This paper draws on a small case study of pre- and in-service VET trainee teachers from a university in the north of England.  It explores trainee teachers’ understanding of wellbeing and health, addressing the way these relate to professionalism. VET teacher training (VETT) in England has only recently become mandatory and tends to be generic rather than focused upon specific vocational or subject specific pedagogies. This sets it apart from that found in much of Europe. In contrast with European VETT, English VETT has only recently been ‘professionalised’ with qualified teacher status becoming a requirement in 2001 (CEDEFOP 2006; Thompson and Robinson 2008). It tends to be focused upon the development of a generic pedagogy. There has however been some attempt by the English policy makers to ensure that VETT addresses subject specific pedagogies (Ofsted, 2003; Skills Commission, 2010) but this is lodged within a generic framework. In English VETT the salience of work process knowledge as well as that derived from practical occupational experience (Bauer and Przygodda, 2003) tends to be played down, with the exception of analyses that address work place learning (Griffiths and Guile, 2003; Fuller and Unwin, 2003). However, these analyses are rather more focused upon learning in the workplace than directly with teacher training.    

The paper explores the socio-economic and policy context within which the study is set. It draws out the demands that are placed upon those working in the sector as well as the range of agendas trainees are to address. These encompass the pursuit of competitiveness (DfES, 2005a) through to the health and wellbeing of learners (DfES, 2005b). There is an affinity between these demands and European developments that presage broader and more expansive conceptualisations of VET professional practice, with Niemeyer’s (2010) work being a case in point. She has discussed changes to VET in the light of the decline of employee security in an increasingly ‘flexible’ German labour market which has resulted in broader less vocationally specific understandings of professional practice.

Trainees’ orientations to care as well as their constructions of learners are analysed. From trainee accounts we can locate two contradictory but overlapping discourses, one that constructs learners as in need of care and support, whilst the other utilises a ‘pathological’ deficit model of learners. Paradoxically trainees can hold these contradictory discourses simultaneously. This analysis is set within a discussion of the labour process and models of professionalism within which trainees and VET teachers are located. In terms of the labour process as well as models of professionalism there is dynamic towards more expansive constructions. The performative context in which this labour process is placed is one that calls for ‘more for less’ - an intensification of labour (Avis, 2003). The professional context echoes the performative,  drawing upon models of ‘good’ practice that extend beyond narrow conceptualisations of ‘classroom’ practice, with the emotional costs that this involves. Trainee understandings of professionalism will be compared to the learning (Guile and Lucas, 1999) and dual professional (Robson 1998).   

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