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Whilst [vocational education and training] VET in German-speaking countries and its research base are well-known internationally, its theoretical foundations are not shared in countries where VET emerged later and has undergone more circuitous forms of theorisation. The significance of these different international understandings of the field is explored here through a comparative discussion of the theorisation of VET in English-speaking countries. A critical review of key contributions to this theorisation shows it to draw on a wide range of external disciplines, in a problematic relationship with both a contested liberal education tradition and with neoliberal policy; and within a fragmented field of knowledge production, where it competes with alternative claims to expertise that limit its contribution to the field of policy and practice. It is concluded that, whilst this problematising and problematic theorisation of VET in the Anglosphere has produced significant contributions, their effect on policy and practice has been delayed or distorted, and that significant investment in autonomous research capacity will be necessary for any meaningful renewal of VET.

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TVET educator roles and identities vary internationally, and are subject to repositioning, for example as the relative significance of institutions and the workplace change within national systems. In English apprenticeships, a key position has long been occupied by competence assessors, whose non-teaching role has related uneasily to those of professional educators. Following the introduction of new apprenticeship standards, former assessors are increasingly being allocated training responsibilities, raising issues about the expertise, identities and professional formation both of these emerging practitioners and of vocational educators in general. A qualitative study of assessors who have assumed greater training responsibilities examined these issues through individual and small-group interviews. Participant accounts of diverse and contested practices and environments suggested a need to conceptualise their roles in ways that draw upon but go beyond accounts of professionalism and occupational expertise developed at earlier stages. Drawing on Gramsci, the concept of the subaltern educator is put forward to characterise the complex position of these staff in the current climate of further education, the need for enhanced, rather than diminished, professional formation and wider possibilities for professional enhancement at a time of uncertainty for all vocational educators.

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The paper addresses the impact of [Coronavirus Disease 2019] Covid-19 on vocational education and training [VET], seeking to discern the outline of possible directions for its future development within the debates about VET responses to the pandemic. The discussion is set in its socio-economic context, considering debates that engage with the social relations of care and neo-liberalism. The paper analyses discourses that have developed around VET across the world during the pandemic, illustrating both possible continuities and ruptures that may emerge in this field, as the health crisis becomes overshadowed in public policy by the prioritisation of economic recovery and social restoration. The paper concludes that, alongside the possibility of a narrowing of VET to its most prosaic aims and practices, the health crisis could also lead to a re-conceptualisation that develops its radical and emancipatory possibilities in both the global south and north.

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Recent policies for English technical and vocational education and training (TVET), centred on apprenticeship reforms [reports available in VOCEDplus at TD/TNC 122.1166 and TD/TNC 110.775] and the Sainsbury Review [report available in VOCEDplus at TD/TNC 125.184], have prioritised employer-led curricula and learning in employment settings. These policies are represented in policy discourse as radical changes that imitate successful European systems, raising new issues about the possibilities and limitations of policy learning and policy borrowing. Useful insights are offered by comparative political economy, which has located skill formation within networks of complementary institutions that shape economic life, rendering problematic the notion of change in a single dimension such as skills. Relatedly, historical institutionalism explains skill formation both as an enduring institution but also as the product of specific historical conflicts over workplace training.

Building on these theoretical conceptions, a series of qualitative case studies carried out at key points in the emergence of current skills policies is reviewed, which demonstrates how wider conflicts are reflected in a tension between selectivity and inclusion currently playing out in the implementation English skills policy. The findings indicate the possibility of further stratification in post-16 education, through the process that historical institutionalism describes as 'layering'. However, possibilities for a more coherent relationship between educational practice and the workplace may also be derived from this analysis.

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Adult participation in higher education has frequently entailed mature students studying part-time in lower-ranked institutions. In England, higher education policies have increasingly emphasised higher education provision in vocational further education colleges, settings which have extensive adult traditions but which mainly teach employment-based skills and are widely regarded as 'outside' higher education. This paper interrogates the significance of these dimensions of college higher education, through a qualitative study of identity formation by adult part-time students. Their accounts, developed through individual interviews and focus groups, emphasised the significance of work to their interpretations of higher education participation: these are compared here to a range of conceptualisations of identity that have been applied in relation to work organisations. This analysis indicates some of the ways in which pathways, which adults may interpret as meaningful in terms of work-related identities, may correspondingly be constrained by a narrow discourse of work-based skills and credentials.

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Knowledge of research methods is regarded as crucial for the UK economy and workforce. However, research methods teaching is viewed as a challenging area for lecturers and students. The pedagogy of research methods teaching within universities has been noted as underdeveloped, with undergraduate students regularly expressing negative dispositions to the subject. These are challenges documented in university-based higher education (HE), yet little is known of the practices and pedagogies of research methods teaching in the college-based HE setting, where the delivery of HE has grown in prominence in recent years. Because college-based HE is widely regarded as primarily vocational, incorporating research methods into curricula may be seen as an additional level of complexity for staff to negotiate. In this article, [the authors] report on the data collected within a study to examine research methods teaching in social science disciplines on HE programmes taught in college-based settings in England. Drawing on data obtained from college-based HE lecturers and students, [the authors] discuss features of research methods teaching and how these may be applied with a diverse student body, within vocationally focused institutions. Issues of institutional culture, resourcing and staff development are also considered as these are identified as integral to the successful embedding of research methods teaching.

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Policymakers in England have recently, in common with other Anglophone countries, encouraged the provision of higher education within vocational further education colleges. Policy documents have emphasised the potential contribution of college-based students to widening participation: yet the same students contribute in turn to the difficulties of this provision. This article draws on a study of part-time higher education students in a college, a group whose perspectives, identities and voices have been particularly neglected by educational research. Respondents' narratives of non-participation at 18 indicated the range of social and geographical constraints shaping their decisions and their aspirations beyond higher education; whilst they drew on vocational and adult traditions to legitimate college participation, their construction of identity was also shaped by the boundaries between further education and the university. These distinctive processes illustrate both possibilities and constraints for future higher education provision within colleges.

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Where young people's upper-secondary education spans work and institutional domains, questions arise about learning across both spheres and its guidance. Theoretical accounts of 'boundary crossing' have explored how vocational teachers can integrate learning across domains by drawing on extended concepts and theoretical knowledge to solve workplace problems; whilst empirical accounts have validated the role of vocational educators by describing the workplace and schools as equally valid, complementary spheres. Different understandings, described here as 'integrative', 'complementary' and 'implicit', appear to reflect different national patterns of vocational education.

The paper reports a qualitative study conducted around two case studies, located in Germany and England, of the way vocational teachers' understandings of facilitating learning across domains are constructed. Vocational teachers working in Germany's 'dual training' claimed to provide advanced knowledge that they compared to practical work skills, reflecting 'implicit' or 'complementary' approaches to learning across domains. Teachers in England, where workplace learning elements are more unevenly developed and lack institutional foundations, nevertheless described colleges and workplaces as distinctive, little-connected spheres. These differences suggest that teachers' approaches are less shaped by the potential or necessity for 'integrative' approaches than by the way different systems enable or constrain their conceptualisation of 'possible futures'.

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An international repositioning of vocational teachers in relation to knowledge and the workplace is reflected in English Further Education through the terminology of 'dual professionalism'. Particularly in settings most closely linked to specific occupations, this discourse privileges occupational expertise that vocational educators bring from their former employment alongside pedagogic expectations of the teaching role.

In a qualitative study of recently qualified teachers employed substantially in workshop settings, using the analytical framework of Margaret Archer, workplace skills and generic attributes provided a basis for claims to expertise, extending to a custodianship of former occupations. Further augmentation of educator roles, however, appeared constrained by market approaches to development and employment insecurity in the sector and beyond. In Archer's terms, the current environment appears to cast 'dual professionalism' as morphostasis, drawing on former practice at the expense of teacher identity in the face of insecurity. Morphogenesis into enhanced professional teacher identities, for example, developing coherent vocational pedagogies informed by research into advances in knowledge, appears the less likely outcome in the current and emerging sector.

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Context: An enhanced role for work-based learning is advocated increasingly widely across industrialised countries and by international Vocational Education and Training (VET) policies. However, this is framed differently in each country by long-term policy orientations that reflect VET's relationship with wider economic and social formations. These national differences reflect path dependency but also distinctive responses to contemporary challenges such as globalisation. In England, recent reforms strengthening workplace learning are constrained by existing patterns of skill formation and may be shaped by further market liberalisation and divergence from social and economic policies in Europe.

Approach: The study examined the relationship between greater emphasis on workplace learning in England and societal change, addressing the research question: how are early experiences of work in England, as part of young people's full-time education programmes, positioning them for future employment? Case studies were organised around apparently distinctive placement types that had emerged from earlier studies. Using the constant comparative method, the team identified a series of categories to distinguish the way each type of work-based learning positioned students in a particular type of labour market transition.

Findings: Evidence emerged of divergence in England's 'further education' system, across mainly male 'technical' routes, young people on vocational courses preparing them for routine, low-skilled, precarious employment, and an area of greater uncertainty preparing young people for digital routes linked to the 'new economy'. Key dimensions of difference included study locations, discourses of occupational status, types of valued learning content, approaches to socialisation, sources of expertise and processes of credentialisation. In each case, learning at work served to position students for a particular type of labour market transition, which we characterise as technical elite formation, welfare VET and new economy precarity.

Conclusion: Approaches to workplace learning in England already reflect social distinctions but entail the possibility of reinforcing these, supporting a more hierarchical pattern of labour market transition. Whilst the upper strata of VET shift their purpose to support the formation of new 'technical elites', others face the possibility of further marginalisation. Such new inequalities could become central to a further fragmented society in a post-Brexit, [post-Coronavirus Disease 2019] post-COVID-19 Britain. Other European states facing challenges of globalisation and the transition to services are also likely to experience pressures for VET stratification, although they may seek less divisive solutions.

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