In the eyes of many European governments, vocational education and training (VET) has become a strategic policy domain. It is seen as a central element in a strategy to enhance the competitiveness of the economy. A general upgrading of skills should be the answer to the competition from low-wage countries in a globalising economy (Crouch et al, 1999). At the same time VET is considered the best way to integrate young people into the labour market. In this way it has also become an important element of policy to prevent marginalisation and guarantee citizenship for young people. Ideologically this policy is often supported by arguments from human capital theory, which has become quite popular in most European centres of government. In this way the lack of appropriate skills is held responsible for many of the problems young people encounter when entering the labour market. This fits in well with the individualising tendencies in European youth policy described by Reiter and Craig in Chapter One that make young people themselves accountable for successful integration into the labour market and citizenship conditional upon their own efforts.

One such European country that has spent much effort in improving its VET system is the Netherlands. Two decades of debate and experiments led in the mid-1990s to a new law on vocational education. This introduced a new regime by integrating public vocational education with apprenticeship training, and by giving employers’ associations and trade unions a formal role in determining the standards of competence and vocational profiles. This chapter, which is intended as a kind of exemplary case study, will describe this reform of vocational education and assess its consequences for the position of young people in the labour market. It will do so from a comparative perspective, by making use of some recent comparative studies of different VET systems in Europe and of the transition from school to work in different European countries.

In the first instance these studies will be discussed with an emphasis on institutional differences in the way VET systems are organised. The next part introduces the debate on vocational education in the Netherlands.