The 1970s were in Switzerland a period of intense debate and far-reaching reform across the education system. German-speaking contemporary scholarship often refers to this phase as Bildungsexpansion, highlighting a brief window of “planning euphoria” during which even highly complex reforms could be adopted (Criblez 2001). Quantitatively, the expansion of upper secondary education is reflected in rising enrolments in both general education tracks and initial vocational education and training (VET), particularly the dual apprenticeship (Gonon 2016; 2018). Against the backdrop of the general debates surrounding this Bildungsexpansion, our contribution offers an in-depth analysis of two documents that played a significant role in shaping reform discussions, even though the plans for the future they advanced were implemented only partially and very unevenly across cantons (Bonoli & Vorpe 2022). The first is Vorschläge zur Verbesserung der Berufsbildung (“Proposals for Improving Vocational Education”), published in 1971 by the Education Commission of the Swiss Trade Union Federation. It called for a renewal of dual apprenticeship, notably through a strengthened role for vocational schools – an orientation largely set aside in national VET policy during the 1970s (Bonoli & Gonon 2023). The second is Mittelschule für Morgen (“The Secondary School of Tomorrow”), commissioned in 1972 by the Swiss Conference of Cantonal Ministers of Education. It proposed rethinking lower and upper secondary levels in order to address the new economic and social demands. Here again, contemporary implementation remained limited (EDK 1996). However, it would be too simplistic to conclude that these two texts played only a minor role in the development of the Swiss education system. Read from a fifty-year distance, several ideas formulated in these proposals found their way into today’s institutional arrangements. The “delayed success” of these two documents will prompt us to examine the socio-political, economic and pedagogical contextual conditions that contributed to the rejection of specific reform proposals in the 1970s , and how shifts in these conditions in subsequent decades facilitated the eventual adoption of analogous measures. Drawing on a larger research project on the evolution of the Swiss educational system in the 1970s, the paper analyses socio-politically driven reform intentions – particularly democratisation and equality-of-opportunity arguments – and traces how these ambitions interacted across general education and initial VET. By focusing on influential but only partially realised reform visions, the study sheds light on how educational ideas were formulated, circulated, were contested, and were translated into policy in a strongly federalised system.

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