Expansion of New Vocationalism and Realities of Labour Market: View from the Spanish periphery

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of the recent vocational education and training (VET) policy in Spain. The article will argue that new vocationalism has played an important role as a rhetorical strategy to support the modernisation discourse of the state in education and to hide deficiencies in the correspondence between education and the labour market. To show this, the article is structured in three sections. The first one briefly presents the particular characteristics of mass schooling in Spain. Some points of historical information are provided to highlight the simultaneous process of consolidation and crisis of mass schooling in Spain. It is argued that the State had to face the democratisation of the access to education in times of fiscal crisis and heterogeneous demands coming from different social sectors. This theoretical and historical framework is used to look at policy documents and academic materials that show the central role of 'new vocationalism' in official education discourses and its rhetorical function to legitimise education policy. The article argues that VET discourses and policies have played a significant role as a symbolic production resource for coping with shortcomings and contradictions. Finally, in the third section, qualitative and quantitative data are given to show both the real dynamics of the Spanish labour market and the specific logic of both the State's VET policy and the employers' discourses in shaping what they expect from the education system and the type of skills they ask for. It is argued that, although some of the discourses stress an accelerated change in the production process and in the work organisation forms, empirical evidence shows the inconsistency of these discourse when looking at labour market regulations and the rise of less qualified jobs in the Spanish economy.