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Technical and vocational education have assumed a significant role in the plans of developed nations to overcome economic crisis, relocating learning into the workplace and extending it to higher levels. Policy discourses are based on the premise that education polarised between universities and low attainment has poorly served the needs of modern economies and young people. This chapter sets out the principal claims of these approaches to improve youth transitions and contribute to social justice. These claims are traced back to their origins in the shift to service-based economies and collapse of youth labour markets, leading to a crisis in vocational education and fuelling demand for higher education credentials; and to the emergence of international policies aiming to reconstitute youth transitions on neoliberal lines. Addressing these questions from a social justice perspective, we ask whether such disruption of the educational divide between general and vocational routes has eroded its role in reproducing and validating the social structures of the post-war period, with the creation of new routes and the postulation of new elites validating the emergence of existing and new forms of educational and social inequity.

This chapter examines conflicting claims about the potential of European VET to provide a model for technical and vocational systems across the world. Technocratic accounts by international policy bodies, especially the OECD and EU, have focused on the possibilities for VET to facilitate transitions to employment by providing early experiences of learning at work, drawing on the integration of VET into production systems, as in the German system, seen as a barrier to neoliberal convergence because maintaining key progressive features into service sectors. Conversely, universalist welfare states held to underpin VET in Scandinavia have meanwhile given way to dualised social policies which, echoing the welfare state literature, can be seen either as ‘layered’ parallel provision or the direct erosion of comprehensive policies. During the early post-war period VET systems incorporated progressive educational elements which have come under attack, as signs of emerging dualisation have undermined the more progressive features of VET in Europe. Challenges from higher levels of VET, particularly in its most employer-responsive forms, can be seen as signs of this emerging dualisation.

In contrast to the technical elites, specific groups of young people – women, those from the lowest social classes, and those with the poorest educational experiences – are already likely to engage with poorer quality further education programmes, those associated primarily with low-paid and precarious employment. They undergo workplace learning as a much more limited experience, studying in vocational areas many of which already include substantial work placements as part of many learning programmes. Childcare, which already requires longer periods in the workplace than are stipulated by T Level requirements, is a prime example. Their time in the workplace is conceptualised as learning to interact with service users and to acquire the personal attributes of workers in these occupations. Placements can sometimes be seen as the routine work of ‘caring’ and service occupations, and young people interviewed often expressed impatience and frustration, linked to preparation for routine employment. The socialisation of these groups appears a key premise of the expectations and rationale offered by policymakers for recent reforms.

education, elites, justice, social skills, polarizing, welfare, world