In Hakala’s research the focus is on the vocational education and training (VET) for intellectually disabled people. Finnish national curricular documents use the concept of “competent citizen” to describe the goals of VET and a strong aim in educational policy is that all citizens get a degree in post-compulsory education in upper secondary level. The idea of a competent citizen and possibilities for intellectually disabled people to fullfill that idea constitute a complicated field of study. The ongoing reform in the governing of the institutions of vocational special education has transferred the state maintenanced schools to be merged with institutions of five private associations for public good organising vocational special education. Three of these former state schools are institutions that have long traditions in organising education and training for people with intellectual disabilities. Hakala has documented the reform in these three schools by visiting the schools gathering ethnographic data and interviewing the headmasters about the prosess. Hakala’s paper is analysing the meanings of the concepts of ‘competent citizen’, inclusion and different categorizations of “special” that are constructed in the data. The analysis is contextualised to the culture and history of the service system of the welfare state as caring and governing the life of those who have “special needs” that has tensions between individual freedom and control.