Conference Agenda

Parity of esteem remains a persistent challenge in vocational education and training (VET), particularly in senior secondary contexts where vocational/applied pathways are frequently positioned as secondary to academic routes (McGlynn, Rawoelle 2025). In Victoria (Australia), recent reforms to senior secondary and VET provision have increased expectations that schools implement coherent applied learning cultures and pathways that respond to young people’s transitions amid intersecting pressures (economic volatility, post-pandemic disruption, and rising living costs). Yet applied learning is still enacted unevenly across schools and commonly sits within organisational arrangements that reproduce vocational-academic hierarchies.

This paper reports emerging empirical findings from the Leading Applied Learning Program, a partnership with the Southern Melbourne Department of Education Jobs, Skills and Pathways team, involving leaders from twenty-five secondary schools. The program is designed as an intervention to advance parity of esteem by strengthening leadership capability, building a shared applied learning pedagogy, and reconfiguring whole-school conditions that influence the legitimacy of applied learning (e.g., staffing, timetabling, curriculum planning routines, recognition practices, and community narratives).

Rather than treating parity of esteem as an attitudinal problem solvable through promotional messaging, the study conceptualises esteem as a systemic outcome produced through the organisation of everyday practice: what is valued, resourced, assessed, and publicly recognised. Early program data indicate that parity of esteem is disrupted not only by external perceptions, but by internal school contradictions that position applied learning as “additional” or “residual” work, often vulnerable to timetable compression, staffing instability, and accountability logics privileging academic metrics.

Research questions.

1. How can a CHAT-informed approach support the co-design and implementation of whole-school applied learning practices that advance parity of esteem under senior secondary VET reform conditions?
2. What systemic tensions and contradictions shaping parity of esteem in applied learning become visible through CHAT, and how are these addressed through intervention design?
3. How do CHAT-informed professional learning and leadership frameworks impact leader capacity to legitimise and embed applied learning practices at school level?
4. How do boundary-crossing practices enable leaders to foster applied learning cultures and strengthen opportunities and pathways for young people in their communities?
5. What key enablers and barriers to parity of esteem are identifiable through a CHAT lens, and how do these inform scalable models for system change?

Conceptual framework and international dimension. Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) (Engestrom, 1987, 2001) is used to analyse applied learning as historically formed and collectively organised across interacting systems (schools, policy, regional partners, community and pathway stakeholders). This enables parity of esteem to be examined as a question of material practice, including contradictions across tools, rules, division of labour, and dominant definitions of “success.” Boundary crossing extends the analysis by examining how leaders coordinate across academic/vocational domains within schools and across school, system, community relationships. Status hierarchies between academic and vocational/applied pathways are a shared concern across many European VET contexts; this paper contributes a transferable intervention logic and contradiction map for parity of esteem work under reform conditions.

Approximately 95% of 16-year-olds enroll in upper secondary school in Iceland, but only about 20% initially choose vocational programs. However, 31% of all upper secondary school students are enrolled in vocational programs (Statistics Iceland, 2025). This is lower than the OECD average of 44% (OECD, 2023).
Traditionally, vocational students in Iceland have been older than other upper secondary school students, with an average age of 25, compared with 19 for other students (Ministry of Education, Science and Culture, 2014). Still, the number of 16–19-year-old vocational students has increased over the last few years. At the same time, the number of students aged 26 and older has remained high, while the number of students aged 20-25 has declined (Statistics Iceland, 2025), resulting in even greater diversity in students' ages and prior experiences. This is especially important in Iceland, where younger and older students in VET are often taught together.
Also, school practices have recently been changing in many VET programs in Iceland towards: (a) More project-oriented learning, even on an individual basis, and (b) Shorter length of study units, for example, with each unit lasting half a semester (with students taking 3 units at a time) or each unit lasting 3 weeks (with students taking 1 unit at a time).
Considering these changes, this study investigates school practices across three VET programs in Iceland, aiming to highlight their strengths and weaknesses in addressing the needs of an increasingly diverse student population in terms of age and experience.
Bernstein's (2000) code theory underpins the study's theoretical approach. It provides a means to examine the relationships between power and knowledge. This theory is suitable for this study because it offers the researcher a lens for examining and describing power relations within the social environment.
Morais and Neves’s (2004, 2010) pedagogic practice model is used to interpret the findings in this study. The model focuses on how teachers can optimize learning using Bernstein’s concepts of classification and framing. Morais and Neves identified the characteristics of teaching methods used by teachers who create the best conditions for compulsory school students from diverse social backgrounds to acquire science knowledge and skills. Their studies demonstrated that effective school practices can mitigate or eliminate the impact of social background on academic performance. They emphasize the importance of clear boundaries and explicit instructional practices to support student engagement and achievement.
This study also employs the concept of student readiness to account for the diverse age and prior experience of students at the start of their studies. The concept, as defined by Billett (2015a, 2015b), refers to the knowledge, skills, and attitudes students need to address new, often demanding challenges in vocational education.
The main research question of this study is: How do different school practices meet students' needs, considering their level of readiness at the start of their studies?

This presentation reports on a study examining how assessment is practised when students work with Student Company in both vocational and academic programmes in Norwegian upper secondary education. The Student Company programme is integrated into the subject Entrepreneurship and Business Development and is designed to prepare students for working life, where creativity, collaboration, entrepreneurial mindsets, and interdisciplinary thinking are regarded as essential competences for value creation and societal development.

Through the Student Company programme, students gain structured experience with the full cycle of entrepreneurial activity, including establishing, operating, and dissolving their own companies within a single school year. The programme is implemented within the school framework and facilitated in close collaboration with a supervising teacher, who provides pedagogical support and formative guidance throughout the process. It is further organised in partnership with the local business community, thereby bridging theory and practice and offering students a relevant and authentic learning environment. The work is grounded in real-life, practice‑based challenges and follows an exploratory pedagogical approach in which students drive their own learning processes, often supported by external partners and mentors.

As Student Company forms part of formal schooling, the assessment of competence developed through this work must comply with national legislation and guidelines for assessment. Teachers frequently find assessment in this context challenging, as there are no specific national guidelines tailored to the Student Company model beyond the general Assessment Regulations in the Norwegian Education Act (§9), which apply to all subjects in the 13‑year education pathway.

The aim of this study is therefore to investigate how assessment is carried out within the Student Company programme and to identify which aspects of students’ competences are emphasised in assessment practices. In the Norwegian context, formative assessment is understood as a research‑informed approach designed to integrate assessment into the learning process in ways that promote student agency, enhance learning and motivation. The Assessment Regulations describe the formative assessment as to be an integrated part of the teaching and shall serve to promote learning, increase competence in the subjects, and make the instruction better adapted to each individual learner (Kunnskapsdepartementet, 2020). This reflects a learning view in which assessment is not primarily a mechanism of control, but a pedagogical tool aimed at improving both teaching and students’ learning (Black & Wiliam, 1998; Hattie & Timperley, 2007; Smith et al., 2016; Hattie et al., 2021; Lui & Andrade, 2022).

Formative assessment is understood as a continuous process that generates feedback loops supporting further learning. According to Hattie and Timperley (2007), feedback is most effective when it answers three key questions: Where am I going? How am I doing? What are my next steps? This aligns with socio‑cognitive perspectives that emphasise students’ metacognitive awareness and their ability to monitor their own progress (Panadero et al., 2018). Sadler (1989) further argues that self‑regulated learning depends on students’ access to clear goals, an understanding of quality, and strategies for improvement. Formative assessment therefore aims to create a dialogic culture where assessment continuously informs both learning and teaching (Wiliam, 2011; Lui & Andrade, 2022).

Formative assessment aligns closely with the aims of the Student Company model because it supports learning processes rather than focusing solely on outcomes; it fosters creativity, practical problem‑solving, teamwork, idea development and interdisciplinary competence; and it enables students to create value through iterative improvement. Previous research on entrepreneurship education has examined assessment practices (Pittaway & Edwards, 2012; Ryen, 2019). In the Norwegian context, several reports and studies indicate that work with Student Companies requires dialogic and process‑oriented assessment within authentic learning processes (Johansen, 2018), and they emphasise students’ self‑assessment as a central mode of assessment (Eide et al., 2018).

Contemporary society is marked by ecological, political, and economic challenges at local, regional, and global levels. This so-called new normal is frequently conceptualized through the framework of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity (VUCA). Its underlying drivers include increasing individualization, unrestrained exercises of power, and forms of egoism that may extend to narcissism. At the same time, human beings are not solely autonomous individuals but are inherently and inseparably social actors. While the acquisition of professional competencies remains an essential educational objective (KMK, 2007), addressing the major challenges of the present era requires a stronger emphasis on social responsibility, solidarity, and cooperative practices.

The question is: How can we shape vocational education and training in such a way that learners can acquire the skills they need to meet current and future challenges?

In this context, we present our model of learning in Junior Companies (Reich, 2003; Tamm & Gramlinger, 2006), which is based on two scientific foundations: the African philosophy of Ubuntu (Maringe, 2022) and socioeconomic education (Tafner, 2019) with an action-oriented teaching and learning model (Albers, 2001).

Ubuntu, often described as a form of African humanism (Biney, 2014), is grounded in the understanding that personhood is constituted through relationships and social interaction. This relational conception is succinctly captured in the oft-cited maxim, “A person is a person through other persons” (Mbiti, 1969, 141). Desmond Tutu (1999) similarly places humanity at the centre of Ubuntu philosophy, emphasizing that humaneness, in the Ubuntu sense, emerges only through mutual recognition and appreciation by others. Accordingly, individuals require community in order to realize their full human potential and, at the same time, bear responsibility toward it. Ramose (1999) further elaborates this perspective by arguing that personhood is not an inherent given but a status that must be attained through social integration. In this process, the community assumes a central role as a mediating force that transmits norms and values, thereby catalysing the ongoing development of personality. In this view, Ubuntu challenges the Western philosophical tradition that often elevates individual autonomy above collective well-being, proposing instead that social interdependence is vital to human dignity and fulfilment (Mtebe & Monchena, 2025, 10).

At the same time, this relational ontology reveals clear parallels with the authors’ socio-economic perspective on education, which likewise conceives of individuals as socially embedded subjects whose development is inseparable from communal contexts. According to Tafner (2019), socio-economic education places the human being—embedded within cultural and societal contexts—at its core. From a socioeconomic perspective, economic activities are not viewed exclusively through the lens of academic economics. Instead, a distinction is made between scientific economics and the lifeworld economy. Consequently, social, political, and ethical dimensions are regarded as integral to economic activity and are critically examined in terms of efficiency, responsibility, and meaning. This educational approach advocates for a 'life-serving economy' (Ulrich, 2008), emphasizing both individual responsibility for shaping one’s work and living environment and active integration into economic and societal structures. The collaborative development of this perspective constitutes a central focus of the project and is outlined in this contribution. In doing so, we follow Matthew (2018, 195), who argues “that approaches which conceive of Ubuntu as an unfinished concept—critically reflecting on external influences while engaging with them and advancing the concept independently—are particularly promising”.