The limits of reforming access to vocational qualifications: the slow expansion of recognition of prior learning (RPL) in Sweden and Switzerland

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyses the development and implementation of policies that aim at improving the ‘recognition of prior learning’ (RPL) in the vocational education and training (VET) systems of Sweden and Switzerland. It argues that the evolution of RPL policies and schemes needs to be analysed in relation to educational expansion, which creates pressure on educational policy makers to provide alternative forms of access to qualifications. It furthermore underlines that actors who have profited from the scarcity value of their educational qualifications are likely to oppose alternative forms of access that would devalue their qualifications through educational inflation. The article’s argument thus contrasts with those that attribute the slow expansion of RPL to either a lack of political will or epistemological constraints. Linking the growing political economic literature on skill formation with an Archerian perspective on educational change, the article also shows that, despite the statist and collective skill formation systems having some trends in common, the design and implementation of RPL has evolved differently in each.