VET systems play a crucial role in equipping young people with labour‑market relevant skills, yet European countries differ in system design, participation patterns and outcomes (OECD, 2023). Research on VET policy transfer remains fragmented and dominated by single‑country studies with limited methodological diversity (Ciantar, 2025). The symposium responds to this gap through cross‑national mapping of VET transition and participation patterns and policy repertoires. 

This symposium brings together research teams from Denmark, Estonia, Croatia, Scotland, and Spain participating in the EU‑Horizon funded VETprep project. All papers begin with national VET policy analyses but extend their lens to a wider ecology of situations—including institutional practices, socio‑economic conditions, professional understandings, and young people’s lived experiences. 

Comparing VET systems is analytically demanding (Czycholl, 1971). As Steiner‑Khamsi (2010) has argued, the logics and purposes of comparison have shifted over time, and King (1965) already underscored that meaningful comparison must move beyond structural inventories towards an analysis of the ecology of situation. Recent comparative VET scholarship proposes multi‑dimensional frameworks that foreground labour‑market structures, governance arrangements, competence models, and educational logics (Clarke, Westerhuis & Winch, 2021). Work on VET policy transfer likewise shows how comparison is intertwined with processes of translation and contextual adaptation (Barabasch, Bohlinger & Wolf, 2026). These are complementary: whereas Steiner‑Khamsi’s work on travelling reforms highlights how policy ideas circulate and are recontextualised rather than simply copied (2023), multi‑dimensional VET frameworks help specify which system dimensions matter when such reforms meet national centexts. Our symposium adopts both vantage points: we anchor each paper in national policy analysis while tracing how policies are enacted, negotiated, and experienced within a broader ecologies of situation.  

Across the five countries, the symposium explores three shared dimensions: VET attractiveness, transitions into VET, and participation and retention. All teams used a common document‑analysis approach (Torraco, 2016), and a common coding scheme for identifying policy intentions, target groups, measures and available evidence. This enables both cross‑national comparability and sensitivity to national and regional particularities. Two papers address additionally the interconnected roles of social background and psychosocial factors in student transitions and educational expectations from a cross-national and cross-time perspective, tapping into possibilities of policy interventions for students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. 

While the shared framework creates a coherent foundation, each contribution adds a distinctive analytical angle. Denmark examines how national VET policy repertoires are translated and enacted across different organisational and pedagogical ecologies, showing how policy intentions materialise, shift, or dissolve as they move from policy texts into school and workplace practice. Scotland shows how the effectiveness of the most significant policy efforts of the Scottish Government to expand VET participation in the last fifteen years have been severely tamed down by the low public commitment and weak institutional coordination of its liberal skill regime. Estonia combines policy analysis with qualitative interviews, illuminating how vocational school staff and students in need of support perceive and enact support measures, with particular attention to vulnerability and student agency. Spain examines how recent VET policy reforms aimed at enhancing attractiveness, structuring transitions and promoting participation and inclusion are enacted and experienced by students. Combining national policy analysis with qualitative interviews, the paper explores how policy intentions are translated into educational trajectories. Croatia links policy analysis to OECD PISA data to investigate transitions, inequalities and aspiration patterns from a cross-national and cross-time perspective, widening the scope to populations of 15-year-olds within EU-28 perspective.  
 

Together, the contributions offer a multi‑layered picture of policymaking and policy enactment. Three themes cut across the papers: cross‑national convergence/divergence in policy solutions; the centrality of vulnerability and equity; and the alignment (or misalignment) between policy intentions and outcomes. 

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