Gamekeeper turned poacher: discursive shifts in apprenticeship reform in England, 2011-2021

This analysis takes both a historical view of higher and degree apprenticeships in higher education and a discursive perspective on a period of educational reform that experienced much turbulence and adjustment in the decade that is examined. The discursive perspective has become very significant in the field of apprenticeship, not least with the rise in populism and public narrative and the influence of that narrative to inform public policy making. Where once professional entry routes, outside of a very few fields, were historically ‘apprenticeships’, the decline of apprenticeship training in the mid to late twentieth century saw their later revival and recasting into a (vocational) educational narrative rather than that of a ‘community of practice’ one. As a result, there was a government failure to recognise that development through many of the best traditional apprenticeships did not simply stop at what is now referred to as Level 3, whether in ‘real’ crafts or in what are now regarded as formalised professions. The revival of an integrated entry route to professional careers has been long overdue given ‘professions’ have been largely missing from the discourse on education and skills policy despite having a meaningful significance on what is and is not viable in the qualifications system.

The methodology used positions the authors public works as ‘texts’ for empirical analysis with the analysis identifying and organising oppositions, alliances, and juxtapositions to show how each public work, as text, is located and operating within apprenticeship policy and higher education. In exploring the concept of the higher education discursive field, the author relies on both Bourdieu’s description of a social field of forces and struggles and Foucault’s description of discursive formation and takes an adapted approach that explains how the texts have operated by deploying ‘technologies of truth’ to uncover a ‘catalogue of possibilities’ from an analysis of ‘knowledge, power and subject’ (k-p-s) relations. Good use of what Dowling calls ‘conceptual spaces’ and what Bravenboer terms ‘discursive spaces’ is made in the finding of oppositions and alliances identified within each text.