Discourses of employability and empowerment: Foundation Degrees and ‘Third Way’ discursive repertoires
Mike Doyle
University of Salford
This is one of a set of papers and work in progress written by research postgraduates (MPhil and PhD) at Lancaster University's Department of Educational Research. The papers are primarily offered as examples of work that others at similar stages of their research careers can refer to and engage with.
Mike Doyle
Education Development Unit
University of Salford
Crescent House
Salford
UK
Tel: 00 44 161 295 6143
Fax: 00 44 161 295 6181
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Biographical Details:
Mike Doyle is Head of Widening Participation at the University of Salford. He has played a leading role in the Access and Lifelong learning agendas in the Northwest of England, is a consultant to Universities UK Access Advisory Partnership, and is currently completing a Ph.D in Educational Research at the University of Lancaster.
Abstract
This paper contextualises the Foundation Degree within competing economic and democratic agendas. In tracing the development within these ideological and discursive priorities it analyses how they are textually represented in policy speeches, and in particular ‘New Labour’ Consultation documents.
The purpose of this is to critically evaluate ‘New Labour’s’ attempt to offer, through the Foundation Degree, a ‘Third Way’ synthesis of these traditionally competing agendas, facilitating a neat discursive synchronisation of utilitarian and progressive objectives - democratising access to higher education and empowering the individual, whilst ‘tooling up’ ‘UK PLC’ to compete in a global economy.
The paper, however, sees significant potential, provided by the discourses of the Foundation Degree experience, for further democratisation of higher education. It is argued that this provides opportunities to facilitate diversity and differentiation by involving the Further Education sector through partnerships with higher education, and providing opportunities to stem and reverse ‘academic drift’.
Introduction
‘New Labour’ has moved the emphasis in the public sector from cost cutting and efficiency (‘New Public Management’, Clarke and Newman, 1997), characteristic of the last Conservative Government, to a stress on service, usually in collaboration with ‘partners’, and underpinned by quality and concepts of ‘Best Value’. An example of this approach to ‘joined up government’ (Newman, 2000) is provided by the Foundation Degree. Prototypes of the Foundation Degree have been funded by HEFCE, starting from September 2001.
Within this context this paper seeks to examine two issues. Firstly, to consider the compatibility of the ideological perspectives that have shaped the development of the Foundation Degree, including New Labour’s ‘Third Way’ policy strategy and discourse of modernisation. Secondly, it will consider implications of the Foundation Degree for Higher Education and its role within a dominant discourse of ‘performativity’.
The paper is therefore structured as follows: following a brief summary of the Foundation Degree a rationale for the research design is provided which locates the study within a framework which permits a critical analysis of the dominant discourse within which New Labour’s Foundation Degree strategy is located. The contextual development of the Foundation Degree is then considered from three standpoints. The first traces the development of the qualification within a context of competing economic and democratic agendas (Coffield, 1997). Secondly, the dominance of the economic agenda is analysed within a context of epistemic contest in HE, which has facilitated the prevalence of economic and vocational over progressive discourses (Bagnall, 2000).
The third perspective involves an examination of New Labour’s attempt to synchronise potential dichotomies in its Third Way strategy: in the case of the Foundation Degree, this means squaring the democratic agenda of widening participation in HE with an apparently uncritical acceptance of human capital theory as the panacea enabling the UK to compete in an emerging process of globalisation. Such strategies are contextualised within a broader New Labour discourse of modernisation and innovation, which “relates a narrative of past failure and future possibility” (Newman, 2000, 49)
An example of New Labour discursive practice is provided by a textual analysis of David Blunkett’s Greenwich speech (DfEE, 2000a) and the Foundation Degree Consultation Document (DfEE, 2000b), both published on the same day. The purpose is to analyse the configuration of priorities identified and consider implications for the sectors responsible for Foundation degree delivery. The stages of the paper reflect the methodology used, based on Fairclough’s (1992) three dimensional model of discourse.
It concludes with an analysis of the implications of the Foundation degree for higher education, and considers a view which may permit the accommodation of ‘vocationalisation’ within a more diverse higher education sector, while retaining its role of providing a research-based critical perspective.
The Foundation Degree
The Secretary of State for Education and Employment undertook a consultation exercise (DfEE, 2000b) on proposals for the introduction of the Foundation Degree. Their purpose is to meet a perceived skills gap at advanced technician level (up to CATS level 2; NCVQ level 4). This award was expected to become the dominant qualification at this level. As a consequence it is anticipated that institutions will re-develop existing sub-degree programmes (such as HND’s) to conform with the requirements for Foundation Degrees. The expansion required for New Labour’s commitment to a target of 50% 18-30 year olds to experience Higher Education by 2010 is to be focused on these sub-degree higher technical qualifications. It is anticipated that their delivery is largely to be in the Further Education sector in an attempt to make higher level learning more accessible. Colleges will work in partnership with employers and a single University, and its quality and validation arrangements will be utilised.
The rationale for such priorities, in the context of a global economy, lies in the shortage of, and increased demand for people with intermediate-level skills, across all sectors of the economy, who can operate effectively in posts generically referred to as higher technicians and associate professionals; in ‘deficiency’ conceptualizations of higher education and its graduates (Coffield, 1999); and in a perceived need to rationalize the range of qualifications below honours degree level.
Foundation Degrees are expected to meet these needs by equipping students with the combination of academic knowledge and technical and transferable skills demanded by employers, while facilitating lifelong learning for the workforce. The award will attract a minimum of 240 credits (120 each at levels 1 and 2), and will be awarded by individual universities. The CVCP (2000) summarized the essential features as: employer involvement; development of skills and knowledge; application of skills in the workplace; credit accumulation and transfer and progression within work and/ or to an honours degree.
Foundation Degree prototypes were expected to deliver within restricted timescales. Consultation was completed and reported on by April 2000. Consortia bids were required by October 2000, and prototypes were confirmed late in 2000. Effectively the prototypes had approximately 9 months to develop partnerships, prepare the necessary curriculum, market the courses, recruit, conduct the required staff development, and agree and implement the necessary quality procedures.
Conceptualising and researching discourse
The research design for this paper is modeled on Fairclough’s (1992) conception of discourse (Fig. 1), by which any instance of discourse is seen as being:
…simultaneously a piece of text, an instance of discursive practice and an instance of social practice (Fairclough, 1992: 4)
In Fairclough’s terms, text refers to the language analysis of texts, discursive practice to the nature of the processes of text production and interpretation, and social practice to
issues of concern in social analysis such as the institutional and organizational circumstances of the discursive event, and how that shapes the nature of the discursive practice (Fairclough, 1992: 4)
The model is based on three analytical traditions: close textual and linguistic analysis, macro-sociological traditions of analyzing social practice in relation to social structures, and interpretivist, micro-sociological traditions of seeing social practice as something people actively produce and make sense of. This paper focuses on the first two: the shaping of policy and its textual representation.
Therefore there are two dimensions of the research strategy considered within this paper. The first, at the macro-sociological level involves an analysis of the ideological context within which the Foundation Degree has developed and is situated; in particular this relates to ‘employability’ and widening participation agendas, and this links to the outer rectangle in Fairclough’s model. The second involves an evaluation of how those ideological and discursive priorities are textually represented in the form of policy speeches and ‘consultation’ documents designed to give shape to the development of practice: Fairclough’s inner rectangle. A third dimension involved an analysis, at a micro-sociological level, how these ideological and discursive perspectives are reflected in the interpretations, priorities and practices of a group of professionals from three sectors (a ‘partnership’), charged with the interpretation, development and delivery of a Foundation Degree prototype: the middle rectangle. Data has been collected to facilitate an analysis of the third dimension, but the scope of this paper is focused on the first two.
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Fig.1 Fairclough’s three dimensional conception of discourse
The methods used have involved a literature review of the policy context, with particular regard to tensions between economic and democratic priorities in higher education policy over the past fifteen years. This has also included an analysis of the Labour Party’s attempts to reconcile these priorities through their ‘Third Way’ agenda and the associated discursive practices. Detailed textual analysis of Foundation Degree policy documents within a context of New Labour discursive strategy has been conducted.
The data has been and will continue to be the subject of review, and in this process, as Brewer (2001:127) argues:
…by making explicit the partial nature of the data and the contingencies into which any representation must be located, the legitimation and representation of the data can be improved
Foundation Degree: massification, diversity and excellence
In his ‘Greenwich’ speech the Secretary of State for Education proclaimed:
I do not want to see the currency of higher education undermined by the creation of a stratified sector in which some forms of provision are considered excellent and others second-rate…Our objective is expansion with diversity and excellence throughout the sector…Diversity with excellence will also mean identifying new routes into higher education and new forms of provision…We have to develop new higher education opportunities at this level (intermediate skills), oriented strongly to the employability skills, specialist knowledge and broad understanding needed in the new economy (DfEE, 2000a)
Expansion of higher education therefore is to have the functional purpose of meeting skills needs required to enable Britain to compete economically in a global market place, and it is the function of government, through appropriate institutions, to meet this need for human capital. This is the culmination of a policy that was clear from Coffield’s (1997) critique of the first Queen’s Speech of the new Labour government in 1997, which was committed to expanding human capital. Indeed Coffield assesses that the ‘technocratic’, functionalist approach of investing in human skills through further and higher education as the overriding strategy to deliver a lifelong learning policy was the continuation of a policy on ‘competitiveness’ represented by three White Papers of the previous government (HMSO, 1994, 1995, 1996).
Coffield is critical of how the economic has dominated the democratic imperative in educational policy discourse over the past twenty years in the UK. Indeed he cites Carnoy and Levin (1985:4) in questioning attempts to rationalise a compatibility:
Relations between education and work are dialectically composed of a perpetual tension between two dynamics; the imperatives of capitalism and those of democracy in all its forms.
However, New Labour policy is characterised by its reincarnation in the ‘Third Way’,
…a radical centre ground approach to politics (Giddens, 1996);
a ‘modernisation’ which reconciles apparent ‘perpetual tensions’. Thus individuals have ‘rights’, but also ‘responsibilities’, and the economic imperative driving the Foundation Degree is presented also as a panacea for widening access to higher education by conceptualising this in a combination of communitarian and social integrationist discourses (Fairclough, 2001), which stresses the responsibility of the individual. ‘Diversity’ with ‘excellence’ is another example, presented in the Foundation Degree Consultation Document (DfEE, 2000b) as differentiation for higher education, to be available through ‘partnerships’ with further education and employers.
This ring-fencing of an aspect of diversity, rather than ‘a one size fits all approach’, represents, according to Blunkett (DfEE, 2000a:7), an element of a wider strategy for higher education, unlike previous expansion in the 1960’s with the creation of the polytechnic sector. The result, as Neave (2000) suggests, was not differentiated massification with elite universities protected from change, but ‘academic drift’ and elite modelling of that new sector resulting in less diversity.
Earlier proposals for diversity in the form of a “strong and credible” intermediate academic qualification (Robertson, 1994) are traceable to the Leverhulme Reports (1981-83). The democratic rather than the economic imperatives characterise these earlier debates, understandably given the elite nature of the HE system in the UK at the time. The contributions of Ball (1990) and Schuller (1990) recognised the financial limitations of state support for massification, with both arguing for a two year qualification on the grounds of cost effectiveness and wider access. Schuller even used the title ‘foundation degree’, and advocated the participation of the further education (FE) sector in its delivery.
The interests of potential students in terms of the recognition of the qualification by employers was addressed by Schuller (1991), who suggested that they might prefer less specialised and earlier entrants to employment. This issue was reinforced by Williams’ (1991) comment in comparisons of a two year foundation degree with a three year honours that “the best has become the enemy of the good”, leading him to the assertion that the qualities rather than the quality of these routes need to be highlighted; the point emphasised by Blunkett’s ‘diversity’.
These early arguments for an intermediate level qualification foundered, according to Robertson (1994), on grounds of quality, demand and equity. In terms of quality Scott (1991) questioned the academic coherence of a two year award. Demand was questioned in terms of the prevailing currency of the three year honours degree, although for the new Foundation Degree Wagner (2001) has argued that: