Newton RCUK-CONICYT Governing the educational and labour market trajectories of secondary TVET graduates in Chile

Chile has experienced considerable educational expansion over the past few decades as a result of the growing demand for education from individuals and families and the positional competition for qualified jobs in the formal sector of the economy. While in the past TVET policies were designed to offer educational opportunities for disadvantaged youth seeking a quick insertion in the labour market, today the orientations and the objectives of these policies are less clear given the larger number of secondary TVET graduates that pursue tertiary education and combine education and work in their trajectories after schooling. In this context, TVET continues to be a strategic sector for improving the skills of most disadvantaged youth over their life course but the transitions of these young adults from secondary to tertiary education and from education to work are becoming more problematic due to the high stratification of tertiary education supply, the scarcity of qualified jobs in the economy and the poor coordination of public policies targeting young adults.

The project aims to understand the potentially competing, and possibly ambivalent, orientations and objectives of TVET policies in Chile, their compatibility and contradictions with the aspirations of secondary TVET graduates, and their intended and unintended effects on the educational and labour market trajectories of these young adults. An important contribution of the project is the incorporation of the perspective of young adults (their expectations, aspirations and strategies) into the debate on how TVET policies can better support disadvantaged youth in their transition to work. By doing this, the project aims to contribute to the design of TVET policies that better accommodate the demands and needs of vulnerable young populations in changing labour markets and societies, which emphasize the relevance of this kind of research in this particular moment in transitional economies like Chile.

Conceptually, the project is based on three major theoretical perspectives - Cultural Political Economy, Life Course Research and Governance Perspective. The combination of these different systems of thought matches the topic's broad variety of dimensions. The proposed project brings together different disciplinary social scientific approaches, which aim at conceptualising the research questions in adequate ways due to its complexity; further, its drawing from theories and methods from Education Science, Sociology and Political Science purports addressing methodological issues related to the complex dynamics of policy-making by means of an interdisciplinary perspective.

In order to achieve its aims, the study is designed as a multilevel qualitative research at national, local and individual level. At the national level, we will map TVET policies and programs, will review policy regulations, and will interview national policy makers and stakeholders. At the local level, we will conduct case studies that will involve interviews with local authorities, TVET schools, and others. Finally, at the individual level, we will carry out interviews with a typological sample of secondary TVET graduates with different educational and labour market trajectories.

This project expects to expand the research evidence on TVET policies in Chile and their implications for the trajectories of TVET graduates after school. We expect that the evidence produced for the case of Chile will contribute to the debates on how TVET can improve the living conditions and labour market opportunities of disadvantaged youth in middle-income and low-income countries, what is a priority for many development agencies today.

In order to unpack and make an effective impact in the communities involved in policy making, beneficiaries and stakeholders related to VET, the research project contemplates different activities organised according to the main research stages described in the case for support with the aim of improving the participation, voice and engagement of different actors involved in VET by allowing them to contribute to the thinking and making of VET policies, and influence the research process from its outset. For this purpose the research project will implement the following strategies:

Advisory Group

The project will establish an advisory group who will be sent updates on progress and emergent findings of the study and will provide feedback to the research team. The advisory group will receive the updates three times during the course of the project, just before the finalisation of the three stages of the research. The group, who will correspond through electronic means, will be composed by one national policymaker, one representative of the business sector, one international expert in TVET from Latin America, an one official from an international organization. Members of the advisory group will be recruited through our extensive network of professional contacts and will be selected in terms of their ability to feed information into the machinery of policy and practice in a timely manner and to influence agendas in Chile and in other middle-income and low-income countries.

Knowledge exchange seminars and workshops

A series of knowledge events will be organised with different actors interested and working on the development of VET policies such as policymakers and practitioners from different spheres: Ministry of Education; curriculum; Superintendencia de Educación; National Board of Education; National Service of Training and Employment (SENCE); representatives of international organizations -BID; OIT, OCDE-, VET students and workers organizations (e.g. unions). One workshop with national and local TVET policymakers, stakeholders and practitioners will be held in Santiago de Chile during the second stage of the research, and two international seminars with international experts and national policymakers will also be held in Santiago de Chile, one during the second stage of the project and another one during the third a final stage of the project.

Online presence and policy briefs

A project website will be in place from the start of the research and will be updated regularly throughout to provide access to project information, working papers and blog entries. This will be linked to our respective university sites such us the University of Glasgow Centre for International Development and the School of Education Centre Robert Owen for Educational Change. The research team will also maintain a dialogue through a Twitter account that has already been established (@skills4dev) so as to maintain an engagement with interested parties, publicizing project progress and posting more substantial documents as well as seeking responses from those with an interest in the area youth, skills and international development. Three policy briefs and corresponding blog entries will also be published on the project website with the objective of reaching policymakers and practitioners and a non-technical briefing paper will be printed and distributed to key individuals and government departments with an interest in issues around TVET and youth labour market. Two more blog entries will also be published in other websites: one in the Robert Owen Centre blog and another one in the NORRAG blog with the aim to rapidly disseminate information on the research findings internationally. We will also produce press releases to place information in the public sphere at appropriately chosen times. The University of Glasgow has a Press Offices that can help us maximize the impact of our messages.