Conference Agenda

VET systems play a crucial role in equipping young people with labour‑market relevant skills, yet European countries differ in system design, participation patterns and outcomes (OECD, 2023). Research on VET policy transfer remains fragmented and dominated by single‑country studies with limited methodological diversity (Ciantar, 2025). The symposium responds to this gap through cross‑national mapping of VET transition and participation patterns and policy repertoires.

This symposium brings together research teams from Denmark, Estonia, Croatia, Scotland, and Spain participating in the EU‑Horizon funded VETprep project. All papers begin with national VET policy analyses but extend their lens to a wider ecology of situations—including institutional practices, socio‑economic conditions, professional understandings, and young people’s lived experiences.

Comparing VET systems is analytically demanding (Czycholl, 1971). As Steiner‑Khamsi (2010) has argued, the logics and purposes of comparison have shifted over time, and King (1965) already underscored that meaningful comparison must move beyond structural inventories towards an analysis of the ecology of situation. Recent comparative VET scholarship proposes multi‑dimensional frameworks that foreground labour‑market structures, governance arrangements, competence models, and educational logics (Clarke, Westerhuis & Winch, 2021). Work on VET policy transfer likewise shows how comparison is intertwined with processes of translation and contextual adaptation (Barabasch, Bohlinger & Wolf, 2026). These are complementary: whereas Steiner‑Khamsi’s work on travelling reforms highlights how policy ideas circulate and are recontextualised rather than simply copied (2023), multi‑dimensional VET frameworks help specify which system dimensions matter when such reforms meet national centexts. Our symposium adopts both vantage points: we anchor each paper in national policy analysis while tracing how policies are enacted, negotiated, and experienced within a broader ecologies of situation.

Across the five countries, the symposium explores three shared dimensions: VET attractiveness, transitions into VET, and participation and retention. All teams used a common document‑analysis approach (Torraco, 2016), and a common coding scheme for identifying policy intentions, target groups, measures and available evidence. This enables both cross‑national comparability and sensitivity to national and regional particularities. Two papers address additionally the interconnected roles of social background and psychosocial factors in student transitions and educational expectations from a cross-national and cross-time perspective, tapping into possibilities of policy interventions for students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.

While the shared framework creates a coherent foundation, each contribution adds a distinctive analytical angle. Denmark examines how national VET policy repertoires are translated and enacted across different organisational and pedagogical ecologies, showing how policy intentions materialise, shift, or dissolve as they move from policy texts into school and workplace practice. Scotland shows how the effectiveness of the most significant policy efforts of the Scottish Government to expand VET participation in the last fifteen years have been severely tamed down by the low public commitment and weak institutional coordination of its liberal skill regime. Estonia combines policy analysis with qualitative interviews, illuminating how vocational school staff and students in need of support perceive and enact support measures, with particular attention to vulnerability and student agency. Spain examines how recent VET policy reforms aimed at enhancing attractiveness, structuring transitions and promoting participation and inclusion are enacted and experienced by students. Combining national policy analysis with qualitative interviews, the paper explores how policy intentions are translated into educational trajectories. Croatia links policy analysis to OECD PISA data to investigate transitions, inequalities and aspiration patterns from a cross-national and cross-time perspective, widening the scope to populations of 15-year-olds within EU-28 perspective.

Together, the contributions offer a multi‑layered picture of policymaking and policy enactment. Three themes cut across the papers: cross‑national convergence/divergence in policy solutions; the centrality of vulnerability and equity; and the alignment (or misalignment) between policy intentions and outcomes.

This paper examines how recent Danish VET policies materialise in practice by analysing an ecology of VET situations—the interplay between policy texts, organisational arrangements, and the lived experiences of VET schools. The contribution is twofold: first, a systematic overview of Danish VET policy developments from 2015 to 2025; second, practice‑proximal insights into how these policies are translated and enacted within three VET‑schools. This analysis builds on scholarship documenting long‑standing dilemmas in Danish VET (Jørgensen & Bøndergaard, 2018), notably the persistent “wicked problem” of balancing attractiveness, inclusion, and labour‑market demands (Cort, 2025). Together, the analyses show how national intentions travel into organisational routines and pedagogical practice. Drawing on systematic coding of 61 policies (2015–2025)—Attractiveness (A=20), Transition (B=8), and Participation (C=33)—the paper shows a post‑2018 pivot towards participation, student well‑being, and inclusion, alongside uneven attention to attractiveness and transition mechanisms (Rasmussen, 2025). I then present three organisational stories—polyphonic, practice‑proximal narratives condensing distributed communications into empirically grounded plots (Czarniawska, 1997)—focused on (i) technology/construction, (ii) care/health, and (iii) multi‑site provision with flexible entry. These stories serve as representational devices and an analytic frame. The ecology‑of‑situations lens draws on King’s situational approach (1966) and Billett’s relational account of workplace learning (2014), combining policy–institutional interplay with practice‑based learning ecologies. Empirically, I synthesise policy documents (executive orders, national agreements, CEDEFOP briefs, and evaluation reports), institutional artefacts, and observational and interview data from three colleges. Analytically, I trace translation and recontextualisation as policies move into organisational routines, pedagogical practices, and workplace‑based training environments. Findings show that (a) participation‑oriented measures materialise clearly in first‑year pathway redesigns; (b) transition mechanisms depend on cross‑institutional coordination; and (c) attractiveness initiatives generate visibility but limited evidence of durable recruitment effects. The cases also illuminate a persistent dropout paradox—low unemployment yet high attrition—and underscore how workplace training quality and social integration shape retention. Viewed through a travelling‑reforms lens, the Danish case shows how policy texts and policy‑in‑practice are co‑produced as ideas circulate, are recontextualised, and translated within organisational and workplace settings rather than simply “borrowed” (Steiner‑Khamsi, 2023). This dual reading aligns with cross‑national evidence that VET reforms travel as problem–solution scripts (attractiveness, retention, permeability) whose effects depend on local ecologies of implementation (Ciantar, 2025). Accordingly, the findings speak to international debates by illustrating how mobile VET policy repertoires gain traction—or fray—at the intersection of institutional routines and work‑based learning across the EU.

Billett, S. (2014). Mediating learning at work: Personal mediations of social and brute facts. In Discourses on professional learning: On the boundary between learning and working (pp. 75-93). Dordrecht: Springer. Ciantar, M. (2025) Researching policy transfer of vocational education and training across the European Union: a systematic literature review, Journal of Vocational Education & Training, 77:5, 1235-1259, DOI: 10.1080/13636820.2024.2442030 Czarniawska, B. (Ed.). (1997). A narrative approach to organization studies. Sage Publications. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412983235 Jørgensen, C. H., & Bøndergaard, G. (2018). Historical evolution of vocational education in Denmark until 1945. In Vocational Education in the Nordic Countries (pp. 84-101). Routledge. King, E. J. (1965). The purpose of comparative education. Comparative Education, 1(3), 147-159. Rasmussen, H.F. (2020). Organization and professionalization. University of Southern Denmark. Retrieved from: https://findresearcher.sdu.dk/ws/portalfiles/portal/284855569/Hanne_Fie_Rasmussen_PhD_Dissertation.pdf

The social determinants of students’ educational aspirations demarcate a well-researched subject. One of the major theories of educational decisions, also related to aspirations, is the Relative Risk Aversion (RRA) theory (Breen & Goldthorpe 1997), which implies that students from higher social origins aspire to higher educational levels than lower-origin students with the same level of academic performance, due to status maintenance motive and risk calculation. Cross-country analyses using PISA data have connected RRA in aspirations with educational system traits (Bernardi & Valdes 2021). We analyze the role of socio-economic status and achievements in aspirations of 15-year olds upper secondary students towards tertiary education cross-time in a single country (Croatia), using PISA data from 2015 (OECD, 2017), 2018 (OECD, 2019) and 2022 (OECD, 2023, 2024). In the past decade, the enrolment share of students in upper secondary VET without direct access to tertiary education slightly decreased, with a complementary increase in enrolment in the upper secondary VET track which offers direct access to tertiary education (besides the labour market) and now comprises about half of all upper secondary education students. Students’ socio-economic status in VET without a direct tertiary pathway was consistently lowest on average. The variability of socio-economic status was consistently highest among students of VET with direct access to tertiary education, while the gap between students in VET with direct tertiary pathway and the general upper secondary students decreased from 2015 to 2018, only to increase until 2022. Achievements consistently differentiated educational tracks from VET students without direct access to tertiary education to general upper secondary students (from lowest to highest), and the gap between the VET with direct access to tertiary education and general upper secondary students also remained consistent. A large majority of general upper secondary students aspired towards tertiary education consistently, while the gap between VET students with direct access to tertiary education and general upper secondary students decreased considerably during the pandemic (from about 40 percentage points difference in 2018 to about 25 percentage points difference in 2022). Our preliminary linear probability models of tertiary education aspirations with interactions of socio-economic status and achievements suggest that RRA does not hold in the case of Croatia, with even evidence to the contrary dynamics before the pandemic (larger achievements’ gradient at higher socio-economic status). We connect these findings to the specifics of the Croatian VET system, thus contributing to the understanding of social gradients in different educational systems.

Bernardi, F., & Valdés, M. T. (2021). Sticky educational expectations: A cross-country comparison. Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, 75, 100624. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rssm.2021.100624 Breen, R., & Goldthorpe, J. H. (1997). EXPLAINING EDUCATIONAL DIFFERENTIALS: TOWARDS A FORMAL RATIONAL ACTION THEORY. Rationality and Society, 9(3), 275–305. https://doi.org/10.1177/104346397009003002 OECD (2017), PISA 2015 Technical Report, PISA, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/about/programmes/edu/pisa/publications/technical-report/PISA2015_TechRep_Final.pdf OECD (2019), PISA 2018 Assessment and Analytical Framework, PISA, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/b25efab8-en OECD (2023). PISA 2022 Assessment and Analytical Framework. OECD Publishing. https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2023/08/pisa-2022-assessment-and-analytical-framework_a124aec8/dfe0bf9c-en.pdf OECD (2024), PISA 2022 Technical Report, PISA, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/01820d6d-en

Preventing early school leaving and supporting integration into labour market are in the focus of national policies across Europe. In Estonia, this orientation is strongly reflected in national education strategies, which prioritise reducing dropout, supporting transitions after compulsory basic education, and improving access for at-risk groups (Haridus- ja Teadusministeerium, 2024). Vulnerability in Estonian VET is concentrated among SEN students, learners requiring language support (refugees from Ukraine and Russian-speaking students) and young people from socio-economically disadvantaged regions. Among the most significant targeted policy measures are the vocational orientation study programme – an EQF level 2 programme designed as a preparatory or second-chance pathway – and a set of measures supporting SEN students through adapted curricula, counselling, and support services. While evaluations suggest these measures have strong inclusive intentions (Kallaste et al., 2022; Roos et al., 2021), evidence also points to uneven implementation (Riigikontroll, 2025). This paper focuses on the gap between policy intentions and policy enactment. The study is theoretically informed by a policy enactment perspective, which conceptualises policy as a process of interpretation and translation shaped by local contexts, institutional histories rather than as linear implementation (Ball et al., 2012). Policy reforms and interventions aimed to support inclusion may have unintended consequences and generate new forms of differentiation and vulnerabilities when enacted in practice. The study employs a qualitative multi-method research design combining systematic policy analysis with semi-structured interviews conducted in three Estonian vocational schools with staff and vulnerable students. Vocational orientation programme emerges as a key institutional buffer supporting transition and preventing dropout. Schools use these programmes flexibly to respond to diverse needs and increasingly as a mechanism to redirect students at risk of dropping out from EQF level 4 programmes. While this flexibility enhances inclusion, it also involves delayed progression and the potential segregation of vulnerable learners, and difficulties in transition to the labour market. Moreover, institutional capacity strongly shapes policy enactment. Schools differ markedly in their access to support specialists. In contexts with limited resources, vocational teachers increasingly perform hybrid roles combining teaching, counselling, and social work. This expanding role is largely unrecognised in formal policy and raises concerns regarding staff burnout. Student interviews reveal diverse transition trajectories, ranging from relatively linear pathways to highly fragmented ones involving repeated dropout and mental health struggles. For many students, the transition from basic education to VET coincides with a difficult developmental period, intensifying vulnerability and leading to cumulation of disadvantages.

Ball, S. J., Maguire, M., & Braun, A. (2012). How schools do policy: Policy enactments in secondary schools. Routledge. Haridus- ja Teadusministeerium [Ministry of Education and Research] (2024). Eesti Vabariigi haridusseaduse muutmise ja sellega seonduvalt teiste seaduste muutmise seaduse (õppimiskohustuse kehtestamine) eelnõu seletuskiri [Act Amending the Education Act of the Republic of Estonia, draft explanatory memorandum]. https://hm.ee/sites/default/files/documents/2024-05/Eesti%20Vabariigi%20haridusseaduse%20ja%20teiste%20seaduste%20muutmise%20SELETUSKIRI%20%28%C3%B5ppimiskohustus%29.docx Kallaste, E., Lang, A., Rentel, A., Räis, M. L., & Sõmer. M. (2022). Lisaõppe ja kutsevaliku õppe analüüs [Analysis of additional studies and vocational orientation curriculum]. https://www.hm.ee/sites/default/files/documents/2023-01/L%C3%B5ppraport%20(1).pdf Riigikontroll [National Audit Office of Estonia]. (2025). Haridusliku erivajadusega noorte kutseõpingute ja töölesiirdumise toetamine. [Audit report: Supporting vocational training and transition to work of young people with special educational needs]. Riigikontroll [National Audit Office of Estonia]. https://aruanded.riigikontroll.ee/80140/ Roos, L., Trasberg, K., Kõiv, K., & Säre, E. (2021a). Implementing VET start programme in Estonian vocational schools: The experience of teachers and support specialists. Socialinis ugdymas, 55(1), 16–41. https://doi.org/10.15823/su.2021.55.2