Article Gold Open Access 2025

What do vocational colleges do and why do they matter? Thinking about the role of colleges as local actors

Journal of Vocational Education and Training
Journal · Vol. 77 · Issue 1 · pp. 36-57
Abstract

Vocational colleges’ social role has been under-developed because they have been marketised and privatised, and because the idea of the vocational college has not been advanced and institutionalised. The paper describes this for public vocational colleges in Australia, which are at the vanguard of competency-based education and in being disciplined with neoliberal policies. The paper bases an institutionalisation of vocational colleges on the capabilities approach and an extension of their social role to anchor the development of communities’ collective education, social and economic development, and their capacity for collective action. © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Keywords

Author Keywords

Colleges human development and capability approach institutional theory markets privatisation

Index Keywords

Author Affiliations
Department of Education, University of Oxford, Oxford, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
Department of Education, University of Oxford, Oxford, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom
Funding & Acknowledgements
No funding information
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