Spain has had a school-based vocational education system since 1970. Despite it has been traditionally questioned, the reform introduced in 1990 brought in several features that contributed to change its perception and to overcome the claimed lack of connection to the labour market needs. Duly aligned with European Vocational Education and Training (VET) policies, a new compromise was reached where views of the administration of education, employer and trade union representatives have significantly contributed to the increased worth and prestige of formal vocational education (Martínez-Morales/Marhuenda-Fluixá, 2020; Martínez-Morales/Marhuenda-Fluixá, 2022) as well as to a rather controversial growth of funding and policies of Continuing Vocational Education and Training (CVET) and non-formal vocational training (Marhuenda-Fluixá, 2019). In this contribution to the symposium, I will use the sociology of conventions framework to identify the main actors in national policy reforms in three domains (formal vocational education policy, non-formal vocational training policy and labour market policy) and to explain what their main justifications have been as well as the compromises they have reached in order to advance VET policies in the country. I will do so by focusing on the reforms produced since the 2008 financial crisis, first led by conservative government and then, after the Covid crisis, led by a social-democrat government. Some of our recent work has used the theoretical framework of the sociology of conventions (Boltanski/Thévenot, 2006) to analyze VET policies and practices in different regards: VET international policies (Marhuenda-Fluixá, 2017), European trends and prospects in VET (Marhuenda-Fluixá, 2022) and the practice of vocational training in non-for profit organizations (Marhuenda-Fluixá/Molpeceres-Pastor, 2021). Before that, we had already researched with the same framework looking at the organizational dimension of non-formal vocational training (e.g. Bernad/Molpeceres, 2010). I will rely upon our previous work but will also consider policy documents by the actors involved (Government Departments of Education and Employment, Social and Economic Council, Employer Confederation, Trade Unions), as well as recent research conducted around the success of vocational education in the past decade (e.g. Barrientos, 2022). By doing so, I want to highlight whether the compromise between civic and industrial conventions that characterized the reforms in the last quarter of the 20th century has been altered and whether and how the power to negotiate of different actors, particularly trade unions and employers, has changed since the 2008 Great Financial Crisis and how firm are the current compromises.

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