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  • Performance based management of vocational education and training: what, how and who is in charge?

  • What kind of vocational education and training should be provided? This question has a simple answer: it should be good quality and relevant. Performance based management of vocational education and training aims, amongst other things, at achieving that, but without going into detail, this answer is not enough. Questions such as ‘How can it be achieved?’ or ‘Who is in charge?’ are even more important.

    As with many public policies, the expectation of transparency and public accountability has increased, so good quality and relevant public policy is now, more than ever, the goal. And evidence-based policy making is part of the solution.

    In many ways, knowledge is beginning to play a new role in policy: we can now distinguish “post-bureaucratic” from traditional “bureaucratic” regimes and show that each presupposes a specific kind of knowledge and a specific way of using it.

  • The discovery and identification of missing knowledge is a key aspect of the paradigm shift. Policy-makers have to have the ability to link scientific evidence and political planning. Appropriate knowledge about the proper tools and mechanisms for reaching policy goals should become available in the countries. Additionally, knowledgeable actors who could diffuse and mediate the new policy knowledge at different levels have to be empowered.

    In fewer countries than before, policy-makers are at the top-centre of government; there is a shift from a pyramid system, strongly hierarchical and centralised, to a more subtle one. A network system with vertical and horizontal interactions is what is wanted.

    The government and the state bodies should change the nature of their role by cooperating with non-state actors, social partners, other civil society representatives, interest groups, etc. These changes do not involve the disappearance of the nation state, only a change to its role. Thus, a new approach is needed, a more complex and less rigid one, able to reconcile general interests with multiple specific interests, and to redefine relations between the centre and component units. This is why the concepts of governance, good governance and multi-level governance have appeared.

    The vertical dimension of multi-level governance – the interactions among the actors on different territorial levels – does not mean decentralisation at any price! We advocate functional reforms that analyse, for each function of vocational education and training, who is doing what, what is the quality level and the cost of the results. Functional reforms have to be evaluated for effectiveness and efficiency.

    The horizontal dimension of multi-level governance suggests a network society in which multiple interdependent actors contribute to the delivery of public services. In this case the professionalism of each actor is “key”, i.e. the right mix of multi-level interactions in multi-level governance whereby levels are loyal to each other. Practice should be cleared by the political decision making process.

    With its new authority, the state has the role and the responsibility to ensure this environment and to secure the empowerment and the professionalism of the multiple actors involved.

    Madlen Serban
    ETF Director

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