The paper is a comparative study of the attempts made to revitalize apprenticeship in the UK and Norway in the 1990s. It begins by outlining a cycle of repeated policy failure to develop a high-quality work-based route in the UK and highlights a set of underlying problems that Modern Apprenticeships (MA) failed to resolve and which remain largely un-addressed by the Labour government’s current reform proposals. These include: the limited educational breadth provided by ‘key skills’; policy makers’ preference for an expanded post-compulsory education system such that the work-based route comes to be seen as ‘the provider of last resort’ for the socially disaffected; and weak employer engagement indicative of the low demand for skill across large parts of the UK economy. The paper then compares these with the main problems and challenges facing the Norwegian ‘2+ model’ of apprenticeship, introduced in the mid-1990s as part of ‘Reform 94’. In an attempt to move beyond official evaluation reports, the research draws upon interviews conducted in 2000 and 2001 with Norwegian policy makers, teacher unions and county education officials along with senior management, teachers and apprentices at seven upper secondary schools. The paper identifies several problems facing the Norwegian apprenticeship model including the overly theoretical nature of the first two school-based years, issues of student motivation, uneven teacher engagement with the pedagogic goals of Reform 94, resource constraints, and the institutionalized separation between school and workplace. An assessment is then made of the relative prospects for revitalizing apprenticeship in the UK and Norway. The conclusion reached is that, in the face of two very different sets of problems and constraints, the prospects may still be somewhat brighter in Norway. © 2002, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. All rights reserved.
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