Across Europe, the purposes of general vocational education have widened over the past 30 years to encompass a widening array of personal, social, employment-related and educational goals.  This trend has been especially prominent in the British education and training system, where policy and practice have been subjected to repeated changes and radical overhauls to curriculum content, assessment, quality assurance and regulation.

The scale and pace of these changes have led to the steady erosion of clear meanings of ‘vocational’ knowledge, a large expansion in the range of organisations and groups with a stake in the design, implementation and regulation of qualifications, and a blurring of distinctions between the goals, content and outcomes of pre-vocational preparation, general vocational education, work-related learning and work-based training (see Bathmaker et al 2010).    

One effect is that general vocational education qualifications in Britain encompass a widening array of ‘life and social skills’, general work-related dispositions, positive attitudes to ‘learning’, ‘learning to learn’, alongside subject-based constructions of knowledge.  Although the erosion of knowledge takes particular forms in the British system, it reflects a broader crisis of knowledge, evident in growing numbers of education systems and reflected in scepticism about the authenticity and legitimacy of traditional forms of subject knowledge, especially in relation to generic life, work  and social skills (see Young 2008, 2010, Ecclestone 2010b).  In addition, repeated overhauls to qualifications have created complicated, confusing and prescriptive arrangements for design, and lack of clarity about which stakeholders have a legitimate role and necessary expertise. 

This paper focuses on how these features affect teachers’ constructions of knowledge, their interpretations of knowledge in official specifications of learning outcomes, course content and assessment criteria, and their translation of these into everyday teaching and assessment methods.  It draws on data from a project that explores the roles of stakeholders in defining knowledge and the ways in which teachers in 12 different sites, in three subject areas, interpret these definitions at two different levels of progression (Bathmaker et al 2010b).  The paper builds on, and extends insights from earlier studies that used a socio-cultural theoretical framework to evaluate the impact of policy on the ‘learning and assessment cultures’ of British tertiary education (see Journal of Vocational Education 2004, James and Biesta 2006, Ecclestone 2010), and relates to earlier work that compared the design, content and pedagogy of vocational education in Finland and Britain ( Ecclestone and Rakkolainen 2005). The paper explores the following questions:

·        What is the purpose and content of ‘knowledge’ in the English general vocational education system at different levels?

·        Who are legitimate stakeholders in defining and regulating that knowledge, and what broad constructions of knowledge do they promote?

·        How do teachers at levels 2 and 3 (the end of compulsory schooling, and advanced education 16-19 respectively) construct knowledge and translate those constructions into everyday teaching and assessment practices?

·        How can we enhance teachers’ teachers’ constructions of knowledge in everyday practice?

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