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Capability for special, adult, and further education

by Gavin Moodie and Leesa Wheelahan

The capabilities approach focuses on human flourishing rather than augmenting productive capacities, although the latter may be necessary for the former. It is also concerned with the potential of people to achieve or become, rather than maximising happiness or the sum total of utilities that individuals have. It is concerned with the real freedoms people have rather than economic resources, as it recognises that different individuals, communities and societies need different types and different levels of resources to live dignified lives.

Students with special educational needs and disabilities

The capabilities approach provides the basis for understanding and addressing multiple and overlapping forms of disadvantage. Tikly explained that the capabilities approach ‘implies a focus on the institutional and cultural barriers that prevent inclusion of different groups’. It has implications for resourcing because it recognises that some groups will need more resources to achieve comparable capabilities as the basis for exercising choice in their lives. This is one reason why the capabilities approach was first drawn upon by the those fighting for the human rights and dignity for those with disabilities. Terzi argued that the capabilities approach ‘is innovative with respect to the centrality of human diversity in assessing inequality’. It offers another theory to guide the development of students with special educational needs and disabilities in further and higher education. This has implications for policy, funding and governance. As capabilities are embedded in their social context and manifest differently in different contexts, they require local engagement with social partners, educational institutions and a nuanced understanding of the different needs of different students.

Education for adults and part time students

The SRHE Blog has noted the under-provision of education for adults and its editor Rob Cuthbert observed that ‘Part-time students are vanishing from the system, as funding regimes repeatedly ignore their different needs and discourage institutions from providing for them.’ Capabilities theory offers a further argument for improving provision for adult and part-time students, if one is needed.

Further education

Tikly argued that the capabilities approach ‘allows for an expanded view of the purpose of [Technical and Vocational Education and Training] as supporting the development of human capabilities and functionings that individuals, communities and society at large have reason to value’. He applied the capabilities approach to understanding the broad purposes of vocational education and the role it can play in society, and also to issues of funding and governance.

We apply human capabilities to vocational education by considering what people are able to ‘be and do’ at work and through work to realise themselves and their goals. We understand capabilities to refer to the resources and arrangements of work and the broad knowledge, skills and attributes that individuals need to be productive at work, to progress in their careers, and to participate in decision-making about work, and in their life. Vocational education students need to understand how their field of practice fits within their communities and societies, and they require the capacity to be ‘citizens’ within their field, so they can help shape its future.

We argue that vocational education develops students’ capabilities in two ways. It develops students’ understanding of the world and their capacity to act in the world. And its educational processes facilitate students making decisions about their education and how they undertake it, even within strongly framed programs.

To do this vocational education should prepare students for a broad field of practice rather than a narrowly defined occupation, or worse, narrowly defined skills aligned with work-place tasks and roles. Vocational education should also contribute to and benefit from helping students develop the building blocks of these broader capabilities.

Strong institutions

The development of capabilities is underpinned by institutional frameworks and social partnerships. This points to the importance of strong public vocational education institutions in mediating the development of capabilities and in mediating links between students and other social partners. And, this requires strong public vocational education institutions to participate in discussions and debates about the nature of capabilities, and to support their development.

Sen explained that we live and operate in a world of institutions, and that ‘Our opportunities and prospects depend crucially on what institutions exist and how they function’. He explained that institutions must be evaluated by the extent to which they contribute to capabilities and to freedom. Winch said that a vocational education framework needs stability:

“… so that it can evolve along pathways familiar to participants, and so that routes and qualifications are recognized by all stakeholders … Governments must resist the temptation to change TVET structures for short-term political benefit, and should plan for robust and long-term stable structures. Last, but not least, qualifications should contain substantial theoretical content to facilitate permeability and broad occupational capabilities.”

Capabilities provide the conceptual basis of vocational education and its qualifications, but the specific focus and content of teaching and learning and curriculum requires deep understandings of the contexts for which students are being prepared, engagement with local communities of interest, and negotiation over the outcomes. For example, the capabilities that electricians need will differ from those of childcare workers.

The extent to which individuals can realise their capabilities at work is partly related to the extent to which a workplace facilitates their agency in work, the level of autonomy and support they are offered, and where they are situated in organisational structures. Hierarchical and managerial workplaces restrict agency, whereas a more expansive approach may provide opportunities for development and growth. It is particularly salient for vocational education that workers’ capabilities as workers depends crucially on the capabilities of their work unit. Work groups have been studied extensively since the Hawthorne studies of the 1920s which identified considerable variation in the effectiveness of different work groups. A work unit that supports and encourages its members to develop their knowledge and skills develops its members’ work capabilities more than others, and according to Senge, learning organisations have competitive advantages over other organisations.

Caveats in using the capabilities approach

There are important caveats in understanding the way in which the capabilities approach can be used. Tikly explained that ‘the capability approach should not be seen as providing ready-made answers to the policy issues and challenges facing the TVET sector today’. He argued that it ‘should be seen as a way of framing issues and as a starting point for evaluating policy choices’.

The second caveat is that while the capabilities approach provides a normative framework for evaluating, assessing and providing the conditions for individual well-being and social arrangements, it does not provide explanations about the causes of ‘capability deprivation’. The capabilities approach cannot be applied in the absence of theorising about social relations of power and domination.

The third caveat is that while the capabilities approach could help renovate vocational education so that it is more holistic and developmental, it cannot on its own ‘fix’ the problems of the labour market. To do this would require a focus on the labour market itself, and not just vocational education qualifications. For example, while vocational education may provide education that helps students develop capabilities, these capabilities may not be able to be realised in workplaces that resist change, are discriminatory, or provide few opportunities for discretionary learning or for the develop­ment of autonomous practice.

The fourth, crucial, caveat, is that capabilities cannot be considered in the abstract. Capabilities are not just an individual attribute: they include the resources available to a person and their personal, social and environmental circumstances that make it possible for them to realise what they reasonably value. A problem in some of the literature is that it considers capabilities in the abstract to generate idealised lists of individuals’ attributes such as general skills, employability skills and graduate attributes. However, since these are detached from the requirements of occupations and the circumstances in which they are practised they don’t advance analysis beyond other lists of general skills and attributes.

Dr Gavin Moodie is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of Education

Leesa Wheelahan is Professor Emerita and William G. Davis Chair in Community College Leadership Emerita at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of Education.


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Capability for higher education

by Gavin Moodie and Leesa Wheelahan

The developers of the capabilities approach Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum argued that education is fundamental to expanding peoples’ capacity to understand and act in the world and thus lead the kind of lives they value and have reason to value.

Capability for education is the freedom to choose a curriculum or a course one has reason to value, that will support students to develop their emerging conceptions of how they want to live their lives, and provide them with the educational foundation that is necessary to do so. This offers higher education an alternative rationale to human capital theory that has dominated post-secondary education since the Robbins Report of 1963, but which has been losing its appeal as the return on investment in higher education has been plateauing.

Moreover, the value of and confidence in qualifications, particularly higher education qualifications, has been diminishing because they are perceived to no longer deliver on the promise of a good job with good career prospects. If the value of higher education qualifications (and indeed, all educational qualifications) are evaluated only by the extent to which they ‘deliver’ on labour market outcomes, then their value will be questioned. However, qualifications have multiple purposes which, of course, include, but cannot be limited to, labour market outcomes.

Students’ capabilities are advanced by higher education with multiple complementary values, and this helps us to consider the enduring value of and importance of qualifications. Qualifications have intrinsic value for students to realise their self to ‘be’ in the world and to live a life they have reason to value. Qualifications have educational value for accessing the knowledge needed for students to participate in debates and controversies in society and in their field of practice and to proceed to higher levels of education.

Qualifications have use value as a necessary foundation for an occupation and an occupational identity, and exchange value to access the labour market and contribute to an occupational identity. Qualifications also have social value for democratic, socially inclusive communities and society. These different forms of value lead us to posit that qualifications for the capability approach have four purposes, while recognising that different types of qualifications will fulfil these purposes in different ways:

  1. Individual, to develop individuals’ agency to live lives they have reason to value, and to contribute to their families, communities, society, and occupation;
  2. Educational, to develop graduates’ and society’s understanding of theoretical, abstract knowledge;
  3. Occupational, to develop graduates’ individual and work groups’ collective productive capacity; and
  4. Social, to advance society, and social justice and inclusion.

Education should include students’ capability for voice – the capacity to express their wishes, expectations, desires, and concerns, and to have them count when decisions concerning themselves are made. Bonvin related the capability for voice to Appadurai’s ‘capacity to aspire’ or ‘to project oneself in the future’. A capacity to aspire is important because people adapt their preferences according to what they perceive to be achievable. In contrast, education should take account of students’ different capacities and aim to develop their capacity to transform themselves, to increase their agency, to expand their choices about how they wish to live. Thus, ‘the development of capabilities requires the ability to construct one’s preferences (capacity to aspire), to voice them and make them count (capability for voice)’.

Post-secondary education should seek to develop students’ voice in their education, work and wider society. Education should extend its application of these principles to the workplaces where students undertake work integrated or work-based learning. However, trainees may have less scope to exercise their voice at work than on campus.

Collective capabilities

Sen argued that ‘[T]he basic building blocks’ of the capabilities approach is ‘the freedoms of individuals’. Sen is interested in expanding individual liberties and he called his book developing his capabilities approach Development as freedom. But individuals’ freedoms and capabilities are constituted not just by their individual circumstances, but by their membership of social institutions which themselves have varying capabilities. Most basically, the social institution of the family greatly affects members’ capabilities, and reproduces not only people, but differentiated capabilities of successive generations of family members.

Yet families have their own capabilities depending, for example, on their literacy and levels of education, which in turn provides different resources upon which family members can draw. Families have unequal levels of economic, social and cultural capital, which is shaped by relations of class, gender and race and other dimensions of power. Education is collective in three ways, through peers, occupations, and social change. The peer effect is a social multiplier, whereby adults share knowledge with their neighbours and those with whom they interact, developing their peers’ knowledge. This educative role is also collective in building social institutions such as schooling, participating in post-secondary education, and credentialing, although some have argued credentialing has been excessively institutionalised. Education’s educative role is also collective in developing educational organisations such as libraries, educative websites, public lectures, and community education, all of which play a particularly important role in education for adult working learners and other members of the community.

Universities are strongly institutionalised – the idea of a university, of an undergraduate, a lecturer, and a degree are widely understood and reinforced by norms and expectations, despite local variations and changes over time. Universities have strong roles in building and extending social institutions of education and related institutions for the advancement of knowledge and promotion of rational inquiry. Postsecondary education organisations and their staff and students also contribute to the educational, social and cultural leadership of their communities by participating formally and informally in local associations, committees and boards. This develops ‘networks of civic engagement’, which develops communities’ capacity for collective action. Through this post-secondary education institutions anchor their communities by developing knowledge and skills within their region; establishing links and exchanges outside the region; contributing to civic, political, cultural, and social activities and networks in their region; developing facilities and amenities used by the community; and, contributing to their region’s economic activity. Gertler and Vinodrai add that universities foster tolerance, openness and social inclusion:

“First, the university plays an important role in shaping the quality of place and fostering openness and tolerance in the community. Crucial to this process is the ability of the university to create a social environment that is open to dialogue and debate, tolerant of different viewpoints, and accessible to many different social, ethnic, and cultural groups (locally, nationally, and internationally). In other words, the university has a role in reducing ‘barriers to entry’ and working towards social inclusion.”

Capability for higher education at three levels

Thus, higher education develops capabilities at three levels: 1) the individual, 2) social and work groups, and 3) society. Most attention has been given to higher education’s contributions to individuals, and to society. More recently higher education has given attention to teamwork but much of this has been about individuals’ capacity to work in teams rather than the development of the capabilities of groups. The capabilities approach is also strongly applicable to adult, further, and special education, which is the subject of the next in our SRHE Blog series, and of our open access book.

Dr Gavin Moodie is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of Education

Leesa Wheelahan is Professor Emerita and William G. Davis Chair in Community College Leadership Emerita at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of Education.


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Introducing the capabilities approach

by Gavin Moodie and Leesa Wheelahan

In 2015 in a blog for SRHE, Rajani Naidoo mentioned, almost in passing, the potential of the capability or capabilities approach to complement the wellbeing framework, which was the approach she advocated.  However, she did not elaborate the approach. Yet the capabilities approach is important for educational and general public policy, and has the potential to transform peoples’ agency. It has become increasingly important in the scholarly literature in all sectors of education.

The capabilities approach was developed by the economics Nobel laureate Amartya Sen and by the distinguished USA philosopher Martha Nussbaum. Sen argued that the aim of public policy should be ‘the expansion of the “capabilities” of persons to lead the kind of lives they value—and have reason to value’. Sen’s argument is that human capability is an alternative to utilitarianism, rights theories of justice, and to human capital theory. While the aim of human capital theory is to increase economic output which may benefit humans, the aim of capabilities is to increase peoples’ freedom, which requires economic resources, but importantly also other arrangements –

“At the risk of some oversimplification, it can be said that the literature on human capital tends to concentrate on the agency of human beings in augmenting production possibilities. The perspective of human capability focuses, on the other hand, on the ability — the substantive freedom — of people to lead the lives they have reason to value and to enhance the real choices they have. The two perspectives cannot be but related, since both are concerned with the role of human beings, and in particular with the actual abilities that they achieve and acquire.

But the yardstick of assessment concentrates on different achievements.”

As Belgian philosopher Ingrid Robeyns explained, the capability approach is a broad normative framework for evaluating and assessing individuals’ well-being and social arrangements, the design of policies, and proposals about social change in society. The capabilities approach is therefore not a list of desirable attributes that people may have, as is suggested by reductive and distorted presentations of the approach. It is not another term for competencies or for skills. It refers to the real freedom individuals have to pursue the things that matter to them, and to live a life they have reason to value, and to the social, economic, political, and the environmental resources and conditions that are needed to realise these opportunities. It is at its core, a relational approach that links individuals, their families and communities, with their society and asks about the social arrangements that are needed to support individuals to realise their aspirations.

Capabilities and functionings

The capabilities approach distinguishes between capabilities and functionings. Capabilities are people’s capacity to act, while functionings are the outcomes from people using their capabilities to achieve a particular goal. A complex set of capabilities provides individuals with the basis for making choices in their lives, whereas functionings are the outcomes they achieve when they exercise choice. A particular set of capabilities can produce any number of outcomes. Walker and Unterhalter explained that: “The difference between a capability and  functioning is one between an opportunity to achieve and the actual achievement, between potential and outcome”. Two people with similar capability sets may make choices that result in different functionings or outcomes. Capabilities cannot be regarded as isolated attributes or resources. Rather, they need to be understood as a ‘set’ or ensemble of interlocking capacities or potentials for action that allows people to make choices.

Agency

In addition to capabilities and functionings, a third key concept in the capabilities approach is agency. Agency is a person’s ability to pursue and realise goals that they value and have reason to value. People need agency to identify, value, and prioritise capabilities. For this Sen emphasised transparent scrutiny, general social discussion, and continued public reasoning. For Sen, capabilities are contingent on circumstances specific to their context and the purpose for which they are identified, and reflect the particular reality that any particular society faces.

The capabilities approach emphasises the importance of agency and distinguishes between different forms of agency, particularly between ensuring people have the freedom to choose how they will pursue their goals (process freedom) and the opportunities that are needed to realise their goals (opportunity freedom). However, it does not develop a full conception of the human agent, leaving this to different ‘capability theories’ and the uses towards which it is being put in different contexts.

We use the work of capability theorists, Bonvin and Laruffa, to think about human agency. They  draw on anthropology to argue that at the core of the capability approach is a conception of people as receivers (of support for vulnerable people, as we all are at different times of our lives), as doers (who are actors able to contribute to society), and as judges (who are political beings with aspirations, values and desires). Living a life that one has reason to value needs to incorporate all these aspects of our being, and allow us to fulfil multiple aspirations.

We also draw on the work of the late British sociologist and leading critical realist scholar Margaret Archer, who distinguished between individuals and social structures, arguing that each is different and irreducible to the other. She explained, for example, that individuals have the capacity for reflection and introspection, whereas societies have social structures and institutions. Archer argued that the self must simultaneously exist in the natural world, the practical world (for example, engaging in activities at work or at home) and the social world.

Archer argued that the way we mediate and navigate our way in each world is through our ‘internal conversation’, wherein we reflect, consider, make decisions, change our minds and so forth. She argued that the self is defined by the things that matter to us, including who and how we choose to love, and issues, problems or concerns such as these cannot always be reduced to self-interest. We build a social identity through our relational engagement with others and not just because of individual effort, even though our agency helps to shape the nature of this engagement.

This provides a foundation for considering human rights, the obligation that all of us have to each other and the social conditions that underpin civil and political life, which includes work, occupations, and the labour market. It also provides a basis for thinking about the purposes of education and the ways in which it can support human agency.

Conversion factors

Robeyns pointed out that a person’s capacity to convert resources into capabilities and thence functionings depends on three types of conversion factors: personal, social, and environmental.

Personal conversion factors may be relatively unchangeable such as being blind, or they may be more changeable such as not being able to read. Both of these conversion factors affect a person’s capability to read unless they are mediated in some way, such as braille or a text to voice conversion application for the person who is visually impaired, or literacy classes for the person who is not yet literate.

Thus, we see that personal conversion factors may be mediated by social conversion factors. These examples also illustrate that social policies should reflect people’s diversity to ensure that everyone has access to the social resources they need to participate fully in society and to achieve their aspirations. People’s capabilities are also influenced by other social conversion factors such as ‘public policies, social norms, discriminating practises, gender roles, societal hierarchies, power relations’.

The third type of conversion factors is environmental, such as geography, infrastructure, and climate. While most discussion is of the capabilities of individuals, we argue that it is also necessary to consider the capabilities of groups and the collective capability of society.

Broader resources

Capabilities therefore rest upon broader social, economic, cultural and technological resources. For example, people need to have the language, literacy and mathematical skills for engaging and progressing in study and work. They need to have access to the social and economic resources that facilitate their participation in study and work, such as the necessary housing, healthcare, transport and childcare, and enable their participation in civic society and in their communities.

People also need to have the knowledge, skills and attributes required to navigate, negotiate and engage in these aspects of life and in work as the capacity to be skillful in both emerges from broader knowledge, skills and attributes.

Application to education

As Sen and Nussbaum elaborated, clearly education is fundamental to expanding peoples’ capacity to understand and act in the world and thus lead the kind of lives they value and have reason to value. The capabilities approach has therefore been applied to education, and more recently to vocational education, as we elaborated in our open access book and as is explored briefly in our subsequent SRHE Blogs.

Dr Gavin Moodie is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of Education

Leesa Wheelahan is Professor Emerita and William G. Davis Chair in Community College Leadership Emerita at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of Education.