The Policy Implementation and Impact Work Package (WP3) will investigate the way apprentices, employers and trainers interpret and enact dual apprenticeship programmes within concrete training and learning practices, and will elucidate the mechanisms that explain the different impact of dual apprenticeships on inequalities of access, learning and labour market outcomes among young people in different local contexts.
The evaluation of the implementation and impact of dual apprenticeships will draw on the analytical contributions of the realist evaluation approach and human capabilities theory.
Realist evaluation understands policy programmes as hypotheses about social betterment that need to be unpacked and tested through the analysis of the operating social mechanisms and the contextual conditions that trigger them . Focusing on the interaction between contextmechanismsoutcomes permits evaluations to go beyond the simplistic question of ‘what works?’ and to interrogate ‘how dual apprenticeships work, for whom and why they generate different impacts in different contexts?’
The research questions that the realist evaluation allows us to address are:
- How are dual apprenticeship programmes anticipated to operate within each country and how is context understood as integral to success?
- How do education and business actors interpret and strategically react to the introduction of dual apprenticeships?
- What contextmechanismsoutcomes configurations explain the different impact of dual apprenticeships on diverse populations and contexts?
Human capabilities theory has placed ‘agency freedom’, the capacity of individuals to pursue the life that they value, at the centre of development debates. The ‘agency freedom’ view of TVET focuses on supporting students’ development of their autonomy and their ability to make choices.
The research questions that human capabilities theory allows us to address are:
- What inequality factors affect the capacity of apprentices to benefit from the learning opportunities in the programme?
- What inequalities of opportunity exist between apprentices in their transition to formal employment, decent working conditions and the continuation of their studies?
- To what extent the voices and experiences of apprentices are considered by the management of dual apprenticeship programmes?
The analysis of policy enactment and will combine quantitative and qualitative methods in the collection and analysis of primary data. WP3 follows a fully mixed sequential equal status design. In this design, the quantitative (national apprentices survey) and qualitative phases (in depth interviews with apprentices, employers and trainers) occur sequentially with both elements given approximately equal weight in the analysis.
The national apprentice survey will generate data on the impact of the programme on a representative sample of young people’s labour market outcomes and will also provide data on the potential explanatory factors of their unequal labour market outcomes.
In parallel to the survey we will select 25 apprentices per region for the in-depth interviews (n=100). Each apprentice will be interviewed in two different moments in order to capture the shifts in their opinions about the programme and in their live plans. These interviews will be triangulated with around ten interviews per region to their employers and five interviews per region to their trainers (n=60). Triangulation is especially important due to the slippery object that we are dealing with at this stage. With the in-depth interviews, we will analyse the enactment of the programme through the reflexivity and strategic behaviour of the actors.
Research Design: WP3. Research Design
Interview Schedule (Implementers): WP3. Guidelines for Implementers
Interview Schedule (Apprentices, Wave 1): WP3. Guidelines for Apprentices1
Interview Schedule (Apprentices, Wave 2): WP3. Guidelines for Apprentices2
Interview Notes Implementers: WP3. Interview notes Implementers
Interview Notes Apprentices: WP3. Interview notes Apprentices
Data Coding procedure and Codebooks: WP3. Data Coding