Vocational education and training (VET) in Denmark is generally organised in a dual model combining school education with traineeships in workplaces. Doing the last two decades the VET system has been going through different reforms aimed at strengthening the quality of programmes and teaching. Some main goals of these reforms have been high completion rates, attractiveness to students, continuity in student learning and relevance to labour market demands; but the goals have been combined and emphasized differently in the different reforms. For instance the ‘Reform 2000’, which emphasized versatility in school learning settings has been followed in recent years by initiatives emphasizing access routes through company training. However, concepts of quality depend not only on the specific goals and conditions of VET; they are also products of general policies for evaluation and quality assessment pursued by nation-states, both for the educational system and for the public sector in general. It is well known that evaluation has become a major instrument of educational policy in recent decades, and is connected to other changes in educational governance. In this paper we try to characterise current and earlier concepts of quality in Danish VET programmes, making use of the concept of quality regime (Dahler-Larsen 2008). Some quality regimes concerns removing variations on a given standard, some have specific effects or political goals as objects, some are concerned with the users’ perspective, and some have the organizational system as an object. We see the quality regimes in vocational education as products of on one hand general concepts of quality in the public sector and education, on the other hand the specific quality issues of VET programmes. We hypothesize that a certain type of quality regime, drawing on neo-liberalism and new public management, has been dominating the policies of the Danish VET programmes since the nineteen eighties, and we try to trace what the political and educational basis of such a regime. However, we also assume that this quality regime contains contradictions, for instance between institutionalism and the craft tradition still present in Danish VET. As part of the argument we will compare with quality policies in some other VET systems. The paper is connected to an ongoing PhD-project in a Danish VET college.

Historical documentation; textual analysis of policy documents; interviews with school managers

We hypothesize that a certain type of quality regime, drawing on neo-liberalism and new public management, has been dominating the policies of the Danish VET programmes since the nineteen eighties, and we try to trace what the political and educational basis of such a regime.