International typologies of vocational education invariably cast England in the role of a narrow, market-led vocationalism, derived by a direct path from its nineteenth century origins (Greinert 2010). Yet such characterisation overlooks the educational struggles that shaped Britain’s further education and skills sector during the ‘Long 1960s’ and ‘Long 1970s’, with their succeeding waves of liberalisation and vocationalisation. In this paper, we review the significance of this contestation for the conceptualisation of vocational provision in English-speaking countries. The Long 1960s are widely noted for the introduction of ‘liberal’ or ‘general’ studies as a mandatory, more cultural complement to the curriculum of technical colleges. The aims, curriculum and staffing of this provision was at most loosely connected to the mainstream technical curriculum. Proposals to integrate these activities with the technical mainstream included the 1969 Haselgrave Report (Bailey & Unwin 2008). This period is still celebrated as an example of an alternative imagining of vocational education (Huddleston & Unwin 2023; Patel 2024; Simmonds 2016) but also reflects wider liberalising tendencies with the post-school ‘further education’ sector. By the 1980s, these developments had been decisively reversed. Greater policy emphasis on the economic aims of education centred the discussion around Haselgrave on employer control of vocational education (e.g. Nature 1970). Outcomes-based education and competency-based assessment dominated the full-time provision for the young unemployed that exploded during the collapse of manufacturing employment in the late 1970s and 1980s. The removal of colleges from local government control to become ‘further education corporations’ in 1992 crowned linked processes of marketisation and vocationalisation. These two periods can be seen as alternative imaginings of the sector that go far beyond mere changes of government, notwithstanding the election of Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. They form part of broader educational developments in Britain, including comprehensive schooling and the creation of polytechnics as an alternative higher education route during the 1960s and the imposition of a neoliberal order throughout the UK’s public sector. The ‘new vocationalism’ of colleges, which also affected schooling, drew on much older traditions of narrow vocationalism, whilst sustaining a strong academic-vocational divide (Hickox & Moore 1995). These findings suggest that a static understanding of vocationalism, reinforcing the notion that there is no alternative to competency-based training for the majority of young people on vocational pathways, understates the possibilities of alternative futures and broader conceptualisations of education on vocational pathways in England and other English-speaking countries.

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