Since the 2000 European Council in Lisbon, education has been discussed within the context of the knowledge-based economy where people are expected to invest in lifelong learning. Europeanization of education is not only connected with the promise of economic prosperity but also with equitable distribution of resources and possibilities of participation in education and labour markets. The European Qualifications Framework (EQF), established in Copenhagen in 2002, is a prime example of the Europeanization of education intended to enable comparisons of qualifications and competences of students and workers across Europe and to promote their cross-border mobility and overcome educational and professional frontiers. To this end, many countries have developed their own National Qualifications Frameworks (NQF), which were later on referenced to the overall EQF.

Employability and a focus on learning outcomes lie at the heart of this educational policy. The new paradigm is designed to serve the interests of employers - who are primarily interested in what potential students and workers actually can do and not where and how they have acquired their competences. The core idea is that input criteria such as duration of learning or reputation of educational qualifications or institutions should no longer determine one’s value on the labour market. Consequently, the distinction between educational pathways (e.g. between tertiary-level higher education and professional education or between upper-secondary level general education and vocational education and training) should become obsolete and make different educational systems more transparent and permeable: “An important objective underpinning the EQF is the promotion of parity of esteem between academic, vocational or higher education routes as well as between initial and further education. In this sense, all the dimensions of the table are of equal value” (European Commission 2008: 6f). Hence, NQFs are not neutral classification systems but tools of a new way of governance in education (Bowker/Star 2000). They arrange elements of education systems in a different order and therefore force a new evaluation and hierarchisation of pathways of education that provoke political claims and critique.

Countries with so-called dual VET systems, in which vocational education and training takes place partly in a vocational school and partly in a workplace setting, are interesting cases for the analysis of the development of an NQF. In Switzerland, Germany and Austria a large proportion of young people follow the vocational education and training track. The countries face the challenge that often more prestige was attributed to general and higher education than to vocational education and training and professional education. Therefore, the development of an NQF has been regarded, among other things, as a means of reforming this image in order to attribute the ‘real’ value to upper-secondary level vocational and tertiary-level professional qualifications (authors, 2016).

A paradigm shift like the one described and the aim of the EQF to bring together all types of education and training in only one equal value system is quite difficult (Powell/Bernhard/Graf 2012). In Switzerland e.g., conflicts, ongoing negotiations and discussions between various stakeholders have led to an NQF, which in reality consists of two different frames side by side, reflecting the traditional gap between general and higher education on the one hand and vocational and professional education and training on the other. In every country, the creation of the NQF was not just a simple process of classifying qualifications of students and workers to facilitate mobility across European borders. Instead it became a debate on the underlying issue of the (un)equal value of certain qualifications in separated spheres of the education system, distinguished by different actors’ constellations lobbying either for vocational education and training or higher education

Authors (2016) Bowker, Geoffrey C.; Star, Susan Leigh (2000): Sorting Things Out. Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge and London. European Commission (2008): Explaining the European Qualifications Framework for Lifelong Learning. Available at: https://ec.europa.eu/ploteus/sites/eac-eqf/files/leaflet_en.pdf (accessed 18 November 2016). Mayring, Philipp: Qualitative Inhaltsanalyse: Grundlagen und Techniken. Weinheim: Beltz. Powell, Justin J.W.; Bernhard, Nadine; Graf, Lukas (2012): The Emergent European Model in Skill Formation: Comparing Higher Education and Vocational Training in the Bologna and Copenhagen Process. Sociology of Education 85, 3 240-258.