each of these three areas of policy learning a naïve concept of best practice may obstruct the search for a deeper understanding of why certain practices may be effective, of the circumstances under which different practices are effective and of the practical issues that must be addressed in developing and implementing them. It typically focuses narrowly on success (witness OECD countries? obsession with learning from Finland since its ?success? in the PISA assessments), whereas we can learn at least as much from failures. It detracts from the wider political, social and economic factors which drive and constrain the process of change. And it will not lead to practices which can be understood, owned, adopted and adapted by those who implement them.
A simple mechanistic search for ?what works? may sometimes be the start of policy learning, but it should never be its end point.
References
Raffe, D. and Spours, K. (Eds) (2007) Policy-making and Policy Learning in 14-19 Education. Bedford Way Papers. University of London Institute of Education.
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