For almost eight years now, Edge’s Emerging Researchers Network (ERN) has been providing a supportive and collaborative space for PhD Students and early career researchers to come together to share their research and develop their networks. The early career researchers explore topics aligning closely with Edge’s research agenda, including vocational education and training (VET), 16+ transitions and employability skills. More recently, Edge has helped support the advancement of VET research and nurture this budding research community by offering seed funding opportunities for members to develop their own pertinent research projects. A number of our members have embraced this opportunity and established meaningful and important research queries, some which closely align with their own previous or current PhDs or personal research projects. Our first round of awardees, who began their research in 2023, have now all published their findings. Their reports portray the varied interests and skills we have across our members, and offer valuable findings to fellow researchers, as well as policy makers and practitioners.
Zihao Liu, in his research with Edge, investigated the gap between China and the UK's Higher Vocational Education and Training (HVET) students' post-college transition after Covid-19. Using semi-structured interviews, Zihao explored the experiences of 20 HVET students from four colleges in China regarding their post-college transitions, comparing them to the UK situation to explore the gap between the two countries. He found that in both countries, the socioeconomic background and curriculum are crucial for affecting HVET students’ transitions. More prominently than the UK, China’s students are experiencing more challenges from the social stigmatisation on the HVET identity and broader barriers which have come to the fore since Covid-19. By contrast, the racism in the UK society continues to produce serious structural issues and inequalities for non-White HVET students during their transitions.
Another long-standing member of the ERN, Liz Polding, examined legal employers’ school outreach programmes, and how they promote access to the solicitor apprenticeship as a route to qualification as a lawyer. The legal profession has been criticised as unrepresentative of the social make up of Britain, with significant overrepresentation in relation to legal practitioners with private school backgrounds. The solicitor apprenticeship, which was introduced in 2015, has the potential to disrupt this in creating a ‘non-graduate’ route into the profession. Liz conducted semi-structured interviews with employers and combined these with a review of publicly available information on schools involved in the initiatives. Themes emerged around the positioning of employers’ motivations for doing school outreach, and the shifting positioning of apprenticeships to a viable alternative to higher education, with important ramifications for improving social mobility and informing effective careers information, advice and guidance.
On a similar theme of transitioning from VET qualifications as Zihao Liu, Karen Tatham’s project sought to understand the qualification patterns and median wage returns for young workers in England aged 25-30 years, using Longitudinal Economic Outcomes (LEO) data. Her study focused on the four largest sectors of employment for young adult workers, which between them employ over half of all young adult workers aged 25-30 years: Wholesale and Retail (employing 16.8%); Health and Social Work (13.0%); Education (9.7%) and Professional Services (9.6%).Karen dives further into the sub-sector level data looking at the number of employees, highest qualifications held and median earnings. She highlights issues around over-qualification and under-employment across industries at graduate Level 6+ level and in the English vocational system at Levels 2 and 3. For young workers, qualification mismatches can limit the earnings achieved and the progression possibilities within an industry.
After witnessing such high-quality pieces from our early career researchers in the first year, Edge has extended the opportunity for this, and coming, years.
Our next cohort of successful awardees have already got stuck into their research. Research underway includes exploring the challenges faced by young people who choose gender atypical subjects and careers, for example, health and social care, hairdressing, engineering and construction. Whilst another investigates career aspirations of FE students in equine training and management. We look forward to sharing these findings with you over the coming year and welcoming further proposals from our ERN members.