Conference Agenda

Postwar societies experienced a period associated with an economic boom, far-reaching social, cultural, and political upheaval. Across many Western societies, traditional authority structures – whether rooted in racial segregation, patriarchal norms, or hierarchical political institutions – faced unprecedented challenges. Mass movements championed ideals of equality, justice, and self-determination, calling for liberation, peace, and participatory democracy. Simultaneously, however, many societies saw the rise of conservative counter-movements, alongside economic recession and high unemployment. This period of economic boom and recession, progressive thinking and conservative resistance has been labeled as the “long sixties” and “long seventies”. The tension between reform and restoration, progress and perseverance also shaped VET. Within this context of tension, VET underwent significant reforms, aiming to respond to rapidly changing labour markets, democratize education, and foster economic development (Doering-Manteuffel & Raphael 2008; Villaume, Mariager & Porsdam 2016).

In current debates on the evolution of VET systems, scholars often rely on the concept of path dependency (for a critical review see Frommberger & Porcher 2023). Existing literature frequently portrays VET reforms as a linear story of winning ideas, neglecting the ambitious experiments and alternative visions that emerged at the time. While this perspective is valuable, it tends to overlook ideas that were previously expressed, but did not influence the privileged path. By doing so, it overlooks the uncertainties, contestations, and alternative futures that were also present in the past. As a result, researchers often exclude these unrealized or divergent imagined futures – expressed by real actors – from their analyses. Yet, to understand the motives of VET actors from the past and to gain insight into how and why ideas evolved, persisted, or failed in past societies, careful, context-specific examination is needed. Therefore, research on VET reform must move beyond simplified narratives of success and failure to recognize the diverse and contingent pathways of change (e.g. Jorns 2025).

Based on the premise that the history of VET does not follow a narrative of progress, but is rather a contested field of pluralistic visions, the symposium aims to rethink the “long 60s and 70s” by highlighting alternatives and pluralistic visions, thereby critically questioning deterministic research and views of history and contemporary perceptions of reform, education, and society. The papers examine how historical actors negotiated societal expectations, political agendas, and visions of industrial and social progress in relation to VET. By recovering the plural visions and alternative possibilities from the postwar era, the symposium challenges, from a historiographical point of view, deterministic and positivist heuristics that shape narratives obscuring complexity. In historical terms, echoing Edward Thompson’s (1966) emphasis on history as the contested making of social relations, we aim to understand both the “winning” as well as the neglected educational imaginaries. The past will be given back its future, its former openness, its former potential, and its former hope and possibility (Hölscher 2017, 8).

VET is viewed here both as a space for social negotiation about the future (education as a project related to the future) and as a place for producing knowledge about society itself (education as a reflection of society's self-interpretation). The symposium thus helps develop a reflective, historically aware understanding of education and social change. VET is therefore not only a functional system of the economy but also a cultural space in which society debates its own future.

In post-war Aotearoa New Zealand there was a long-established and widely accepted belief in free and universal access to education. This often discussed and much celebrated egalitarianism was seen as a central and distinctive aspect of New Zealand’s national identity as part of an established welfare state developed in the 1930s (McCulloch 1988). A 1962 national report, The Report of the Commission on Education in New Zealand (1962) known as The Currie Report named after the chair of the commission provided a picture of education as being provided fairly and equally by a benevolent state (McCulloch 1988). However, the report was accused of avoiding issues relating to differences and inequalities and of maintaining the status quo by extending the current conditions (Ewing 1972). For vocational education and training the status quo included support for the move to provide technical education through post school technical institutes and the broadening of a common core curriculum to manage equality of opportunity in secondary school provision (Scott 1996). No major submissions occurred under technical education (Scott 1996) and vocationalism was effectively moved to technical institutes. By the 1990s, however, post compulsory education was completely transformed. The Report of the Working Party on Post Compulsory Education and Training in New Zealand (1988) known as the Hawke Report made recommendations that led to the reform of tertiary education based on neo-liberal, market-based principles. Subsequent legislation including the Education Amendment Act (1990) allowed polytechnics to offer degree level programmes. The changes, accused of being hasty and lacking in consultation (Patterson 1991) creating a deregulated and liberalised, laissez-faire, market model saw polytechnics change at a rapid rate. Academic drift, combined with a drop in the number of apprentices (Department of Labour 1989) through prior deregulation of the state sector, saw degree level provision outnumber sub degree provision by the early 1990s (Abbott 2000). This paper considers the idea that the marginalisation of VET in Aotearoa New Zealand came about over 40 years through seemingly egalitarian goals presented in two key national reports on education; firstly, in secondary schools through the broadening of a common core curriculum to provide for all; and secondly in polytechnics through the stated ideal of consumer choice. What is clear however, is that there were a range of missed opportunities. Did a collective complacency for working class education and jobs form the basis of a current and much reported under skilled workforce that now seems almost insoluble?

Abbott, M. (2000). The development of vocational education and training in New Zealand. Education and Research Perspectives, 27(1), 1–15. Department of Labour. (1989). New Zealand report on further education and training of the labour force. Department of Labour. Ewing, J. (1972). The Currie Report: Ten years later. Ministry of Education. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED102720.pdf McCulloch, G. (1988). From Currie to Picot: History, ideology and policy in New Zealand education. Access: Contemporary Issues in Education, 7(1), 1–10. https://pesaagora.com/access-archive-files/ACCESSAV07N1_001.pdf Patterson, G. (1991). University “reform” in New Zealand 1984–1990: Policies and outcomes. Access: Contemporary Issues in Education, 10(2), 56–70. https://pesaagora.com/access-archive-files/ACCESSAV10N2_056.pdf Scott, D. (1996). The Currie Commission and report on education in New Zealand, 1960–1962 (Doctoral dissertation). University of Waikato.

In 1948, a major reform of the Swedish education system was proposed, eventually leading to the abolition of the parallel school system in 1962. In 1971, a large part of vocational education and training (VET) was reorganised as upper secondary education alongside academic preparatory programmes. Central motives behind these reforms were the ambition to promote democratic development and reduce class differences, as well as the growing emphasis on human capital and the role of education in supporting industrial growth. By the 1950s, a new welfare ideology had been firmly established in Sweden. A key feature was the corporatist model, in which social partners regulated labour market conditions through agreements reached without direct state intervention. In public debate, the relationship between industry, employment, and welfare was frequently highlighted, with increasing production and employment portrayed as the foundation of the welfare state. Consequently, the importance of work and labour market policy have been, and remain, central assumptions underpinning Swedish social development. Within this context, the importance of VET has consistently been acknowledged. However, views have differed regarding its responsibility, organisation, content, and capacity to meet political and economic expectations. Based on this study’s mapping and analysis of these expectations, it becomes evident that they are often contradictory and, in practice, impossible to fully satisfy—an issue rarely addressed explicitly in reform processes. This paper examines the relationship between VET and labour market training. Both are vocational education, but historically separated by different organisational and financial conditions, labour market and education politics. The aim is to analyse the purposes attributed to VET in its various forms during the period 1948-2007. The analysis focus problem formulation based in the policy analysis approach what´s the problem represented to be (WPR) by Bacchi (2009). However, it also draws on Ozga´s understanding of policy as not limited to formal documents, but a non-linear process created in an ongoing negotiation at different arenas. Hence the material for the study includes press material where various VET stakeholders publicly debate VET issues as well as government reports and proposals. Thus, the following research questions are asked: What problems should different forms of vocational education solve? How are the problems formulated by different actors? How have contradictions between different perceptions manifested themselves? Preliminary results indicate a strong, but complex management by objectives that not only contributes to hierarchies between VET and academic education, but also between VET in different forms.

Bacchi, C. L. (2009). Analysing policy: What’s the problem represented to be? Pearson. Börjesson, M., Palmblad, E., & Wahl, T. (2005). I skötsamhetens utmarker: Berättelser om välfärdsstatens sociala optik [On the margins of respectability: Stories about the welfare state’s social optics]. B. Östlings bokförlag Symposion. Ellström, P., Davidson, B., & Rönnqvist, D. (1990). Kontext, kultur och verksamhet: En analys av AMU:s organisation och pedagogiska miljö [Context, culture and operations: An analysis of AMU’s organization and educational environment]. Universitetet i Linköping, Institutionen för pedagogik och psykologi. Ozga, J. (2000). Policy research in educational settings: Contested terrain. Open University Press. Rothstein, B., & Bergström, J. (1999). Korporatismens fall och den svenska modellens kris [The fall of corporatism and the crisis of the Swedish model] (1st ed.). SNS.

The 1970s were in Switzerland a period of intense debate and far-reaching reform across the education system. German-speaking contemporary scholarship often refers to this phase as Bildungsexpansion, highlighting a brief window of “planning euphoria” during which even highly complex reforms could be adopted (Criblez 2001). Quantitatively, the expansion of upper secondary education is reflected in rising enrolments in both general education tracks and initial vocational education and training (VET), particularly the dual apprenticeship (Gonon 2016; 2018). Against the backdrop of the general debates surrounding this Bildungsexpansion, our contribution offers an in-depth analysis of two documents that played a significant role in shaping reform discussions, even though the plans for the future they advanced were implemented only partially and very unevenly across cantons (Bonoli & Vorpe 2022). The first is Vorschläge zur Verbesserung der Berufsbildung (“Proposals for Improving Vocational Education”), published in 1971 by the Education Commission of the Swiss Trade Union Federation. It called for a renewal of dual apprenticeship, notably through a strengthened role for vocational schools – an orientation largely set aside in national VET policy during the 1970s (Bonoli & Gonon 2023). The second is Mittelschule für Morgen (“The Secondary School of Tomorrow”), commissioned in 1972 by the Swiss Conference of Cantonal Ministers of Education. It proposed rethinking lower and upper secondary levels in order to address the new economic and social demands. Here again, contemporary implementation remained limited (EDK 1996). However, it would be too simplistic to conclude that these two texts played only a minor role in the development of the Swiss education system. Read from a fifty-year distance, several ideas formulated in these proposals found their way into today’s institutional arrangements. The “delayed success” of these two documents will prompt us to examine the socio-political, economic and pedagogical contextual conditions that contributed to the rejection of specific reform proposals in the 1970s , and how shifts in these conditions in subsequent decades facilitated the eventual adoption of analogous measures. Drawing on a larger research project on the evolution of the Swiss educational system in the 1970s, the paper analyses socio-politically driven reform intentions – particularly democratisation and equality-of-opportunity arguments – and traces how these ambitions interacted across general education and initial VET. By focusing on influential but only partially realised reform visions, the study sheds light on how educational ideas were formulated, circulated, were contested, and were translated into policy in a strongly federalised system.

Bonoli, L., & Gonon, P. (2023). Challenges, future and policy orientations: The 1960s–1970s as decisive years for Swiss VET. International Journal for Research in Vocational Education and Training, 10(3), 340–460. https://doi.org/10.13152/IJRVET.10.3.3 Bonoli, L., & Vorpe, J. (2022). Swiss VET between national framework and cantonal autonomy: A historical perspective. Education Sciences, 12(114), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci12020114 Criblez, L. (2001). Bildungsexpansion durch Systemdifferenzierung—am Beispiel der Sekundarstufe II in den 1960er- und 1970er-Jahren. Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Bildungswissenschaften, 23, 95–118. EDK. (1996). Von der «Mittelschule von morgen» zur Maturitätsreform 1995. EDK. Gonon, P. (2016). Beruf und Profession im Kontext der Expansion der schweizerischen Berufsbildung. In T. Zimmermann, W. Jütte, & F. Horvath (Eds.), Arenen der Weiterbildung (pp. 190–199). HEP. Gonon, P. (2018). L’expansion de la formation professionnelle: Le cadre législatif au centre des réformes de la formation professionnelle. In L. Bonoli et al. (Eds.), Enjeux de la formation professionnelle en Suisse (pp. 33–52). Seismo.