Tourism Education in the UK: Lesson Drawing in Educational Policy

Tourism education is fast growing across most tourism receiving countries in the developed and developing world. Traditions in this area have seen models of tourism education transplanted from, generally, a developed country context to that of countries in varying stages of development, frequently in an uncritical and unplanned manner. This paper aims to provide a framework whereby the best of a national case study in tourism education (here based on the UK) can be translated in a critical and sensitive manner, elsewhere the context of the research upon which this paper reports was a trans-national study which aimed to draw lessons from the UK experience for application elsewhere. The paper is based on a field study of tourism education in the UK and reports the findings in a manner that can have transfer value elsewhere. The paper concludes with a number of key questions that can be extrapolated to other contexts from the process of lesson drawing.