While there are common approaches for classifying initial vocational education and training (IVET)-systems, cross-country comparative research struggles with the variation within national systems (Tessaring 1999, Saar and Ure, forthcoming). In several countries, programmes for various occupational fields co-exists and differ widely in popularity, prestige, learning opportunities, further educational choice and career prospects. It is the composition out of attractive and less attractive VET opportunities defining a country’s specific VET system.

The paper aims to contribute to cross-country comparison of VET systems, proposing a new way for representing countries’ VET architecture and exploring the institutional effects of hierarchical educational spaces on the motivation and career aspiration of VET students. The ways how VET programmes are positioned against each other as well as how programmes enjoy or lack a positive identity beyond their relative position in such a hierarchical space are hypothesized as decisive for VET systems’ institutional effects on their student populations.

Based on a cross-country comparative study among approx. 17 year old VET students (see http://www.7eu-vet.org/) and supplemented by administrative data, the paper propose a new, more detailed hierarchical representation of seven countries’ VET systems (Austria, Greece, Germany, Slovenia, Lativa, Lithuania, England). Programmes are classified by both their selectivity and the occupational careers they prepare for. The hierarchical representation is used to understand differences’ between students’ motivation to continue their educational career after finishing their current programme in various programmes.

Available VET system typologies based on ISECD level do neither consider the selectivity (Who has access? How many drop out?), nor the short and medium career prospects attached to a particular VET programme. However, selectivity and career opportunities typically available – the ‘span of qualification’ (Maurice et. al. 1980) – provide a way to detect salient hierarchies between VET programmes and to represent the differences in likely outcomes of VET systems between countries. Moreover, overall country systems representations are compared to each other and linked to existing typologies for classifying VET systems, (Greinert 2005, Busemeyer et. al. 2012).

The paper builds on the framework of organisational institutionalism (Greenwood et. al. 2008) and related institutional approaches to schooling. VET programmes and VET systems – beyond more structural features – could be therefore analysed by their ‘social charter’ (Meyer 1970) and their more generous or more restricted promises they make beyond any individual characteristics of participants and their learning outcomes. Institutionalised perceptions of ambitions feasible are expected to be of great impact for what is actually going on in school: students’ career outlooks potentially imprint their learning behaviour, their future plans and  dreams, they live for. VET students learning behaviour, their inclination to finish programmes or to drop out, but also intention for continuing the education, are likely to reflect what opportunities’ programmes typically open up. Learning achieved and institutional promises are thereby closely linked.

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