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The interest in educational and professional aspirations of students transiting to post-secondary education has gained prominence in academic debates and policy agendas internationally. Political interventions for raising aspirations quite often draw on narrow instrumental and rationalistic assumptions of individual decision-making that, as we will argue, do not capture adequately the meanings students attribute to these aspirations. By means of in-depth interviews and combining a critical realist approach to social action with capabilities approach, the paper explores the educational and professional aspirations of students at the end of secondary TVET in Chile. We consider that high educational aspirations of secondary TVET students in Chile need to be understood as a reflexive response to significantly high social inequalities in the country, the precarity of working conditions in a highly liberalised labour market, and the enduring neoliberal tenet of meritocracy. We also argue that understanding aspirations is key to reimagine TVET's roles and purposes at individual, institutional and national levels, towards fairer opportunities for human development.

The role of German cooperation as a key force behind the worldwide dissemination of dual training is well-established within the specialized literature. The multilayered and fragmented nature of the German cooperation landscape suggests that German efforts in this area follow a complex and evolving interplay of motivations--yet the rationales behind Germany's bilateral work in the area of technical and vocational education and training (TVET) have rarely been examined in a systematic way. Additionally, existing approaches to the question of aid motivations as provided by economics and international relations scholarship appear to be ill-suited to understanding the rationales behind Germany's TVET cooperation efforts. Drawing on a combination of document analysis and interviews with key stakeholders, this paper investigates the heterogeneity of drivers and motivations behind German cooperation efforts in the promotion and export of the dual training model and examines the coordination challenges posed by this diversity. The paper finds that German efforts in the international promotion of dual training are driven by at least three analytically distinct rationales that correspond roughly to three differentiated poles within the German policy space--namely, the economic, development and education arenas. The paper also finds that this diversity of motivations poses important coordination challenges--and that, while recent coordination efforts have succeeded in securing some degree of rhetorical consistency, only limited progress has been made in terms of operational coherence.

Mainstream approaches in comparative education have paid more attention to trends in donors' priorities than to policy processes in recipient countries, overlooking the agency of national governments in the institutional configuration of vocational education and training (VET) in developing contexts. Drawing on constructivist political economy and historical institutionalist frameworks, the paper analyses the role played by global development paradigms and ideas in the VET policy reforms adopted in Chile during the period between 1964 and 2005. The study shows how the selective adoption of international development ideas in Chile was mediated by the ideological orientation of national government administrations in each historical period. It also shows how the main goals of VET policies evolved as the economy tertiarised and the demand for education grew among lower social classes. Finally, the paper identifies the military dictatorship as a path-shaping moment in the institutional configuration of VET in Chile, as it was able to impose a radical transformation of the system from central planning to decentralised market competition. This profound transformation generated institutional path-dependencies that restricted the capacity of future democratic governments to reverse the market model in VET.

In the aftermath of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, European authorities reinforced the economic objectives of European lifelong learning policy, promoting employability solutions to address youth unemployment, and increasing their political influence on the implementation of national lifelong learning reforms. This article investigates to what extent these supranational policy orientations have been translated into concrete national lifelong learning initiatives. Although European countries were not equally affected in terms of time and intensity by the rise in youth unemployment rates, the political responses from their governments shared a central focus on employability solutions to youth unemployment in lifelong learning policy reforms. Our comparative analysis shows how different lifelong learning policy initiatives managed to 'educationalise' a structural economic problem (i.e. youth unemployment) into an individual educational concern (i.e. lack of education and skills). We argue that the 'educationalisation' of youth unemployment through lifelong learning policies is a crisis management strategy, which has allowed governments to focus on the individual symptoms of the problem while avoiding offering solutions to the underlying structural causes of young people's poor labour market prospects.

The importance of skill formation for young people and the challenges of youth unemployment and underemployment are at the forefront of global development agendas. However, there is still an open debate about the most adequate policy frameworks to tackle these societal challenges and, particularly, about the role that the state and the market should play in the coordination of skills supply and demand. Taking Chile as a case study, the paper analyses how the market model of skill formation is re-contextualised by practitioners and other stakeholders at the local level. Through a realist evaluation approach, the paper tests to what extent the underlying theoretical assumptions of the market model hold up when confronted with the reality of the contexts in which young people, education providers and employers make decisions. The case of Chile is particularly interesting for the comparative literature because of its extreme neoliberal orientation and the centrality of the market in the allocation of resources and opportunities among different social groups. The findings show the limitations of the market for coordinating the supply and demand of skills and its negative consequences on the educational and work prospects of young people, especially the most disadvantaged..

This article shows how the Scottish Government's (SG) political management of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has reinforced the economic goals of lifelong learning (LLL) under the skills for work agenda. Youth unemployment has been prioritized as the main social problem to be addressed, and most of the limited public resources for LLL have been targeted towards youth at risk of unemployment at the expense of the rest of the adult population. The article adopts a Cultural Political Economy perspective to examine LLL policy discourses contained in 12 policy documents published by the SG during the period between the Scottish National Party's arrival in power and the Independence Referendum (2007-2014). The analysis draws attention to the fact that the GFC has been used by the SG to legitimize selective cuts to the further education sector as well as a stronger labour market orientation within LLL provision.

This article adopts the skill ecosystem approach to the comparative analysis of skill mismatch across European regions within different skill formation regimes. Institutional arrangements of skill formation regimes are designed at national level. However, they are enacted in regions with very different Labor market and socioeconomic conditions, which mediate the relationship between the institutional setting and its effects on the mismatch between the supply and demand of skills in a given region. Our analysis draws on quantitative and qualitative data from an EU Horizon 2020 project on lifelong learning policies for young adults that compares 18 regions in nine European countries. The data analyses show the importance of regional demand side factors in explaining skill shortages and skill surplus, and the coexistence of low-skill and high-skill equilibria in urban regions with high levels of skill polarization. Skill formation regimes present divergent effects on skill mismatch depending on the availability of jobs in the region and the level of skills demanded by the local economy. These findings suggest that combining skill formation regime and skill ecosystem approaches in comparative education research can provide better suited explanations of skill mismatch at regional and sectoral level.

Human development and rights-based approaches to education have been gaining support among international organisations and development agencies as alternative frameworks to human capital orthodoxy. While these global trends have been well-documented in the international development literature, there is little empirical evidence into what extent, and through which mechanisms, alternative development paradigms in education are influencing Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) reforms. Chile provides an excellent opportunity for this kind of research given the long cycle of political contestation of neoliberal education policies in the country during the last decade. The article analyses TVET policy discourses for the last three government administrations (2006-2018) from a Cultural Political Economy perspective. The adoption of the rights-based approach in Chile shows its potential to mobilise greater involvement of the state in the funding and provision of TVET and in the support to secondary TVET students who want to continue their studies in tertiary education. However, the rights-based approach to education falls short when it comes to problematising political economy structures that shape TVET policymaking and the precarious labour market opportunities available to TVET graduates. These shortfalls show the need to incorporate more fundamental critiques of the neoliberal paradigm into the formulation of alternative policy agendas for TVET.

The interest in educational and professional aspirations of students transiting to post-secondary education has gained prominence in academic debates and policy agendas internationally. Political interventions for raising aspirations quite often draw on narrow instrumental and rationalistic assumptions of individual decision-making that, as we will argue, do not capture adequately the meanings students attribute to these aspirations. By means of in-depth interviews and combining a critical realist approach to social action with capabilities approach, the paper explores the educational and professional aspirations of students at the end of secondary TVET in Chile. We consider that high educational aspirations of secondary TVET students in Chile need to be understood as a reflexive response to significantly high social inequalities in the country, the precarity of working conditions in a highly liberalised labour market, and the enduring neoliberal tenet of meritocracy. We also argue that understanding aspirations is key to reimagine TVET's roles and purposes at individual, institutional and national levels, towards fairer opportunities for human development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schools in the most deprived areas in Brazil are marked by extreme poverty, a situation that has obvious consequences for the everyday life in schools and for efforts to develop a supportive culture of schooling. Nevertheless, schools' responses to poverty are far from uniform. Although the context of poverty generally determines what is possible for schools to achieve, this context is by no means consistent. Not all schools located in poor areas offer poor education. And, in themselves, unfavourable contexts do not necessarily generate educational failure. This article captures the diversity of effects generated by poverty at the school level, and the variety of responses by schools situated in very similar socioeconomic and cultural contexts. It draws on a study conducted in the state of Minas Gerais, which explored five schools and their corresponding cultures to reveal the diverse effects of poverty at the school level.

In many countries choice of school is an increasing concern for families and governments. In Spain and Chile, it is also associated with a long-standing political cleavage on the regulation of large sectors of private-dependent schools. This article analyses both the micro- and the macro-politics of choice in these two countries, where low-status 15-year-old students record a significant segregation. At the micro level, some evidence is provided that not only middle-class skilful choosers but also the political representatives of private-dependent schools manage to pursue their interests drawing on economic, social and cultural capital. At the macro level, evidence also shows that the lobbies defending private-dependent schools can use and maintain these power resources. However, in some episodes collective action is an effective power resource for those who campaign in favour of a stricter regulation of these schools, but its influence is much difficult to maintain for longer periods. (Contains 2 notes and 2 tables.)

This study estimates the trends of school segregation in Catalonia (Spain) between 2001 and 2006. Currently, new immigration has reopened the debate about the "Other Catalans" triggered by concern with the integration of the incoming population. An "intersectional approach" to social divisions suggests that class and ethnic school segregation responds to strategic parental choice and informal policy arrangements. School segregation indices report a more even distribution in most localities, reinforced isolation of "foreign students" in a few public schools in some large cities and a persistent divide between more comprehensive public schools and selective private-dependent schools in a variety of towns. According to these findings, the analytical approach points at some clues to make sense of impact of distributive policies, the influence of policy contradictions and the success of mobilisation and lobbying political strategies. (Contains 3 notes, 1 table, and 2 figures.)

Mainstream approaches in comparative education have paid more attention to trends in donors' priorities than to policy processes in recipient countries, overlooking the agency of national governments in the institutional configuration of vocational education and training (VET) in developing contexts. Drawing on constructivist political economy and historical institutionalist frameworks, the paper analyses the role played by global development paradigms and ideas in the VET policy reforms adopted in Chile during the period between 1964 and 2005. The study shows how the selective adoption of international development ideas in Chile was mediated by the ideological orientation of national government administrations in each historical period. It also shows how the main goals of VET policies evolved as the economy tertiarised and the demand for education grew among lower social classes. Finally, the paper identifies the military dictatorship as a path-shaping moment in the institutional configuration of VET in Chile, as it was able to impose a radical transformation of the system from central planning to decentralised market competition. This profound transformation generated institutional path-dependencies that restricted the capacity of future democratic governments to reverse the market model in VET. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows how the Scottish Government's (SG) political management of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has reinforced the economic goals of lifelong learning (LLL) under the skills for work agenda. Youth unemployment has been prioritized as the main social problem to be addressed, and most of the limited public resources for LLL have been targeted towards youth at risk of unemployment at the expense of the rest of the adult population. The article adopts a Cultural Political Economy perspective to examine LLL policy discourses contained in 12 policy documents published by the SG during the period between the Scottish National Party's arrival in power and the Independence Referendum (2007–2014). The analysis draws attention to the fact that the GFC has been used by the SG to legitimize selective cuts to the further education sector as well as a stronger labour market orientation within LLL provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of skill formation for young people and the challenges of youth unemployment and underemployment are at the forefront of global development agendas. However, there is still an open debate about the most adequate policy frameworks to tackle these societal challenges and, particularly, about the role that the state and the market should play in the coordination of skills supply and demand. Taking Chile as a case study, the paper analyses how the market model of skill formation is re-contextualised by practitioners and other stakeholders at the local level. Through a realist evaluation approach, the paper tests to what extent the underlying theoretical assumptions of the market model hold up when confronted with the reality of the contexts in which young people, education providers and employers make decisions. The case of Chile is particularly interesting for the comparative literature because of its extreme neoliberal orientation and the centrality of the market in the allocation of resources and opportunities among different social groups. The findings show the limitations of the market for coordinating the supply and demand of skills and its negative consequences on the educational and work prospects of young people, especially the most disadvantaged.. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human development and rights-based approaches to education have been gaining support among international organisations and development agencies as alternative frameworks to human capital orthodoxy. While these global trends have been well-documented in the international development literature, there is little empirical evidence into what extent, and through which mechanisms, alternative development paradigms in education are influencing Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) reforms. Chile provides an excellent opportunity for this kind of research given the long cycle of political contestation of neoliberal education policies in the country during the last decade. The article analyses TVET policy discourses for the last three government administrations (2006–2018) from a Cultural Political Economy perspective. The adoption of the rights-based approach in Chile shows its potential to mobilise greater involvement of the state in the funding and provision of TVET and in the support to secondary TVET students who want to continue their studies in tertiary education. However, the rights-based approach to education falls short when it comes to problematising political economy structures that shape TVET policymaking and the precarious labour market opportunities available to TVET graduates. These shortfalls show the need to incorporate more fundamental critiques of the neoliberal paradigm into the formulation of alternative policy agendas for TVET. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]