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Context: Vocational education and training (VET) has traditionally focused on providing learners with technical skills for the labour market. However, growing societal challenges – such as digital transformation and social polarisation – require a broader approach that includes transversal skills, including citizenship competences. Research shows that fostering these competences not only enhances employability but also supports active and responsible participation in civic life.

Approach: By drawing on examples from a number of European countries such as England, Norway, Poland, Scotland, and Sweden in this article, we aim to discuss the three key topics that we find particularly important from the perspective of the development of democratic citizenship in VET, namely: a) assessment, b) inclusion, and c) VET learners’ participation.

Findings: Designing the assessment of citizenship competences is shaped by the organisational structure of the vocational assessment system in any given country. Poland and Scotland represent two contrasting approaches. In Poland, VET assessment is highly centralised, with external agencies responsible for standardised examinations conducted at the end of the learning process. Scotland adopts a more decentralised model, with assessment integrated into ongoing learning and teachers or training providers playing a central role in designing and implementing assessments. Inclusion in VET goes beyond widening access; it requires ensuring that every learner – regardless of gender, migration background or socio-economic status – can see themselves as an active democratic agent. Sweden’s rotational workplace placements illustrate how carefully designed learning environments can turn inclusive rhetoric into practice, fostering empathy, solidarity and political inclusion. Learners’ participation may lead to empowerment and the development of active citizenship. This requires an approach that goes beyond individual practices in the VET school or in the workplace. Systemic and joint approach by all stakeholder groups is needed and participatory practices should be built in as a natural and integrated element across all VET programmes.

Conclusions: By focusing on assessment, inclusion and participation, we have shown that promoting the development of democratic citizenship competences is a multi-layered and multi-faceted process. It requires rethinking both the role of these competences in VET and the introduction of new solutions, methods and techniques. Inclusion plays a key role, and by creating inclusive learning environments that recognise the needs of diverse groups, VET as a system can promote civic engagement and democratic competences among VET learners. Alternative approaches may be necessary to strengthen the links between formal education and non-formal initiatives, as well as to ensure adequate resources. Comprehensive experience of VET learners’ participation should be a collaborative endeavour for all VET stakeholders - trainers, employers and VET learners. However, this area remains significantly under-researched, with few comprehensive studies specifically addressing VET. In this context, the Council of Europe’s work stands out, particularly through its launch of the Reference Framework of Competences for Democratic Culture (RFCDC) in VET project.

There are high hopes that young refugees will help to counter population decline in Sweden’s rural areas. However, there is a need to better understand the factors and processes that facilitate or hinder their persistent integration and continued presence (including further education and work preparation). This article therefore explores the prevailing refugee reception practices and their consequences during and after the major refugee wave in Sweden that started in 2015. This wave, caused by wars in Syria and Afghanistan, had a huge impact in Sweden’s rural areas. The analysis is based on interviews with local officials, school heads, teachers, and career guidance counsellors in various municipalities. The findings illuminate these groups’ understandings of requirements for effective, fruitful reception of young refugees, and how their reception can be organised to improve their preparation for further education and work. The results also reveal notable differences between rural areas (e.g. between smaller and larger rural municipalities), and suggest that young refugees’ prospects and likelihood of remaining in such areas can be enhanced by measures including incorporating multicultural and intercultural perspectives in staff training, and organisational adjustments to enhance local career learning and interculturalism.

This study explores the integration of migrants in education and the labour market from the perspectives of professionals working with young migrants in Swedish rural municipalities. It compares interview data referring to the situation during the refugee crisis in 2015 with data referring to the period 2019–2022. It addresses the organisation of teaching, how professionals talked about integration in relation to the local labour market and how integration-related practices and discourses developed from 2015 to 2022. The findings indicate a major change over time in the educational integration strategies and practices. Migrant children were mainly taught in separate preparatory classes in 2015, but by 2019–2022 there was a general aim to integrate them rapidly in regular classes. In terms of labour market integration there was also a discursive change. In 2015 the main hope was that the migrants’ reception would create short- and long-term jobs for the local population and contribute to the survival of local services and life. In contrast, in 2019–2022 the main expressed hope was that migrants would stay permanently and contribute productively to their new societies’ labour forces.

During the initial phase of the refugee wave in 2015 rural municipalities in Sweden were obliged for the first time to receive refugees. Some rural officials welcomed refugees in hopes that it would counter population declines and future staffing problems. Some officials also referred to rural areas as idylls for reception, well equipped for reception arguing that small places are better for integration. This raised placement issues, which varied widely among three identified categories of municipalities (tourist towns and/or sparsely populated areas, de/industrialised towns, and small villages). We explored these issues by interviewing respondents in 21 municipalities. We selected three municipalities to represent the three categories and analysed responses of our informants within them to obtain insights into their views of the refugees' reception and associated issues. For this we applied a Masseyian ‘sense of place’ and ‘power geometry’ theoretical framework. Wide variations among municipalities were reported. However, common themes included: a lack of relevant training initially; rapid establishment of organisational arrangements and competences; segregation in some municipalities due to placement in segregated housing (which raised informants' awareness of social class-based divisions); and changes in status or requirements for migrants to relocate (with very little warning) that severely impacted the refugees' transitions. The results clearly indicate needs for more long-term and robust policies to avoid problems associated with refugees' ‘liminal citizenship’ and weak power, with consequent impacts on their educational transitions and subsequent prospects.

Research topic: In this presentation, we analyse how and to what extent VET curricula and qualification requirements in Finland and Sweden at upper-secondary level include preparation for digital citizenship.

Theoretical framework: It has been argued that in a current form of digital capitalism, a division of learning has replaced the division of the labour as the core organising principle of society (Zuboff 2019). Crucial questions in this era are related to distribution of knowledge, and whether all individuals have equal opportunities to learn. Even if this might be an exaggeration, digital skills have nonetheless become a crucial part of citizenship competence. In this context, critical citizenship scholars (e.g. Isin & Ruppert, 2020) have emphasized the importance of not only a discussion on digital skills, but also to open up a discussion of the digital citizen as a political subject - capable of making digital rights claims - as a crucial viewpoint when defining digital citizenship. 

Methodology: There is little research on VET and digitalisation, in particular in the context of digital citizenship. Against this backdrop, this presentation is based on analysis of the curricula and qualification requirements of three different VET programmes in Sweden and Finland; (i) Vehicle and Transport (ii) Healthcare and (ii) Nature work (Naturbruk, Nature-based services). We examined (A) targeted learning outcomes and (B) 4-5 courses from the beginning of each program. Our analysis was guided by three questions: where, what and how digitalisation is mentioned and framed in curriculum documents. We seek to answer how and to what extent VET curriculum and qualification requirements in Finland and Sweden include preparation for digital citizenship and discuss what this implies for the ‘division of learning’ in society. We are also interested in how the “skills and competences discourse” - which has largely displaced a learning discourse and become a commonplace in VET - is positioned in relation to digitalisation. 

Expected results: Preliminary analyses of curriculum documents suggest that the division of labour has not been replaced by, but is intertwined with, a division of learning. Fostering digital citizenship skills (Isin & Ruppert, 2020), is not a goal of VET. Thus a “digital divide” seems to follow the pattern of an “academic-vocational divide” (Nylund, et al, 2018), reproducing the moral order, where an active citizenship is reserved for academically educated individuals. 

Relevance to Nordic Educational Research: This study addresses questions of relevance in all Nordic countries, and offers cross-cultural and comparative perspectives on contemporary VET curricula in two Nordic countries, with different upper-secondary education systems.     

This paper discusses how Bernsteinian concepts (‘pedagogic rights’, ‘discursive gaps’ and ‘pedagogic code’) from the field of sociology of education can be used as didactic tools to illuminate how different ways of organising teaching in VET has implications for citizenship preparation. The paper is based on results from a five-year research project investigating the extent and nature of learning processes that can be characterised as civic education in Swedish VET. Results from the project show how VET often contributes to social reproduction through provision of class-, gender-, and ethnicity-based access to knowledge with different powers to students. However, we also identified many variations in the VET-contexts studied. In the paper at hand, examples of when and how students got access to different types of knowledge through different ways of organising teaching, and how different ways of teaching prevented or promoted different types of questions with implications for the kind of citizenship preparation the students were offered, is discussed. Our hope is that these discussions contribute to a conversation on how to make a language accessible to VET-teachers that is helpful to problematise and plan their teaching to offer greater access to an active citizenship for students in vocational programmes.

Drawing from the work of PhD students in the “To Find Paths in a Time of Future Challenges” (FindPath) research school, the collection of articles offers an interdisciplinary perspective, incorporating historical, sociological, and pedagogical insights into educational transitions and career trajectories. This is a field which, with some exceptions, is still under-researched, not least because the education and labour market context of young people´s career decisions undergoes constant transformation, and school-to-work transitions and their institutional support are complex phenomena displaying large local variations. Theorizing educational transitions and career trajectories from gender, class, emotional, and career learning perspectives, the special collection offers essential findings to understand how young adults find their educational path in Scandinavian countries.