Vocational education and training (VET) plays a pivotal role in the initial socialisation and professional integration of young people into the workforce and into society. “Early contract dissolutions” (Huismann & Hippach-Schneider, 2023) are therefore considered problematic for the young people concerned, for companies and for society. Research on this topic has grown considerably over the last ten years (Böhn & Deutscher, 2022). This applies primarily to questions about the structural determinants of early contract dissolutions (Krötz & Deutscher, 2022; Kriesi et al., 2016), including the perspective of the apprentices themselves (Bosset et al., 2022) and the individual consequences for career development at an individual level (Stadler & Schmid; 2016, Schmid, 2010). Early contract dissolutions are a widely discussed topic internationally, including the associated conceptual and terminological differentiation (Cedefop, 2016; Huismann & Hippach-Schneider, 2023).

Although the political problematisation of this phenomenon seems to be subject to its own rationales, it was already in the 1970s attributed to function as a “thermometer for identifying existing strengths and weaknesses in vocational education and training” (Nigg & Gelb, 1979). In VET research, this period is regarded as the “decisive years” in the development of dual VET in particular (Bonoli & Gonon, 2023). During these years, VET had to respond to several key challenges, including meeting the very high demand for skilled workers and responding to new social expectations. The debates of the time focused on the need to put “all available reserves” to work and enable all “talents” to access higher-level education and training. In this context, early contract dissolutions, a phenomenon that has always existed in VET, take on renewed significance. To grasp this renewed significance, it is crucial to examine the structural development of early contract dissolutions and how they were referenced in contemporary discourse.

For this reason, this paper offers a new lens on the development of dual VET. First, the data and debates surrounding early contract dissolutions are used analytically as a “thermometer” to examine these “decisive years” for VET. To date, the historical development of early contract dissolutions has hardly been considered in VET research. Second, adopting a historical approach to the phenomenon of early contract dissolutions allows for a more nuanced perspective on today’s controversies surrounding their political, educational and economic significance. While existing studies have generated a rich body of knowledge on the definition, the background and the consequences of early contract dissolutions in VET, they rarely consider how their significance depends on changing historical expectations towards VET.

We are therefore asking two questions: (1) How have early contract dissolutions and the political debates surrounding them changed during the period of educational expansion in the 1960s and 1970s? (2) What does their renewed significance reveal about changing expectations of VET?

To answer these questions, this paper focuses on the development of initial VET in Switzerland in the 1960s and 1970ies. Although data on early contract dissolutions have been publicly available in individual cantons since the introduction of local VET legislation (during the first third of the 20th century), the content of this data has become more differentiated and comparable since the 1960s. This is due to a general expansion of data production in the education sector during this period, but it may also be related to the fact that this data has increasingly been understood as an indicator of VET “at risk”. We take a differentiated methodological approach to answer our questions. On the one hand, we reconstruct the phenomenon of early contract dissolution in different cantons using historical statistics. This allows us to compare the cantons in terms of both the phenomenon itself and how it changed over the period under analysis. On the other hand, we contextualise these data. We, therefore, examine the production, dissemination and public discussion of data (Ruoss, 2018) with relation to early contract dissolutions. Theoretically speaking, the purpose of creating visibility through statistics is threefold: firstly, to describe social facts; secondly, to trigger observation; and thirdly, to assign meaning (Köhler, 2008). To this end, we conduct an analysis of leading newspapers in the three language regions to examine the discourse they stimulate regarding the significance of early contract dissolutions for VET. The selected cantons reflect the three linguistic regions of Switzerland and are empirically relevant because they have published corresponding data over long periods of time. They also differ in terms of the importance they place on dual VET at upper secondary level (from high to low), as well as in the structure of their VET administration (Department of Industry and Commerce or Department of Education).

From a historical perspective, early contract dissolutions emerge as a remarkably stable statistical phenomenon. This applies to both the aggregate view and the comparison of the cantons under study with each other. However, improvements in statistical data in the 1960s and the 1970s and the new significance in debates on the functioning of VET explain the interest in focusing on this period. We show how the representation and discussion of the reasons for early contract dissolutions varied from canton to canton and how the interpretation of these reasons was a subject of ongoing debates in education policy. At the same time, we show how the social and political significance of contract dissolutions for the actors involved changed in this period. The new economic and social demands placed on VET tended to shift the overall responsibility for early contract dissolutions. While such interruptions were previously considered isolated, individual problems, they gradually took on systemic significance. This is where the idea of the “VET thermometer” emerges, which measures the system’s ability to mobilise all the “reserves” that the economy needed at the time and to promote the education and training of all the “talents”.

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