Simon Mcgrath
Biographic Data
| ID | 138296 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Simon Mcgrath |
| GIVEN NAMES | Simon |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcgrath |
| SIGNATURE | MCGRATH S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Nottingham |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2312-5378 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 83 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 204 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 83 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
The contribution of VET to resilience and the possibilities for decolonisation
Drawing on existing academic literature, institutional accounts and agency reports on Palestinian VET, we explore the question of how VET can support resilience, a neglected topic in the international VET literature. In spite of the horrendous current situation, we suggest that there are signs of hope and possibilities for new developments in the Palestinian VET context. Beyond presenting the Palestinian situation to an international audience, we…
Agricultural technical and vocational education and training in China
Over the past decades, the Chinese central government has implemented significant reforms to the agricultural training system, making farmers’ upskilling a crucial public commitment. This paper examines how the central government’s policies have shaped and restructured the Chinese agricultural training system since the founding of the People’s Republic of China (1949–present). Based on an analysis of six flagship policy documents from 1949 until …
Defining CVI
Community Violence Intervention (CVI) operates at the critical intersection of public health and public safety, offering a community-driven approach to reducing violence while addressing its root causes. Grounded in principles of harm reduction, trauma-informed care, and social determinants of health, CVI reframes violence as a public health crisis rather than solely a criminal justice issue. Despite its promise and demonstrated impact, the field…
Professor Lorna Unwin OBE (1953–2024)
Professor John Keith Philip Watson (1939–2024)
Oil, transport, water and food
In this paper, drawing on an extensive research project across three countries (VET Africa 4.0 Collective 2023), we produce an emerging argument that it is necessary to rethink and reframe VET logics and approaches in a warming future dominated by informality and mass unemployment.Currently,neither the formal VET college or workplace are adequately set up to provide the type(s) of VET that are in demand or needed for just transitioning and sustai…
Agricultural vocational education and training for sustainable futures
With ever-increasing focus from policymakers on the potential of vocational education to provide skills for livelihoods and sustainability in the rural economy, this study set out to investigate attempts at curriculum reform by agricultural technical and vocational education and training providers in the context of the dual crisis – ‘climate and economic’ – in Zimbabwe. The question addressed is: How should the agricultural vocational education a…
A landscape view of emerging sustainability responses within VET
With evidence of global climate change and ongoing ecological degradation, there is an urgent need to give more attention to sustainability within VET to ensure that VET does not remain complicit in reproducing the unjust and unsustainable trajectories of current economic and development pathways. At present, the VET literature does not adequately address these issues, hence the need for this special issue. In response, this paper offers a meta-r…
Towards vocational education and training and skills development for sustainable futures
The scale and urgency of the climate emergency means that major transformations across a range of human systems are both necessary and inevitable; although what is inevitable and what is necessary
A capability approach to understanding the role of informal apprenticeship in the human development of informal apprentices
Skills training in the informal economy, known as informal apprenticeship, caters to the skills needs of millions of young people in the Global South. While it predates the development of formal Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) systems, it was not until the ‘discovery’ of the informal economy in the 1970s that attention was drawn to this important system of training. Despite the importance of informal apprenticeship, it is s…
Doctoral theses abstracts in vocational education
A recent tradition of the Journal of Vocational Education and Training that brings great pleasure to the editorial team is the annual publication of a selection of abstracts from recent doctoral th
Revisiting VET research paradigms
This paper reflects on a large multisite funded VET research project conducted by a large and diverse research team. Reflecting on two of our case studies, from Uganda and South Africa, we consider both the need for broadening the VET research agenda to incorporate more research on non-formal sites of vocational learning and work, and the imperative of continued critical reflection on modalities of researching the formal sphere. What we offer is …
Reframing skills ecosystems for sustainable and just futures
The current dominant approach to vocational education and training (VET) does not work in theory, policy or practice in current contexts of unsustainability and global inequality. Nor is it fit for future purpose. Drawing on a large-scale research collaboration between four universities, funded by the UK’s Global Challenges Research Fund, with co-funding and funding in-kind from global south partners, this paper is a contribution to imagining new…
Skills for development and vocational education and training
In 2012, IJED published a special issue on vocational education and training and development that reflected the sense of being at a potential turning point for policy, practice and research in this area as UNESCO convened the Third International Conference on Technical and Vocational Education and Training. A decade on, we reflect on the way that the research literature has evolved in this period, suggesting a five-fold typology of literature tha…
New VET theories for new times
There is a growing sense that the orthodox set of theories and policies for VET don’t work. This is particularly true in the South where all such Northern theories and policies face the common problem of being constructed for other contexts and then imported. In the light of persistent poverty and inequality; widespread precarious and indecent work; continued concerns about educational access, retention and achievement; and a rising environmental…
Vocational education in the fourth industrial revolution
No abstract available
Skills futures in Africa
The UNESCO International Commission on the Futures of Education imagines a positive future in which skills development can be harnessed for the benefits of people and planet, in line with the loftiest vision of the Sustainable Development Goals. However, skills systems often remain marginalized within educational debates and plans, with vocational learning often dismissed as low quality and low status. Reflecting on the work done for the commissi…
A laminated, emergentist view of skills ecosystems
In this paper we present a model of vocational education and training (VET) that can be used to guide decisions relating to VET in Africa today. This model takes the critique of the neoclassical, neoliberal model of VET as its starting point. Guided by Bhaskar's Critical Naturalism, we use immanent critique to consider the adequacy of proposed alternatives to the neoclassical approach, such as: the heterodox approach, which foregrounds explanatio…
Re-conceptualising VET
The paper addresses the impact of Covid-19 on vocational education and training, seeking to discern the outline of possible directions for its future development within the debates about VET responses to the pandemic. The discussion is set in its socio-economic context, considering debates that engage with the social relations of care and neo-liberalism. The paper analyses discourses that have developed around VET across the world during the pand…
Exploring the Internationalization of Zimbabwe’s Higher Education Institutions Through a Decolonial Lens
Looking through the history of higher education in Zimbabwe, we argue that the concept of internationalization of higher education is not new to Zimbabwe. Understandings, manifestations, and processes of the phenomenon over time are examined to reveal the nuances of the internationalization process in its current mode of occurrence, in an attempt to not only understand it in its colonial and postcolonial manifestation but to situate it within a w…
Education for just transitions
The 30th anniversary Human Development Report, entitled The Next Frontier: Human Development and the Anthropocene, was released by the United Nations Development Programme in December 2020. It marks an important step forward as a high-profile publication trying to radically re-think the challenge of sustainable development and revisit what it means to develop as human beings interconnected within earth systems. This article provides a critical re…
Possibilities and priorities for Ijed in times of uncertainty
Internationalisation of higher education and national development
The discourse of the internationalisation of higher education continues to grow in influence. Whilst the bulk of the IHE literature has been Northern-focused and dominated, there was an African strand a decade or so ago that has sought to understand what the discourse means in African contexts, shaped profoundly as they have been by colonialism. This debate is ripe for revisiting given the very different context of the post-2015 period and a retu…
Educational policy-making and hegemony
This article discusses the changes in basic education in Turkey, with a particular focus on religious education and its ramifications for the education system. The latest education reform, 4 + 4 + 4 (or 4+), the largest education reform in recent Turkish history, has brought radical changes to the school system regarding religious education. For this research, journalists and teacher unionists were interviewed to investigate civil society’s persp…
Quality education and the role of the teacher in Fiji
This article reports on the findings of original field research carried out in the small island developing state of Fiji, in the South Pacific. A North-South research partnership was built upon previous collaboration between team members and, in so doing, pioneered the blending of Pacific and Western research approaches sensitive to a postcolonial positioning. The study interrogates practitioner perspectives on: the nature and quality of teachers…
Vocational education and training for development
Higher education and economic development
The role of education in development
This paper delves beneath the widespread belief that education (often repackaged as human capital) is important in development to consider the role that the discipline of education plays in shaping the wider discourses of development. In particular, it will explore recent texts by important figures in development economics (Collier, Easterly, Sachs and Stiglitz) to see what they say (and don’t say) about education’s role in development and to con…
Challenging deficit discourses in international education and development
Research and policy in international education has often been framed in terms of a deficit discourse. For instance, policy debates on women’s literacy and education have begun by positioning women
Skills for sustainable development
Skills for development and vocational education and training
In 2012, IJED published a special issue on vocational education and training and development that reflected the sense of being at a potential turning point for policy, practice and research in this area as UNESCO convened the Third International Conference on Technical and Vocational Education and Training. A decade on, we reflect on the way that the research literature has evolved in this period, suggesting a five-fold typology of literature tha…
Negotiating Employability
In this paper we focus on highly skilled migration from Zimbabwe to the UK, exploring these migrants' social capital sources/structures and content. In doing so we pay attention to routes of migration and how they shape migrants' networking capabilities and patterns. We further take a Bourdieusian perspective and explore the intersection between social capital and cultural capital in the process of migrants' negotiation of employment opportunitie…
Knowledge-based aid
Beyond the basics
Education and skills for development in South Africa
Africa's Young Majority
Barbara Trudell, Kenneth King, Simon McGrath and Paul Nugent (eds), Africa's Young Majority. Edinburgh: Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, 2002, 342 pp., £19.50, ISBN 0 9527917 7 3 (paperback). - Volume 73 Issue 4
International influences on the evolution of skills development in South Africa
Communicating Employability
The post-2015 debate and the place of education in development thinking
Research in a cold climate
Reframing skills ecosystems for sustainable and just futures
The current dominant approach to vocational education and training (VET) does not work in theory, policy or practice in current contexts of unsustainability and global inequality. Nor is it fit for future purpose. Drawing on a large-scale research collaboration between four universities, funded by the UK’s Global Challenges Research Fund, with co-funding and funding in-kind from global south partners, this paper is a contribution to imagining new…
Education for just transitions
The 30th anniversary Human Development Report, entitled The Next Frontier: Human Development and the Anthropocene, was released by the United Nations Development Programme in December 2020. It marks an important step forward as a high-profile publication trying to radically re-think the challenge of sustainable development and revisit what it means to develop as human beings interconnected within earth systems. This article provides a critical re…
Beyond aid effectiveness
Coming in from the Cold? Further education and training in South Africa
As South Africa enters the Mbeki Presidency so the fortunes of the country are thrown into sharp relief. One of the central elements determining South Africa's short- to medium-term future will be the success of educational transformation, particularly when it is directed to addressing issues of equity and economic development. This paper explores the 1998 reforms of the further education and training system in the context of broader questions of…
Quality education and the role of the teacher in Fiji
This article reports on the findings of original field research carried out in the small island developing state of Fiji, in the South Pacific. A North-South research partnership was built upon previous collaboration between team members and, in so doing, pioneered the blending of Pacific and Western research approaches sensitive to a postcolonial positioning. The study interrogates practitioner perspectives on: the nature and quality of teachers…
Education and the post-2015 international development goals
Professional skills development in a resource-poor setting
Possibilities and priorities for Ijed in times of uncertainty
Knowing and doing vocational education and training reform
Education and development
Enterprise in Africa
Internationally, donors are increasing their emphasis on poverty-focused policies and on the notion of pro-poor growth. This publication examines key elements of the debate about small and micro enterprises (SMEs) from the perspective of the current poverty-growth debate and in the specific context of Africa. Contributing authors consider issues such as the effect of the macroeconomic climate on small enterprise development, the effectiveness of …
Coming in from the Cold? Further education and training in South Africa
As South Africa enters the Mbeki Presidency so the fortunes of the country are thrown into sharp relief. One of the central elements determining South Africa's short- to medium-term future will be the success of educational transformation, particularly when it is directed to addressing issues of equity and economic development. This paper explores the 1998 reforms of the further education and training system in the context of broader questions of…
Research in a cold climate
The Globalisation of Development Knowledge and Comparative Education
The British Department for International Development and Knowledge-based Aid
A number of trends have led development cooperation agencies to embrace the idea of becoming 'knowledge agencies', more efficient and effective users of knowledge both internally and in their work with their recipients/partners. At the same time, agencies have become fascinated with the role that knowledge can play in national development strategies. This paper seeks to highlight some of the unresolved tensions that emerge from this new agency ar…
Africa's Young Majority
Barbara Trudell, Kenneth King, Simon McGrath and Paul Nugent (eds), Africa's Young Majority. Edinburgh: Centre of African Studies, University of Edinburgh, 2002, 342 pp., £19.50, ISBN 0 9527917 7 3 (paperback). - Volume 73 Issue 4
Assessing the impact of globalization on South African education and training
This article reviews the effects of globalization on South Africa a decade after the transition to a post-apartheid system. It brings together some of the recent literature of the performance of the economy and concomitant changes in education. It shows the pervasive force of globalization on South African education and training and explores in particular how this has affected the political imperative to establish a non-racial socio-political ord…
Knowledge-based aid
An examination of the vocational education and training reform debate in Southern Africa
This paper explores the role that vocational education and training (VET) can play in Southern African responses to major socio‐economic challenges. It argues that this role will be most pronounced if it is articulated within a broader educational and economic vision that is shared by a range of stakeholders in society and supported by an adequate funding base, effective information systems and qualified and motivated planners and implementers. H…
Education and skills for development in South Africa
International influences on the evolution of skills development in South Africa
Complexity, identity and educational change
Beyond the basics
Mediating between global theory and local practices
Educational change
Developing teachers and teaching
Vocational education and training for sustainability in South Africa
Education, culture and society
Caught between different worlds
Education and development in diverse contexts
Education and development
Education at the margins
Education, Citizenship and New Public Diplomacy in the UK
Global citizenship is a contested concept which is receiving attention in the United Kingdom as a means of contributing to students' understanding of global issues and the rights and responsibilities that they imply. Global citizenship education is criticised as indoctrination by some and considered the best route to global peace by others. This article provides a discussion of its relationship with the concept and practice of cultural relations …
On the limits of best practice
Education and development
Political science (64 works) · Sociology (58 works) · Economics (35 works) · Global Educational Policies and Reforms (35 works) · Economic growth (28 works) · Law (25 works) · Poverty, Education, and Child Welfare (21 works) · Education Systems and Policy (20 works) · Law (19 works) · Pedagogy (19 works)