This paper follows the personal and professional lives of six people who trained to teach in the English Learning and Skills sector in 2002. Since that time, the lives of each individual have moved in quite different directions. All began with an intention to work as lecturers in further education colleges, or in education and training organisations of some kind in England, and all initially pursued that goal. Since their first steps into practice, however, they have not all constructed a working life in the vocational education and training field, sometimes out of choice, sometimes because of the constraints of the opportunities available.

Their different experiences provide insights into what it means to work as a ‘teacher’ or ‘trainer’ in the English Learning and Skills sector at the beginning of the 21^st century, and how this fits with understandings of work in vocational education and training in Europe more widely. On the one hand, their narratives and the discourses to be found within and surrounding those narratives provide insights into current conditions of practice. On the other, they offer a means of exploring the construction of professional identities.

We explore these narratives and discourses in relation to a number of themes, firstly related to the work of constructing professional identities. We consider:

What does it mean to be a professional in the English Learning and Skills sector?

How does the English context resonate with developments across other European countries?

Do the narratives suggest particular understandings of a ‘preferred professionalism’?

Are there models of the ‘ideal teacher/trainer’ in the sector (that it may be impossible to live up to)?

What do the individuals see as the point to their practice? What are they doing for/with the people that they teach?

How do they conceptualise knowledge and what counts as really useful knowledge in the work that they do?

Secondly, we draw on the narratives and discourses to look at the work of reconstructing the English Vocational Education and Training context, which shapes the possibilities and constraints of practice. We ask:

How should we make sense of the labour process in FE and other locations in the Learning and Skills sector in England?

Do concepts of marketisation and performativity help to understand the constructions of work in the current context, and are these part of a specifically English phenomenon or a wider European trend?

What affordances and what limitations do these understandings place on the work of vocational education and training at the beginning of the 21^st century?

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