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Vocational education aims at preparing students for their future as professionals; thus, students are often required to undergo a form of on-the-job learning. Assessment of professional performance during on-the-job learning is not based on single observations, but on prolonged participation at the workplace culminating in judgement by a workplace educator. However, little is known about how educators reach a judgement. This paper, therefore, aims at exploring how educators inform their judgements about students' professional performance. We consider the workplace to be a participatory learning environment, which entails that judgement about professional performance should be made in relation to the community students participated in and that the educator from that community has a central role. Our study takes an explorative approach based on interviews and uses template analysis to generate insight. Findings revealed that educators use multiple strategies to gather and process information about students to inform their judgement. Findings also showed that assessment starts at the first meeting, when the educator forms a first impression of the student and judges whether or not the student is suitable for the job. Educators at the workplace also showed that they are aware of the context in which they form their judgement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Higher education institutions are increasingly expected to demonstrate the relevance of the education provided and establish tighter links with the labour market. The introduction of learning outcomes represents one such development. The article examines the extent to which various intermediary organisations are involved in decisions about learning outcomes and the consequences of this regarding the role of learning outcomes and their potential in linking higher education to the world of work. Intermediary organisations are operationalised as professional associations and trade unions. The empirical material includes data from interviews of 14 intermediary organisations with different ties to higher education. The findings show that organisations have distinctly different approaches to their involvement in learning-outcome development as well as different views on the potentials of learning outcomes as a legitimate instrument to increase the relevance of higher education. Instead of creating new links between higher education and the world of work, the processes of introducing learning outcomes reinforce existing collaboration patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages with an extensive body of research by David Raffe to explore what it means to say that a qualifications framework ‘works’, in light of the limited evidence to support the claims made about this popular policy phenomenon. The framework regarded as the most successful, the Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework, is of limited value in thinking about frameworks in general, as it is deeply embedded in institutions and a series of educational reforms in that country. Typologies of qualifications frameworks provide insights in theorizing and researching qualifications frameworks. An analysis of this literature suggests that attempts to theorize frameworks were useful for an initial range of studies, but have reached the limit of their usefulness. They run the risk of being concept-heavy, when there is almost no empirical data for researchers to analyse. The paper suggests, drawing again on Raffe’s work, that qualifications frameworks could be of interest in studying the changing relationships between knowledge, qualifications, and work in different countries, but only if attention is paid to context and the ways in which the apparent problems of the qualifications derive not from the qualifications themselves but are primarily the products of their context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]