Between-school tracking provides students with tailored educational pathways but also fosters social comparison. According to the Basking in Reflected Glory Effect (BIRGE), students internalise the social perceptions of their assigned educational track, influencing their self-esteem and subsequent outcomes. Drawing on this framework, this study examined associations among track allocation, students' self-esteem, life satisfaction, and subsequent occupational attainment using longitudinal data from the China Family Panel Study, which tracked individuals aged 12-15 from 2010 to 2020 (n = 2309). Findings from structural equation modelling showed that cognitive abilities had stronger associations with track placement than socioeconomic status. Students in vocational tracks reported lower self-esteem compared to their academic peers, consistent with the BIRGE. Vocational-track students attained lower occupational status, whilst reporting higher levels of life satisfaction, possibly due to earlier labour market entry. Comparatively, boys attending vocational schools reported lower self-esteem, lower occupational status, and lower life satisfaction, while girls attending vocational schools showed a stronger link between self-esteem and life satisfaction. The results enhance our understanding of the long-term impact of explicit between-school tracking on students' self-evaluation, psychological well-being, and status attainment in a non-Western context.
This paper compares two transnational educational initiatives in Central Asia - the Luban Workshop at East Kazakhstan Technical University and the American University of Central Asia (AUCA) - to examine how cultural embeddedness shapes localisation outcomes. Using a four-dimensional framework of embeddedness and a theory-informed comparative case-study design, the study analyses policy texts, institutional documents, curricula and media materials across three domains: staffing, pedagogy, and curriculum/equipment design. The findings suggest that the Luban Workshop is institutionally and structurally embedded but remains culturally thin, as epistemic authority is concentrated in external expertise, pedagogic adaptation is limited and curriculum design risks technological lock-in. By contrast, AUCA demonstrates deeper localisation through more sustained pedagogic adaptation, broader redistribution of epistemic authority and a curriculum that combines global standards with local flexibility. The article argues that successful transnational VET cooperation depends not only on formal institutional alignment but also on the co-production of interpretive resources, vocational capital and locally credible forms of knowledge.
Responsibility is a fundamental aspect of teacher professionalism; however, research on teacher responsibility in vocational contexts is scarce. Drawing on both focus groups and individual interviews with vocational teachers from three vocational programmes, this study examines how vocational teachers perceive and navigate their responsibilities for students' transitions to apprenticeships. The study is situated in Norway, where vocational education and training is characterised by an institutional gap between school-based learning and apprenticeships. Findings show how teachers negotiate and enact responsibility amid systemic constraints, ambiguous expectations and competing interests, and why support can be necessary yet not sufficient when control over allocation lies outside schools. While teachers' work in supporting students' transitions to apprenticeships often involves substantial but largely invisible efforts, the study also highlights that personalised student support carries the risks of over-reliance on individual teachers and variations in the level of support provided. The study contributes to ongoing scholarly debates on teachers' roles in VET transitions by clarifying how responsibility is negotiated and enacted at the school - apprenticeship boundary, particularly in contexts where expectations are unclear and formal guidelines are absent or ambiguous.
This paper examines whether dual VET enhances labour market resilience for young adults in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. Using harmonised microdata from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) for the United States, linked via the Comparative Panel File (CPF), we compare unemployment among 25- to 34-year-olds whose highest attained qualification is dual VET (Germany) or a high school diploma (United States). Our weighted estimates indicate consistently lower and less volatile unemployment risk for dual VET graduates than for high school graduates, with the gap peaking during the crisis years and persisting thereafter. We interpret these patterns through the lenses of collective skill formation, school-to-work transitions, and the trade-off between specific and general skills. The findings suggest that sustaining and modernising high-quality dual VET can strengthen labour market resilience within a broader skills strategy.
High rates of school dropout impact on young people's educational and employment opportunities highlight the importance of second-chance education programmes. These initiatives aim to raise educational attainment, rebuild motivation to learn and improve employability. However, studies examining the profiles of the young people who attend these programmes are still limited, and reliable assessment tools to measure their progress and inform continuous improvement are insufficient. This research is conducted in two second-chance education centres. The study analysed student profiles, examined teaching practices and developed improvement proposals to enhance motivation, strengthen student - teacher relationships and support learning. Quantitative and qualitative assessment methods were incorporated to guide ongoing improvements. Using a mixed-methods design, data were collected from 23 young people through surveys and in-depth interviews. Findings show that an immigrant background and school experiences strongly affect engagement and increase dropout risk. Key factors include teacher - student relationships, cultural barriers and the psychological effects of migration. Co-creation and collaborative work between students and teachers were found to improve engagement by fostering positive interactions and more inclusive learning environments. Results suggest that students' perceptions of the education system and their professional aspirations improved after the intervention, alongside notable increases in self-esteem and motivation.
Vocational Education and Training (VET) in Chile serves a large share of students from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds and relies on teachers whose career paths differ from those in general education. Many of them enter teaching as a second profession after working in the productive sector, often acquiring pedagogical training while already in service. These distinctive pathways pose challenges for teacher recruitment, retention, and professional development in a context of high turnover and persistent shortages of qualified staff. This study examines the trajectories of VET teachers in Chile between 2015 and 2024, focusing on patterns of turnover and attrition. Using a longitudinal quantitative approach based on national administrative records from the Ministry of Education, we estimated discrete-time multilevel logistic regression models to identify individual, contractual, institutional, and contextual factors associated with teachers' mobility. Findings show a marked decrease in turnover during the pandemic years and highlight the influence of contract type, tenure in the school, and geographical location. These results contribute new evidence on the dynamics of VET teachers' careers and provide insights for designing policies that strengthen workforce stability and professional development in this strategic sector of the Chilean school system.
This study investigates how structural inputs and contextual barriers influence learning engagement, skill gain, and employment outcomes among rural women participating in e-learning tourism vocational training. Drawing on the survey data from 390 women in the Mekong Delta Vietnam, the research develops and empirically tests a structural model linking digital access, content quality, and trainer support to learning engagement and decent work outcomes. Using the logic model framework, the study identifies both direct and moderating effects of support policies and socio-cultural barriers. Findings underscore that input factors play a critical role in enhancing rural women's learning engagement and post-training employment. Moreover, policy and cultural contexts significantly moderate these relationships, shaping women's digital inclusion and work readiness. The study advances theoretical understanding of digital capacity building in marginalised settings. It offers practical policy implications for designing flexible, gender-responsive, and sustainable vocational programmes that align with Sustainable Development Goals 5 and 8.
Dual systems of vocational education and training (VET) - where the so-called 'dual model' serves as a key pathway from school to work - are often perceived as nationally uniform. However, research has revealed significant variation in how these systems operate, both between countries and within national contexts. Adopting a historical perspective, this article traces the early development of the dual model as part of the broader VET system formation process in Switzerland around the turn of the 20th century. While existing scholarship has emphasised the role of collective corporate actors in shaping dual systems, the Swiss case highlights a decisive role of the state in enabling the model's widespread adoption. The article conceptualises this as a process of policy-driven diffusion. Methodologically, it draws on documentary analysis of key VET policies issued by the Swiss cantons, which first codified the norm of dual training. This is complemented by historical statistical data on apprenticeships and early forms of vocational schooling, demonstrating how the model diffused across regions and over time. The article contributes to a more nuanced understanding of dual VET systems by foregrounding state agency and policy dynamics in their historical evolution alongside evolving educational structures.
When making career-defining decisions, individuals should be well-informed. This study examines the impact of a low-cost personalised information intervention on occupational choices for students in lower-secondary education in Switzerland. Using data from an online platform and a regression discontinuity design (RDD), we analyse how a tool called occupation finder affects the number of occupations students apply to. The findings show that tailored information significantly increases the number of occupations students apply to. The intention-to-treat effect suggests every fifth student applies to an additional occupation, while the local average treatment effect indicates an increase of applications to three additional occupations for those students using the tool.
This article analyses the ways in which the perception of financial stress interferes vocational education students' engagement and how this is related to educational intentions and trajectories and intentions to persist or drop out. The study is part of a broader investigation of VET students' trajectories and transitions. An ad hoc questionnaire was administered to a sample of 2,482 students from six Spanish regions. The data analysis was organised in two phases: first, we sought to identify the demographic profile of students who reported financial stress in pursuing their studies, comparing this perception with their family context and academic trajectory variables; subsequently, a two-step cluster analysis was performed to identify differentiated student profiles. The results show that financial stress is concentrated in certain groups according to age, employment status and family background, and is associated with lower levels of academic satisfaction, self-efficacy and future aspirations. The cluster analysis yielded four student profiles with differentiated combinations of academic integration and economic vulnerability, one of which concentrated almost all dropout intentions. Results reveal the need to develop guidance and support policies that address the interaction between material conditions and academic factors to enhance persistence and wellbeing amongst VET-students in contexts of inequality.
This study explores how practice-based knowledge, shaped through social and vocational experience, underpins the pedagogical work of vocational educators in Building and Construction. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and narrative interviews, the study shows how teachers' implicit understanding of craft learning, rooted in embodied engagement, material sensitivity, and tacit knowledge shapes workshop instruction and informs a broader sense of responsibility towards students. Learning for teaching roles emerges through relationships between educators and students. While students are guided to engage with materials, tools, and processes, they are also introduced to workplace expectations and adult responsibility, including punctuality, responsibility, collaboration, and social interaction in informal settings. Educators draw on prior work experiences as important resource in their teaching, while their professional understandings take form through ongoing interactions with students and colleagues. The study highlights learning as a relational process in which meaning making arises through the interplay between experience, practice and the teacher role. It contributes insights into how vocational pedagogy is embodied, relational, and co-constructed in everyday educational practice, revealing how educators and learners reinterpret what they know, do, and value.
Over the past decades, the Chinese central government has implemented significant reforms to the agricultural training system, making farmers' upskilling a crucial public commitment. This paper examines how the central government's policies have shaped and restructured the Chinese agricultural training system since the founding of the People's Republic of China (1949-present). Based on an analysis of six flagship policy documents from 1949 until the present, this study identifies rounds of progressive reforms within China's agricultural training system, illustrating the central government's ambition increasingly oriented towards the marketisation of agro-technology. Employing the triangulation method, we connect policy documents to secondary data, illustrating their impact. These are not basically propaganda documents but brought about significant changes at the ground level; that is, the market-oriented shift can deskill farmers. Drawing on deskilling theory, this paper suggests that deskilling in the agricultural sector centres on issues of power, authority, and control. On the one hand, farmers have gradually lost the power to participate in decisions concerning agro-technological change. On the other hand, the notion of the 'peasant class' has, under China's waves of reform, come to denote a declining and precarious group marked by an 'unfinished proletarianisation'.
This study explores the early career trajectories of vocational education graduates, challenging traditional views that portray vocational pathways as inherently problematic. Employing sequence analysis and life course theory, we investigate the complexities of vocational trajectories, recognising that differentiation can be both advantageous and disadvantageous. Our research uses longitudinal data from a Russian cohort study to explore how vocational graduates navigate transitions in education and employment. We identify specific transitions that characterise advantageous turbulent trajectories. Favourable turbulence is driven by sequences that integrate vocational and often higher education with substantial full-time work and study-work combinations, whereas harmful turbulence reflects recurrent moves into inactivity, unemployment, and precarious part-time employment. This study contributes to the understanding of vocational life courses, emphasising the heterogeneity within this group and their educational and career pathways. The research offers insights into the factors that enable vocational graduates to construct meaningful careers, highlighting the need to move beyond traditional measures of career success and embrace the complexities of modern life courses. It also opens a discussion on conceptual and methodological issues related to differentiated vocational pathways, providing a foundation for further comparative research across diverse VET systems and labour markets.
This study examines how code of conduct (CoC) policies1 function within Australia's marketised vocational education and training sector, revealing fundamental contradictions in their implementation as instruments of neoliberal governance rather than for ethical guidance. While ostensibly designed to regulate professional behaviour across all employment categories (from teaching staff to administrative personnel, including casual and contract workers), these regulatory frameworks function primarily as mechanisms of institutional control and risk management. Drawing on Bernstein's concepts of policy recontextualisation and pedagogic discourse, we investigate how CoC policies for teachers are implemented to create 'ethical impossibility': structural conditions where adherence to official ethical policies becomes antithetical to ethical practice. Through interpretative phenomenological analysis of semi-structured interviews with 19 teachers from public and private vocational education and training institutions across three Australian states, we examine how teachers navigate ethical dilemmas. Our analysis reveals how recontextualisation establishes strong symbolic boundaries between collective professional ethical discourse and situated educational practice, thus constraining teachers' contextual ethical reasoning. Rather than guiding professional ethical decision-making, these policy instruments individualise collective ethical responsibilities, forcing teachers to develop 'ethical resilience': maintaining professional integrity under structural constraints. Findings reveal how competitive funding and performance-driven accountability create conditions where teachers must choose between institutional survival and ethical practices. We conclude that effective ethical practice requires reconceptualising CoC policies as collective social practices rather than as individualised regulatory mechanisms of regulation and control.
