Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Multi-actor collaborations between government and non-government agencies is an increasingly common feature in the education sector. In particular, the collaborations that involve partnering with the industry have been documented in the literature as promissory to provide young people with better chances to improve both their academic and employment outcomes. Schools that establish partnerships with local businesses are able to provide structured workplace learning opportunities to their students, through which they can develop employability skills, self-confidence, and well-being; and, in turn, have better and easier access to work placements. Apprenticeships build on the premises of collaborations between schools and employers and tend to be regarded as a “high-end” work-based learning approach precisely because of the dedication of both firms and schools to provide high-quality training. For apprenticeships to flourish, schools need to establish formal relationships with industry partners. However, the nature and quality of partnerships vary considerably from school to school and, indeed, from nation to nation. While federal governments generally provide objectives and proposed structures for greater engagement of partners, the ability of local authorities to establish and maintain these collaborations is not uniform across states.

The adoption of apprenticeships throughout the world, by countries without a tradition of public-private partnerships in the education sector, generally means that partnerships have been developed on an individual and ad hoc basis, creating a new but poorly understood dependence on the quality of collaborations between educators and their partners. Moreover, the escalation and sustainability of partnerships seems impossible without first understanding what can lead to effective collaborations. Strong and lasting partnerships require not only a coherent policy but also established practices based on shared principles and continuous capacity-building work. Different capacities or ‘capabilities’ influence how well- or ill-equipped schools are to knock on businesses’ doors, involve them in a collaboration, and extend the scope of such collaboration. The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of school capacity in driving effective partnerships with the industry. More specifically, two research questions are addressed: First, which capacity appears to be the more prevalent for the establishment of partnerships? Second, which capacity appears to be the most prevalent for the maintenance and long-term sustainability of such partnerships?

This paper aims to bring light into the current state of school-businesses partnerships in Mexican technical education schools, particularly within the implementation of the Mexican Apprenticeships model. The expectation is to contribute to the knowledge of the process of policy implementation and to provide insights to policymakers and practitioners about different dimensions of capacity and how each one of them influences the development of partnerships in the different stages of implementation of the program in Mexico.