Research into young people’s transitions to work and adulthood have provided important insights into the comparative impact of different forms of vocational education across Europe. Such comparisons have tended to centre on single points of transition within each jurisdiction, and especially on the balance of provision between schools and the workplace (Raffe 2014; Ryan 2001) and such contextual factors as the relationships between economies and welfare states in different countries (Walther et al. 2006). These national factors mediate the way that young people’s social origins and early life experiences shape their whole life-course, reflecting inequalities of class, ethnicity and gender (Ecclestone et al. 2010). However, these comparisons, salient in educational research, have generally been aggregated in largely quantitative and mixed-methods studies. Analysis of quantitative or mixed-methods data can capture some of the complexities of transition where the returns to different qualifications can be analysed (Cavaglia, McNally & Ventura, 2020; Dearden et al. 2000; Mcintosh & Morris 2021). These can indicate with some clarity the relative ease or difficult with which young people enter the workforce in different countries; but such approaches are less effective in showing how different national systems affect VET participants’ life prospects: not only their future productivity and promotions but their personal health, happiness and contributions to community and citizenship. 

This paper by contrast reports a study that makes important contributions to understanding the changing nature of these processes in recent years. Firstly, it demonstrates how the forces that affect transitions shape the whole life-course by drawing on biographical accounts that are informed by reflections on participants’ lives. These accounts are taken from data collected for the international research project BioDataBase, a joint project of the the University of Applied Labour Studies, Germany, the University of Derby, UK and the University of Innsbruck, Austria, which is contributing transcribed biographies of vocational education students lives to an open, transnational repository of qualitative social science data. The project adopts a biographical and subject-oriented perspective that examine the dynamic interplay between structural conditions and individual agency, enabling individuals to actively construct their biographies within this context (Harney & Ebbert, 2006; Wengraf, 2001). 

In this paper, we use data collected in England to show how changing patterns of transition and specific shifts in education policy are reflected in the autobiographical reconstructions and reflections of individuals. By locating participants’ extended transitions and trajectories not only within not only broader patterns of social and historical change but within changing education and skills policies, we seek to understand both national continuities and the dynamic nature of different national transition systems and processes through the multiple temporalities (Lingard, 2021) of participants’ lives and policy change. Whilst this approach locates our study within traditions of life history and other forms of research aiming to provide adequate representation of personal accounts within structural and historical context (Chase 2018; Goodson/Sikes 2001) and extends these traditions into the vocational sphere, it also draws on the multiple conceptualisations of policy change that affect contemporary accounts of policy research (Ozga, 2021; Warren, 2025). This approach enables us to go beyond established constructions of periodicity, that tend to align to governmental changes and avowed policy turns: instead, we note the different ways in which neoliberalism has unfolded over the vocational landscape of England during the last half-century and discover how these changes have played out in the lives of individual former vocational education students. We argue that these changes, compared to those in countries where VET has been generally (by no means entirely) stable over the last half-century, have a distinctive role in changing the whole life-course of individuals. 

The study described forms part of a wider project aiming to capture the life experiences of participants who had undertaken vocational studies in Germany, England and Austria, contributing their accounts to a social science database. The project team used biographical narrative interpretive methodology (BNIM, Wengraf, 2001), using a Single Question aimed at Inducing Narrative (SQUIN) to ensure that no prompts or probes are required in generating initial narratives, enabling participants to choose their own emphasis. Notes based on key or cue phrases that emerge in the story (Ross & Moore, 2016) formed the basis of ‘sub session 2’ interviews, which Wengraf (2001) refers to as Particular Incident Narratives (PINS), probing the interviewee for more narrative on selected topics drawn from the original account, with these selections justified to the whole team. The UK data provided a valuable opportunity to show how patterns of transition and specific education policies have changed compared to some other European countries, examining how these are reflected in the autobiographical reconstructions and reflections of individuals. The data was collected from 20 participants selected because of the place of VET in their lives, constituting examples of the system’s successes rather than representing all VET students but are broadly representative of the vocational areas, gender and ethnicity of students in this sector. Their participation was based on informed consent, approved by university ethics procedure. Drawing on a century-old tradition connecting the lives of individuals to broader patterns of social structure and its historical evolution (Mills 1959; Thomas/Znaniecki 1918-20), the next phase connected their accounts to broader personal and social contexts, beginning with the chronological order of life events necessary at this BNIM phase, introducing a sequential element that may be absent from the narrative (Okoko et al., 2023). In transforming the BNIM data into life history research, we began by seeking understandings of the pathways that individuals followed during different historical and cultural periods, ‘reconstruct[ing] tacit knowledge and action orientations, which are partly unconscious’ (Hollstein 2019). Whilst policymakers and some policy researchers simply attribute changes in policy to the decisions of successive governments, alternative patterns are visible in the progress of neoliberalism: Ainley (1993) identified four major breakpoints between 1944 and 1988. We extended and modified this pattern and, through a shared review of the data allocated our accounts not simply on their chronological locations but on the way these matched overlapping patterns of historical data.

Taken together, the biographies of our participants reflect the changing patterns of transition and shifts in education policy, the eldest leaving school at the end of the 1960s, the youngest in the early 2010s. From 1975, when Labour’s Manpower Services Commission first developed training schemes in response to the international recession, our participants now in their 50s and 60s left school at 16 ill-prepared for a world where entry into vocational education took the form of training largely separated from the limited employment opportunities of the time. These minimal skills enabled them to negotiate deregulated labour markets after the 1980s and acquire a degree of stability, even personal wealth. Darker sides of their accounts include psychic troubles and the passing mentions of others who have not 'done any good’ (William, l.41). A second breakpoint took place from the new millenium, partly in support of the Labour government’s drive to increase the qualifications of both young people and the workforce (Wolf et al. 2006). Participation by 16-17-year-olds in General, FE tertiary and specialist colleges, which had fallen below 30% by the year 2000, recovered to over 35% by 2010 (UK government, 2026). This turn to qualifications rewarded institutions for the number of qualifications their students amassed, leading to a proliferation of low-value additional certification that Wolf et al. (2006) argued were of questionable exchange value, although our participants offered positive accounts of a route often regarded with caution by those who have only experienced general education. Finally, Conservative-led governments over the years 2010-2024 developed policies that allow families with the networks and social capital to access advantageous work opportunities, preparing a more stratifying phase (Esmond & Atkins, 2022) that supports the polarisation of employment noted by economists (Goos and Manning 2007). This divide within vocational settings already emerges in our data.

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