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Teaching Economics

In the News

Will employers take a free ride on apprenticeships?

Graham Watson

18th April 2017

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Here is a Guardian editorial packed full of evaluation of the latest attempt to beef-up vocational training via apprenticeships. In it, there's an acknowledgement of the difficulties of policy-making, an application of 'Goodhart's Law', which stated that once something is established as a target, it often ceases to be a meaningful measure of what it used to quantify.

As the article notes, this leads to such targets being 'gamed' and I guess this applies to apprenticeships, as much as it does to monetary aggregates, or the time taken for ambulances to arrive.

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Graham Watson

Graham Watson has taught Economics for over twenty years. He contributes to Tutor2U, reads voraciously and is interested in all aspects of Teaching and Learning.

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