Austria’s vocational education and training system displays a unique structure that joins a strong dual apprenticeship system with a robust full-time school-based VET. A noteworthy part are the VET colleges which provide professional qualifications and the examination that gives access to university studies. This part of the system has grown particularly strong during the last decades, so that more young people gain the right for university access through these VET colleges than through the traditional academic stream (gymnasium). The purpose of the paper is to understand the longer term development of this system, its current challenges and the responses by the main actors.

The Austrian VET system shows a very high degree of differentiation and complexity that is very difficult to oversee and to govern. Notwithstanding the various actors are giving quite positive evaluations of the system. The involvement of interest groups in the VET system is quite strong, whereas the involvement of the government is quite scattered to different administrations. A gap is to be seen between the apprenticeship system and the school based system, with the social partners being strongly involved into the governance of apprenticeship, under auspices of the Ministry for Economic Affairs, whereas the school based part is governed bureaucratically by the Ministry of Education.

The analysis shows that the roots of this development go back to the 18th and 19th century, when a system of school based VET institutions were built as a modernising element alongside the already existing apprenticeship, the latter having been completely in the hands of the employers. The systems have developed very much separately, and we have today a system that has not been 'designed' but has evolved through certain specific changes that had partly unintended consequences.

The development of a strong system of social partnership after world war 2 has reinforced the development of apprenticeship. In the 1960s the school based VET system has been formally integrated into the Austrian school legislation framework, and in the beginning of the 1970s the then Social Democratic Government decided to expand the VET colleges as an alternative to the (bourgeois) Academic Upper Secondary School. From the 1970s the VET colleges expanded strongly and this has brought apprenticeship into a situation where it has difficulties to compete for the able young people. Partly due to demographic developments, partly due to economic downturns there were also problems on the apprenticeship market, which were countered by strong policy measures which finally resulted in a kind of institutional apprenticeship. In parallel an initiative was started to provide the maturity examination that still entitles to university access also to apprentices beneath their training in order to improve their position. However, currently the regulations of access to university have come under discussion, so that the conditions might change again.

In sum we can see that the system has changed its face very significantly without having been planned by someone in this way.

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