Everybody has an interest in education. Nowhere is that more so than in the relationship between education and work. It may seem that ‘vocational education’ is the main arena for examining the relationship; but ‘general education’ and ‘liberal education’ are also deeply implicated.

How can education help in working lives?

General education is the transmission of knowledge, concepts, and methods, from a range of academic disciplines, which cover what all members of society should know. Part of it is thought to be for helping people, as one Prime Minister put it, ‘to do a job of work’. The movement to identify work relevance in general education is world-wide (Oxenham, 1988). Employers are thought of as wanting young men and women to stay at school for long enough to gain qualifications; and qualifications are thought to be reliable guides to employability. Such assumptions shape the curriculum to employers’ needs, so that students learn to communicate clearly, calculate precisely, key-board accurately, and work with others flexibly. These are ‘key skills’ for employability. Such thinking is now a feature of the education of young children (Lauglo & Lillis, 1988). The pressure is to raise standards because, it is assumed, work productivity will then increase (Department of Trade and Industry, 1994).

Vocational education is more specifically shaped, enabling people to develop employability for work roles. Where employability becomes a dominant feature of a secondary programme it is called pre-vocational education. Governments target money into schools on criteria associated with vocational relevance. Pre-vocational programmes are organised around work clusters rather than specific occupations; they can therefore have a more exploratory quality than vocational courses. In Britain they lead to general vocational qualifications, which compete for credibility with ‘academic’ qualifications.