The rich array of metaphors offered in the course of interviews with vocational school principals in Israel prompted us to reflect deeply on their implications. As the interviews progressed, we increasingly came to believe that these metaphors were neither poetic embellishments nor incidental expressions. As one principal stated, ‘something different, something unusual is happening here [in the vocational school], compared with regular [academic] schools'. As Sharp (1995) suggested, experiencing reality in terms of otherness or as extraordinary often leads individuals to draw on semantic tropes, such as metaphors, to ease phenomenological and ontological disorientation.

 This article is guided by two central research questions:

(1) What metaphors do vocational school principals use to describe their role?
(2) What do these metaphors reveal about educational work in vocational schools?

 Exploring these questions empirically carries significance due to the scholarly and phenomenological value of studying metaphors in educational leadership (Schechter et al. 2018). This exploration addresses the notable dearth of research focused specifically on the role of vocational school principals (Çolak, Çakir, and Cansoy 2025). Moreover, this examination is crucial in light of the contested distinction between academic and vocational schools, a distinction deeply tied to broader social hierarchies, for example, the opposition between 'theory' and 'practice,' or between 'working with one’s hands' and 'working with one’s head' (Lahelma 2009). Vocational schools also face distinct challenges in today’s high-tech and digital era, including the disappearance of traditional jobs and the ongoing need to adapt to labour market demands (Wuttke et al. 2020). In addition, in various countries, vocational schools are mainly populated by students who experience social exclusion and marginalisation based on class, race, and ethnicity (Avis et al. 2017; Atkins 2009; Ling 2015; Nylund et al. 2017; Woronov 2011).  In other words, as in many countries, vocational schools in Israel are closely intertwined with class, inequality, and educational stratification, or as Ling (2015:108) formulates it: 'Vocational schools have thus become a unique site for studying education and class reproduction'. Vocational school students across many contexts are frequently described through the deficit discourse, such as 'youth at risk' (Author 2, 2025), 'left-over students' (Hao et al. 2024), 'difficult' or 'lazy' students (van de Weers 2023). These descriptions indicate that vocational education in Israel can be viewed as 'weak'. These descriptions place Israel alongside other countries, including the United States, France, England, as well as several Asian and African countries (Cedefop 2020), rather than those promoting a 'strong' model of vocational education (the dual system), such as Germany, Switzerland, and Denmark (Stalder and Luthi 2020).

To address our research questions empirically, we conducted 26 semi-structured interviews with vocational school principals in Israel. Of the 26 interviews, 40 metaphors were extracted, as some participants provided more than one. Thematic analysis of these metaphors revealed three overarching metaphorical categories, ranked by frequency:
(1) Emergency, chaos, and survival (e.g., emergency room, natural disaster);
(2) Illness, pandemic, and organisational death (e.g., AIDS, COVID-19);
(3) Unwelcome space (e.g., the Wild West, the state’s backyard).

These metaphors articulate various understandings of the vocational school principal’s role, portraying the principals’ educational spaces as othered, different, unusual, or abnormal. It is also important to emphasise that these metaphors are mainly negative. The principals in our study did not offer positive metaphors for their role or for vocational schools more broadly. The Discussion section offers several explanations for this striking and consistent finding. Against this backdrop, this article offers unique contributions to three interrelated domains of educational research: the role of the vocational school principal, educational leadership metaphors, and the broader study of vocational schools.

This qualitative study is based on 26 semi-structured interviews with principals of vocational schools in Israel. Both volunteer sampling and snowball sampling were employed. Four participants were recruited through the authors’ personal networks, another four through professional colleagues, and twelve through a public call distributed via social media. The remaining six participants were identified through referrals from interviewees. The study sample includes 14 male and 12 female principals. Their management experience ranges from 3 to 18 years. Six principals held a teaching certificate, six had prior experience as principals in academic schools, and 14 entered their positions without formal educational experience but had prior managerial experience in various non-educational organisations. The primary research tool was a semi-structured in-depth interview designed to explore principals’ perceptions of their role. With the participants’ consent, all interviews were recorded using a mobile audio device and later transcribed. Transcriptions included notations of pauses, crying, laughter, and other significant nonverbal cues. Each interview lasted approximately one hour and comprised several sections: professional life trajectory (e.g., ‘What is your professional background?’); role perceptions (e.g., ‘How would you characterise the role of a vocational school principal?’); metaphorical representation of the role; description of the principal’s daily routine; students’ characterisation (e.g., ‘What are the main characteristics of your students?’); parental involvement (e.g., ‘To what extent are parents involved in the school?’); public critique of vocational education (e.g., ‘Are you aware of the social critique regarding vocational schools in Israel? What is your position on this issue?’). Data were analysed using thematic analysis, following the approach outlined by Braun and Clarke (2006). The process included the following steps: an initial reading of the transcripts and notation of descriptive and linguistic features, preliminary conceptualisation of central themes identified by each author, a rereading of the interviews in relation to the emerging themes, an open reading aimed at identifying additional themes not previously recognised, a focused reading based on themes proposed by the authors, and a final reading to identify themes potentially missed in earlier rounds. At each stage, the authors engaged in collaborative discussions to refine and organise the themes. The study received approval from the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Education at the authors' university.

'In many ways,' wrote Woronov (2011, 91), based on her ethnographic research in vocational schools in China, 'the culture of vocational students is a kind of culture of failure.' Among these factors are the stigmatised public image of vocational schools in China, the educational and social construction of vocational students as a morally inferior 'moral group' (82), and the deficit-oriented descriptions of public vocational schools and their students by teachers and administrators (e.g., 'students as hopeless,' and 'undisciplined and unruly'). We propose that the notion of a 'culture of failure' may help explain the dramatic prevalence of negative metaphors among the interviewed principals. The principals in the current study characterised their experience as reflecting a 'weak' model of vocational education. They described a school culture characterised by wasted time. Moreover, adopting deficit-oriented language to describe the students and their families, the principals portrayed their schools as spaces of social exclusion for at-risk youth. These metaphors and descriptions of the principal’s role encourage critical readings of vocational schools in the age of digitalism. These critical readings were explicitly presented by about half of the principals in our study. They prompt reflection on a myriad of social aspects: the compatibility of vocational schools with contemporary technological culture, the implications of their institutional features as socially exclusionary spaces (van de Weerd 2023), their influence on students’ future trajectories, and their role in the intergenerational reproduction of educational inequality across social classes and specific ethnic communities. The interviewed principals’ accounts clearly indicated that vocational schools in Israel do not foster academic and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984), both of which are essential for upward mobility (Crul et al. 2017). These observations are not exclusive to the Israeli context (Atkins 2009; Cerdà-Navarro et al. 2024; Giesinger 2017; Woronov 2011).

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