Abstract The UNESCO International Commission on the Futures of Education imagines a positive future in which skills development can be harnessed for benefits people and planet, line with loftiest vision Sustainable Development Goals. However, systems often remain marginalized within educational debates plans, vocational learning dismissed as low quality status. Reflecting work done commission skills, this article considers nature challenges present building better futures Africa. It argues...

In 2012, IJED published a special issue on vocational education and training development that reflected the sense of being at potential turning point for policy, practice research in this area as UNESCO convened Third International Conference Technical Vocational Education Training. A decade on, we reflect way literature has evolved period, suggesting five-fold typology seeks to explore VET-development relationship. First, note vast majority VET developing countries is practice-focused,...

There is a growing sense that the orthodox set of theories and policies for VET don't work. This particularly true in South where all such Northern face common problem being constructed other contexts then imported. In light persistent poverty inequality; widespread precarious indecent work; continued concerns about educational access, retention achievement; rising environmental crisis, must be transformed to address new challenging objectives. Here, we offer an exploration theoretical...

* 1. Researching Knowledge-Based Aid 2. The New Agenda 3. Knowledge for Development 4. World Bank or the Bank? 5. From Information Management to Sharing: DFID's Unfinished Revolution 6. Knowledge, Learning and Capacity in Swedish Approach Cooperation 7. Experience, Experts Japanese Policy Practice 8. Conclusions Implications

The current dominant approach to vocational education and training (VET) does not work in theory, policy or practice contexts of unsustainability global inequality. Nor is it fit for future purpose. Drawing on a large-scale research collaboration between four universities, funded by the UK's Global Challenges Research Fund, with co-funding funding in-kind from south partners, this paper contribution imagining new VET futures. It looks iteratively, reflexively expansively at how our...

With evidence of global climate change and ongoing ecological degradation, there is an urgent need to give more attention sustainability within VET ensure that does not remain complicit in reproducing the unjust unsustainable trajectories current economic development pathways. At present, literature adequately address these issues, hence for this special issue. In response, paper offers a meta-reflective 'landscape view' 'field knowledge' as it emerging. Here, we use landscape review...

This paper delves beneath the widespread belief that education (often repackaged as human capital) is important in development to consider role discipline of plays shaping wider discourses development. In particular, it will explore recent texts by figures economics (Collier, Easterly, Sachs and Stiglitz) see what they say (and don't say) about education's contrast this with educationalists' accounts. lead on a consideration implications such reading are for field international comparative...

The paper addresses the impact of Covid-19 on vocational education and training, seeking to discern outline possible directions for its future development within debates about VET responses pandemic. discussion is set in socio-economic context, considering that engage with social relations care neo-liberalism. analyses discourses have developed around across world during pandemic, illustrating both continuities ruptures may emerge this field, as health crisis becomes overshadowed public...