If it was Going to Work it Would Have Worked by Now

A top-down model of educational change and improvement has dominated the landscape of vocational education in England for over 30 years. However, as yet, as Coffield (2017) notes, this model has done little to improve the quality of education or increase learners’ achievement across the sector. A reason for this, he argues, is that policy professionals, education leaders and teachers in England have become caught in the grip of a top-down model of educational change and improvement which is proving difficult to loosen. Carr (2005) and Kemmis (2005) contend that a consequence of this is that educational change and improvement in England are now locked in a system which is preoccupied with technique and caught up in a clockwork universe where strategies for the implementation and evaluation of educational policy are coupled with the instrumental language of “recipes” and “blueprints” for “excellent” teaching to command, inhibit and distort the discourse. This paper lends support to the work of the above authors where they argue that these factors make it difficult to see how the education system in England and the model of educational change and improvement which underpins it, could operate in any way other than it currently does. A further consequence of the grip of current model is that quality (what we take to mean by good vocational education) is being reduced to blunt measures of performance outputs imposed from the top-down and measured from the outside-in, which are subsequently presented to the public in the form of competitive league tables (Sennett, 2009). If we accept that we need to rethink existing models of educational change and improvement in vocational education in England, then we need to begin the question of …where do we start? Drawing attention to the deficiencies of the current model of educational change and improvement is simply not enough. Instead, this paper attempts to make a persuasive case for the need to move towards a new model by providing practical examples which offer glimpses (albeit in microcosm) of how we might go about educational change and improvement differently in the future.