European educational policy in the field of vocational education and training (VET) is highly complex due to the deep embeddedness of VET in national systems of work and industrial relations (Trampusch & Powell, 2012; Elken 2015; Graf, 2015; Di Maio et al., 2019). In light of this, the European Commission has developed a new decentralized approach to strengthen VET in Europe, namely the European Alliance for Apprenticeships. Key goals of this alliance include enhancing both social inclusion and economic competitiveness in Europe. It represents one of the European Commission’s main multi-actor and multi-level cooperation frameworks to support and enhance apprenticeship training across member states and to combat youth unemployment (European Union, 2014). Yet, we still know relatively little about the rationales driving this policy instrument and how it is affecting skill formation systems at the national and subnational levels. The paper explores the institutional and organizational characteristics of the European Alliance for Apprenticeships and compares it to the arguably most prominent case of collectively governed skill formation in Europe, namely apprenticeship training in the Federal Republic of Germany. This national collective system is based on the decentralized cooperation of multiple actors at multiple levels, too. Do the European and the German governance approaches to apprenticeship training complement and enrich each other or are they in a relationship of tension, if not contradiction, with each other? Interestingly, European Alliance for Apprenticeship aims to directly integrate VET stakeholders from the local level in Germany. Yet, the study finds that the European Alliance mainly operates in parallel to traditional decentralized governance in Germany and has a rather limited impact on apprenticeship training. This institutional analysis carves out the specific governance mode and theory of change underlying the European alliance in VET and discusses its prospects to enhance economic competitiveness and social inclusion.

Di Maio, Gina, Lukas Graf, and Anna Wilson. 2019. “Torn between Economic Efficiency and Social Equality? Short-Track Apprenticeships in Denmark, Germany and Switzerland.” European Educational Research Journal 18 (6): 699–723. Elken, Mari. 2015. “New EU instruments for education: Vertical, horizontal and internal tensions in the European qualifications framework.” Journal of Contemporary European Research 11 (1): 69–83. European Union. 2014. “The European Alliance for Apprenticeships.” Brussels: European Union. Graf, Lukas. 2015. “The European Educational Model and Its Paradoxical Impact at the National Level.” In: Trajectories in the Development of Modern School Systems: Between the National and the Global, edited by Daniel Tröhler and Thomas Lenz, 227–40. New York: Routledge. Powell, Justin J. W., and Christine Trampusch. 2012. “Europeanization and the Varying Responses in Collective Skill Systems.” In: The Comparative Political Economy of Collective Skill Systems, edited by Marius R Busemeyer and Christine Trampusch, 284–316. Oxford: Oxford University Press.