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This article analyses reforms addressing and affecting the curriculum and organisation of Swedish upper secondary education over 40 years, up to an initiative by the present non-socialist government. The aim is to analyse the current reform of upper secondary education and relate it to previous reforms during a 40-year period in terms of continuity and breaks, mainly with regard to major functions of the reforms and the structuring and control of educational contents. Aiming to create a sharper division of students into three separate streams (academic and vocational education, and apprenticeship training), the reform constitutes a major break with the previously dominant trend towards greater integration. It is argued that it will result in a restriction and reformulation of the knowledge which is regarded as desirable. Similar moves are evident in relation to teacher education, which, if enacted, would involve moving from a model of high flexibility and a common core of knowledge to substantially stronger divisions between contents and programmes.

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This article aims to deepen understanding of the trajectories through school and into adulthood of people who did not attain valued qualifications from upper secondary school ('non-completers'), and explore the fruitfulness of careership theory for such analysis. It is based on interviews with 100 young Swedes: 81 non-completers and 19 who had attended special upper secondary schools catering for young people with mild cognitive disability. Their narratives portray sparse socio-economic resources and difficult family situations, learning problems and marginalisation processes in school. They commonly learned to perceive themselves as failures and 'different'. Framed by narrow horizons of action, these young people's careers were mostly characterised by enforced rather than self-initiated turning points. Often leading to unemployment and economic problems, leaving secondary school was less of a turning point than a continuation of failure, even if completing adult education and getting a job were regarded as self-initiated, positive shifts. [The authors] conclude that careership theory was useful for analysing and understanding the careers of the young people concerned. However, distinguishing between 'routines' and 'turning points' became especially difficult when studying lives of these young people hemmed in by sparser resources, fewer choices and less stable career trajectories than their peers.

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This article discusses young people's transitions from school to work at a time when educational systems have become more closely connected to the economy than ever before. The serious situation of high unemployment, unstable employment conditions and poverty among young people and young adults in Europe is highlighted. Using Sweden as an illuminative example, it is argued that the increasing commercialisation and competition within the education sector add to the risks connected to school-to-work-transitions. The associated shift to outcome-based curricula and focus on narrow competences and skills rather than a broad education including social, cultural and democratic elements, will provide young people with poor navigation instruments in this process. The need to analyse the long-term impact of the market-oriented culture on young people's self-understanding, orientations and choices is emphasized.

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In Sweden as in most other OECD countries, school-to-work transitions have become extended and uncertain endeavours. School dropout and youth unemployment rates are comparatively high, and the so-called yo-yo transitions are common. Although traditionally characterised as a prominent example of a social democratic welfare regime, Sweden has recently incorporated numerous neo-liberal ideas into its educational and youth policies. The responsibility for managing and implementing these policies has been extensively devolved to the country’s 290 municipalities. Moreover, young people are increasingly expected to take exclusive responsibility for forging their own careers, and to be self-governing, enterprising and proactive, both within the educational quasi-market and beyond. The aim of this article was to critically analyse current Swedish national school-to-work transition policies as well as the ways in which local strategies and measures are implemented and developed within individual municipalities given the relatively broad latitude available to them, and to provide some tentative explanations for Sweden’s problems with school dropout rates and youth unemployment.

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The Thematic Network on Teacher Education (TNTEE) is funded by the European Commission. Its main objective is to establish a flexible multilingual trans-national forum for the development of teacher education in Europe. The network is coordinated by the Board of Teacher Education and Research, Umea University, Sweden. The focus of this collection of papers from a TNTEE symposium is the vocational education and training systems of Germany and Sweden. The collection includes one paper on the Danish vocational education system. The papers are as follows: ‘Introduction: Germany and Sweden: two different systems of vocational education?’ by Lisbeth Lundahl and Theodor Sander which compares the processes of vocational education and training (VET) and the professional education of vocational teachers and trainers in Sweden and Germany, and highlights the role of the VET system in maintaining social control in the face of oppositional movements as a neglected area of research; ‘The emergence of new models of organisation of vocational education in Sweden’ by Anders Nilsson which presents and discusses new forms of organisation in vocational education for work in the manufacturing industry; ‘Still the stepchild of Swedish educational politics?: vocational education and training in Sweden in the 1990s’ by Lisbeth Lundahl which examines recent reforms and developments in Swedish upper secondary education, highlighting the technical vocational programs; ‘Selection principles in the recruitment for work on the shop floor’ by Sigurd Johansson which discusses issues related to the underlying principles influencing the recruitment of new members in groups working in the shop floor in the occupations of process operators and machine operators; ‘The Danish vocational educations and the interrelation of the school-based and the firm-based parts’ by Vibe Aarkrog which focuses on commercial education in an attempt to identify some of the difficulties in establishing an effective interrelation between school and company, and an optimal means for doing so; ‘The dual system: a static system?’ by Uwe Lauterbach in co-operation with Philipp Grollman, which analyses the ability of the German dual system of vocational education and training to adapt to changing educational needs in comparison with the university and college system; ‘On the ‘attractiveness’ of ‘in-company’ training in the dual system of vocational training in Germany’ by Eva Kuda which discusses the decline in both the number of in-company training places and the demand for vocational training among young people; ‘The crisis of the ‘dual system’ of vocational education in Germany (phases, sy[m]ptoms, reasons, reforms)’ by Meinhard Stach which explains the dual system and its development and outlines the reasons for the crisis currently evident in the system; ‘Young working people in Germany during the first half of the 20th century’ by Alfons Kenkmann which provides an historical view of the situation of young workers on the employment market of the 1930s and 1940s; ‘Youth opposition to vocational education in the Former GDR in the 1980s’ by Theodor Sander which examines the role of apprentices in the struggle against policies of the GDR [German Democratic Republic] leadership. Show less

Few studies have researched career guidance and information policies, particularly at the regional and local level. This article analyses Sweden's national governance of career guidance in schools from 1950 to 2007, and governance at the local level in today's highly decentralised Swedish educational system. The analysis is based on national policy documents and on survey data from Swedish municipalities. It is concluded that the current situation is characterised by traditional ambitions to offer a universal service to all young people, combined with increasing local fragmentation in the provision of educational and vocational guidance.

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