Author: Graham Attwell

The European Commission’s agency for vocational education and training, Cedefop, is launching the first comprehensive survey of VET teachers across Europe. The European Vocational Teacher Survey (EVTS) will reach 14,000 teachers across 23 EU Member States, starting in October 2025, to gather crucial data about the challenges and experiences of those working in vocational education. Addressing Critical Workforce Challenges The survey comes at a time when Europe faces significant shortages of qualified VET teachers, particularly in STEM subjects, foreign languages, and informatics. These shortages are undermining efforts to meet the EU’s 2030 skills targets and hampering progress toward digital and […]

Leon Furze says that when we stop policing AI and start designing better assessments, student engagement increases and academic integrity concerns decreases. He claims these principles work whether students use AI or not. If you’re an educator struggling with AI policies, start with these fundamentals. Ask yourself: Is my assessment valid? Authentic? Transparent? Process-focused? Built on professional expertise? And he advocates 5 principles to bring us back to what matters about assessment:

The UK JISC have published the results of their annual digital experience insights survey for further education (vocational education and training) learners. The survey took place took place betweenOctober 2024 and April 2025 with 5,881 respondents from 16 organisations representing 6% of all further education providers in the UK.1 A separate analysis of the digital experience of learners in colleges in Wales was conducted in 2024/25. The mean number of responses was 368 per organisation and the median number of responses was 372 per although However, six of the 16 organisations contributed fewer than 100 responses. However, they continue, “the […]

There has always been an argument that although technology my destroy jobs, at the same time it creates new employment opportunities. So far there is little. evidence that Generative AI is creating new jobs, part from for a limited group of expert programmers and data scientist. But now NBC news has revealed a new source of work – to fix what Artificial Intelligence gets wrong. In an article entitled “Humans are being hired to make AI slop look less sloppy” they report how as companies struggle to figure out their approach to AI, recent data provided from freelance job platforms […]

In the late 1990s there was an upsurge of interest in the education community around research into knowledge development. Perhaps stimulated by political preoccupations around the emergence of the ‘knowledge society’ discussions focused on how knowledge was developed and how such knowledge development could be stimulated and supported. Although recently innovation has tended to be seen as dependent on individual invention, in the 19902 research it was more generally seen as a social process. Nonaka & Takeuchi (1995) developed the SECI model which describes four knowledge creation processes within organizations, involving the interplay of tacit and explicit knowledge. SECI includes […]

I’m just back from been having a couple of weeks holiday from the blog, escaping from Spanish heatwaves half way up a mountain in Galicia. But the time has come to get back to the keyboard. And I’ve quite a pile of posts waiting to be written Lets start with assessment. Assessment has not caused such a stir in vocational education and training as in school and higher education, mainly I guess because the general move towards competence and practice based assessment is less vulnerable to the likes of ChatGPT. But that doesn’t mean that vocational education and training policy […]

I’ve been working in vocational education and training for about 40 years. And there are a few themes that seem to repeat themselves. The assertion that education is out of touch and needs changes to meet the demands of employers and modern industry. The need for reform of vocational qualifications (although it may be that this is a particularly UK obsession). A more recent discourse is the importance of VET for productivity. And, of course, there are the ever changing demands for adopting new technology as a tool for modernising VET. So I was interested to read about Raymond Callahan’s […]

The UK ESRC Digital Good Network has published a call for abstracts for a proposed special issue in the journal Big Data and Society aiming to advance scholarship on the state-of-the-art and future prospects of including public voices in AI. They say ‘Public voice’ is not easy to define or operationalise. “There is no one ‘public’. Benefits, harms and risks are distributed unevenly. The hopes, concerns and experiences of different groups with AI vary. What has been identified as a ‘participation gap’ is worsened by insufficient and ineffective processes of consultation, implementation and ongoing management. Compounding these issues are structural […]

The European Commission and OECD, with support from Code.org, have released a new draft of their proposes AI Literacy Framework. The framework defines what primary and secondary students should know and be able to do in a world shaped by AI. Now the European Commission has we’re inviting feedback from educators, policymakers, researchers. They say your input will inform the final version of the AI Lit Framework and will help shape how we prepare students to engage with AI – critically, creatively, and ethically and invite feedback from “across geographies, roles, and perspectives” to ensure this framework is relevant and […]