Neither research nor the policy formation process in England has tended in recent times to pay much heed to any notion of designing a coherent system of education and training (E&T) provision. The UK government’s approach to the policy process tends to centre on reform by institutional tinkering and a continuance of the great British tradition of incremental accretion of institutions and of ‘muddling through’ (Lindblom, 1959; Norris and Adams, 2017; Keep, 2006). Systems that have developed in this incremental manner often contain tensions between different routes, levels and design principles for funding, governance, etc.
It is also the case that in the past, across the developed world remarkably little E&T research was focused on conceptualising E&T as a system, or on exploring the principles that might inform E&T systems design. In recent years there has been a growing interest, from international bodies such as UNESCO and the OECD, in the question of how the architecture of an E&T system might best be constructed and the implications that different choices of configuration might have for the various potential stakeholders (OECD, 2016). In part, this interest has been driven by the rise of international educational performance league tables and testing regimes (e.g. the OECD’s PISA and PIAAC surveys) and by the resultant ‘battle of the paradigms’ as governments search for the educational model and systems architecture that can deliver optimal national educational outputs/outcomes (Ozga, 2013; Fenwich, Mangez and Ozga, 2014; Fischman et al, 2018).
