General introduction

Until recently further education was a neglected area of sociological inquiry; its voluntaristic and entrepreneurial character perhaps reflecting the low status image traditionally associated with technical education in Britain. With a few notable exceptions, research in the sociology of education, in the 1960s and early 1970s, has tended to focus on schooling, with little or no reference to the activities of ‘industrial trainers’. (1) One could say that the relationship between further education, training and work during this period was taken as given. Yet in the two decades following publication of the Crowther Report (1959) much has happened to the non-advanced sector of FE, not least in relation to the expansion and deversification of its links with industry, student intake and curricular arrangements. Paradoxically, the rise of youth unemployment has not only initiated far-reaching training reforms in recent years, but it has also bred fresh life into many of Crowther’s proposals, notably in relation to the dream of ‘FE for all’.