Vocational education and training in United Kingdom has traditionally been regarded as the responsibility of employers and labors. But after the Industrial Training Act in 1964, this was changed into tripartite system. In 1995 DfEE had been made, and now Labor government headed by Blaire stresses 'Welfare-to-Work', continuing to pursue the decentralization of vocational education and training system. The focus of vocational education and training policy in these days is to activate the training market which is leaded by employers and labors.
The vocational education in Britain is classified into one in pre-16-year-old compulsory secondary education and the other in post-16-year-old compulsory secondary education. In this level, the vocational education is provided by comprehensive schools, technology colleges, and city technology colleges. Post-compulsory secondary education is accomplished in sixth-form colleges, and further education institutions. Lots of further education institutions provide post-16 students with liberal education as well as vocational education.
Related to lifelong education, Britain government published the green paper, the Learning Age in 1998, which included new ways of lifelong learning such as UfI(Unversity for Industry), and ILA(Individual Learning Accounts). UfI is for the purposes of making a wide range learning demands, and includes 'Learning Direct' to offer useful learning information. In addition, there is IiP(Investors in people), which links the management strategy with training and human resources development much stronger.
Among the vocational training is the initial training, which is for the young people except high school students and those who take trainings of NVQ 3 level or over, in the age of 16-to-19. For those youngsters there are WBTYP(work based training for young people) such as Modern Apprenticeship, the National Traineeship, and Youth Training. The finance of Modern Apprenticeship is provided by TEC according to the industry and training form, and the qualification of it is about 900 NVQs.
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