WEBVTT

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Today I want to talk about how we can learn policy lessons from international comparisons.

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As researchers, as policymakers, as educational actors, we're engaged much more in international

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activities than we used to.

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And certainly as a researcher, I'm very aware that

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so much research is carried out in an international context.

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And so much of this research

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to inform policy, but I'm not sure that we're always very explicit about what kinds of lessons

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we should be drawing, what the approach is to drawing lessons. I want to suggest that actually

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learning from comparisons involves a somewhat broader concept of policy learning. Policy

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borrowing might be part of it, but we need to think more broadly in terms of policy learning,

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not just taking what they've got and putting it in here, but using the examination of their

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experience as a way of learning and learning things or concepts

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or ideas that can be applied here.

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A lot of countries are introducing frameworks because in one way or another they don't think

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their education and training systems are meeting the requirements of society and often particularly

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the needs of the labour market.

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So they're introducing frameworks in the hope that this will make the education and

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training system more transparent and that this will allow employers and others to understand

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what education is about and more clearly to specify what they're expecting education

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and training to achieve.

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If you look at NQFs across the world, often they look quite similar.

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represent them by sort of grids which show you the different levels of learning, different

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levels of qualification and then characterisations of the learning outcomes associated with each.

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Sometimes the grid would identify fields of study and all types of qualification.

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Second point is that those country differences persist despite what you might call global

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pressures which in theory are affecting all countries in a similar way and you might have

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expected to cause a degree of convergence in things like transition

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transitions between education and work.

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And the concept of transition systems tries to explain those differences in terms of the

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institutional structures within each country, the education and training systems, labour

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markets and so forth, which create different logics within the country.

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Things work differently in different countries.

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I think the main thing is that policymakers need to learn, need to use comparisons with

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other countries to learn rather than to borrow.

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they need to use those comparisons to identify factors which are interesting, which are important,

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to identify, for example,

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the way in which different systems work, to see what dimensions of differences between countries

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seem to explain the way in which different countries operate,

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and then use that knowledge not to try to identify specific policies that they can introduce in their own countries,

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but rather to identify models, conceptual frameworks, ideal types,

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that will help them to learn, to help them to think about, to analyse their own countries,

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and to develop policies that are specific to their own countries.

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you