Christian Helms Jørgensen, associate professor Sept 8.

2008
Department of Psychology & Educational Studies
Roskilde University
Postbox 260 Phone 0045 46742923
DK-4000 Roskilde Email: cjhj@ruc.dk
Denmark http://www.ruc.dk/inst10/

Draft paper for VET-NET at ECER 2008 Main Conference, 10 - 12 Sept. 2008 in Göteborg

Paradoxes of planning in vocational education and training

Introduction
A central quality of planning is that it assumes that a society or a social community can create a
common will to guide its achievement of a wanted future (Gleeson 2000). This basically modernist
assumption is a guiding interest of this paper where I will explore educational planning of VET
based on past and present practice VET in Denmark.
Educational planning in a Durkheimian sense is essential for society’s ability to recreate itself
according to its own ideals by the shaping of its coming generations (Durkheim 1907/2006). In the
age of life long learning this also applies to the shaping of society by the enlightenment of its older
generations. Planning is essential for accomplishing shared goals of a future society by educating its
inhabitants today. Yet the relevance and significance of educational planning seems to have faded
over the past decades. The concept of planning has been replaced by terms like policies and
strategies (Harris 2007).
This is a first paradox of planning: On the one hand the current challenges of ‘risk society’ require
comprehensive planning to avoid the unintended and threatening consequences of mans earlier
efforts to control the social resources and exploit nature (global heating, cultural polarisation and
capitalist globalisation). But on the other hand planning seems to have become obsolete with the
neo-liberal turn in politics and the post-modern turn in planning theory (Allmendinger 2002).
Instead concepts like management of education and governance of education have taken over.
These concepts though are lacking the above mentioned ‘utopian’ aspirations of planning and have
replaced it with a more technocratic interest. That is why I find it valuable to explore the possibility
of educational planning (Jørgensen 2006).
It will be attempted in this paper first by exploring the general shift in educational planning in VET
in Denmark over the last 50 years from tradition based planning over centralised state based
planning to the current decentralised and market based planning. Secondly the paper examines
current conceptions of planning of vocational education and training based on research in education
and training schemes in the Danish manufacturing industry. The result of this exploration is in the
final part discussed in relation to the development in planning theory. First I will outline three main
historical phases of educational planning in relation to the Danish VET system.

Tradition based planning

The VET system in Denmark grew out of the pre-capitalist guilds and apprenticeships and its
development has many parallels historically to the German Dual System (Greinert 1998; Thelen
2004). The normal length of the educations is 3-4 years and two thirds of the time is spent in
 2

workplace training. The apprentices have status as employees and their salaries and working
conditions are regulated by general agreements between the labour market organisations.
Before the Second World War it is hard in Denmark to find indications of planning of VET that
systematically try to link the development of the educational programmes to forecasts of the future
labour market demands or of other social changes (Juul 2005). The way the VET system was
developed can be described as tradition based planning, as it was primarily based on projections of
inherited practices and customs. It was more backward looking than actively trying to influence the
future.
The agents responsible for the development of VET were the organisations on the labour market in
each industry or trade. A national trade committee for each industry was by law in 1937 given the
responsibility to supervise and control the VET programme of that industry, according to the so
called ‘vocational autonomy’ (se Thelen for udtryk). The degree of formalisation of the educations
was low and school based learning in most trades took place in the form of evening classes. The
curricula of the VET programmes were mainly defined by the actual work tasks in the workshops
and by the craft traditions among the skilled workers who took care of the training.
The trade unions and the employers’ organisations did in some industries agree on the number of
apprentices (quotas) to be trained in the coming two year period in connection with concluding the
general agreements. It was considered a common interest to limit the access to the trades in order to
maintain the quality of the training. The employers were interested in limiting unfair competition by
other employers use of apprentices solely as cheap labour and the unions were interested in limiting
the internal competition and the unemployment in the trade. Even though the Danish labour market
from 1899 had strong centralised national organisations on both sides with a right to conclude
general agreements on behalf of their member organisations, the regulation of apprenticeship was
left mainly to the individual unions of the skilled workers and their counterparts on the employer
side.
The tradition based planning of this period thus mainly consisted in projecting the past into the
future and in a gradual adaptation of inherited practices to the changes that had already occurred.
But as the pace of social and technological changes rose in the post-war boom, there was a growing
demand for a more forward looking and wide-ranging planning and for a formalisation of the
prevailing tacit forms of knowledge in VET.

Comprehensive state based planning

The second period with comprehensive centralised educational planning started after the Second
World War and followed the rapid industrialisation, the growth of the welfare state and the
expansion of education. There was a political concern to make VET contribute to the integration of
the large youth cohorts that entered the labour market in the mid 1950ies. At the same time VET
was to contribute to the industrial modernisation of the Danish small scale and craft based
production as the protection of the national market was gradually lifted.
The development of the VET system was drawn into a new form of comprehensive and centralised
planning. Concurrently the centre of planning shifted from the trade and industry level to the state
level, but still in close collaboration with the labour market organisations. In Denmark and the other
Scandinavian countries this was facilitated by the alliance between the Socialdemocratic parties that
were dominating in governments at the time and the labour movement.
In the 1960-70ies social planning in general was based on a belief in the ability of the state to
manage a continued economic growth and secure social stability and progress. Especially the
planning of education acquired a central role in this political regime for a number of reasons. First
after the ‘Sputnik chock’ education was considered a central means in the ‘system competition’
 3

between East and West. Even though this competition was conceived of in terms of ‘free market
economies’ against ‘state planned economies’, there was a general support of the idea of state
planning in the West. According to the commonly accepted convergence theories the challenges of
modernisation to governments were considered be the same across the systems, and so also many of
the means to handle them (Streeck 2006). Secondly with the introduction of Human Capital theory
education was given a key role in a scientific and technological modernisation of production.
Thirdly especially for the Social Democrats who dominated in governments in the Nordic countries
in this period, the opening up of access to education for all was seen as a way to achieve greater
social equality and democratisation of society (Telhaug a.o. 2004).
This was the background for the advent of the first phase of centralised and instrumental planning
rationality of the 1960ies. For VET this had three consequences. First school based education under
state control was expanded. By law from 1956 the day school was introduced in all vocational
educations. This was meant to secure the quality of the educations even when the number of
training places was expanded to absorb the large youth cohorts. Secondly in the 1960ies there was a
growing specialisation in the training programmes in order to raise the number of training places
and as a response to the growing Taylorisation of production. Thirdly in some programmes, like the
metal trades, the informal, local and tradition based educational planning was replaced with a
functionalist type of centrally defined and standardised detailed planning of the curricula (Juul
2008).
This time of high modernity was characterised by a positivist faith in neutral experts and scientific
knowledge to guide social planning. The content of education was determined by skills assessment
studies carried out through detailed analysis of work processes and the skills requirements of new
technology. The number of students in the different educational programmes was defined through
forecasts of trends in demography, markets and technologies. In the 1970ies this planning paradigm
reached a peak in Denmark with a comprehensive plan for the development of the educational
system on a ten year term (the ‘U90’) and with proposals to establish a ‘super ministry’ of planning
to coordinate the planning by sector and ensure the intended rational development of society.

The crisis of centralised planning

From the late 1970ies this type of planning ran into a severe crisis, because some of its inherent
weaknesses became visible, and because some of its preconditions broke down. First of all the
economic stability of the Fordist era was replaced by successive crises and insecurity. Old industries
suddenly collapsed, the growth of the public sector was halted and many of the young people, who
had believed in the value of education, found themselves unemployed. Consequently the credibility
of state based planning and the trust in the advantages of continued educational expansion
disappeared. Secondly the aura of neutrality of technocratic planning had been eroded in the
previous period, as educational planning had become highly politicised. From the left wing this type
of planning was criticized for serving interests of capital and for being based on an idea of
adaptation of education to the demands of business. From the right wing it was criticized for
supporting the development of a meritocracy and for expressing the interests of a privileged state
bureaucracy that was financed by raising the taxes.
Thus planning based on centrally defined directions for practice ran into some of the same problems
that faced the detailed control of Taylorism. It led to alienation of the people who were subjected to
planning, as they in this paradigm of planning were conceived of as standardised objects of
bureaucratic control and not as autonomous and reflective individuals (Antikainen 1990). The key
 4

procedures of educational planning were forecasts and analyses of skills requirement using ‘skills
gab analyses’. They were in essence based on a deficit – not a resource - approach to skills – even if
they were formulated in a Human Resource language. Their interest was to identify the skills that
the present or the future employees were lacking in order to operate the new technology and work
in new types of work organisation.
They conceived of the employees mostly as functional units or ‘work machines’ to be upgraded to
fit the changing demands of business. In addition the analytical approach of skills assessments had a
focus on separate work tasks and thus missed the general and personal skills that related to the
employee’s assessment and handling of the overall work situation. Consequently the educational
programmes were often times out of touch with the personal experiences and subjective interests of
the students and employees.
Furthermore the idea of giving prescriptions for the specific technical skills to be transmitted in the
educational programmes were challenged by the rapid change of skills demands and the growing
focus on generic, soft and personal skills. Educational planning to secure the right skills for
business could no longer be achieved through analysis of the skills requirements of technologies
and organisations, since these analyses were overtaken by the still more rapid and unpredictable
changes in business practices. Before the skills assessments had been finished, the educational
programmes been revised and the students had been trained, they had often become outdated.

The paradox of this paradigm of educational planning was that it intended to be politically neutral
and based on scientific knowledge that was guaranteed by experts and professional planners, but it
was dismissed as serving special and private interests. It intended to contribute to social equity and
democratisation, but was discarded for producing new kinds of meritocratic social inequality and
for promoting a rule of experts and professional planners who refused to recognize the needs and
knowledge of the people they were planning for. As a result of this crisis the centralised and goal
rational planning lost not only much of its social and political legitimacy but also its ability to
produce the desired results: reliable forecast to guide educational planning. Instead state based
educational planning became a politicised and contested terrain, which was made responsible for
the skills mismatch on the labour market and the missing employability of many of the newly
educated. It is a paradox that at a time when education and knowledge were being nominated as the
keys to competitiveness in the global market, the state based planning of this vital asset was being
discarded.

The shift to market based planning of education

An additional reason for the discrediting of centralised state planning was that it was associated
with a continued growth in public spending, rising taxes and an overgrown bureaucracy in the
public sector. From the early 1980ies this paved the way for a neoliberal political turn that
significantly changed the planning paradigm in three ways: from plans focussing on input to plans
focussing on output; from a discourse of equality and emancipation to a discourse of efficiency and
employability and from centralised state based to decentralised market based planning (Jørgensen
2006).
It might seem to be a contradiction in terms to talk of ‘market based planning’ as markets and plans
historically have been conceived of as opposite ways of regulating societies and coordinating social
interaction. Actually in most of the post-war period this contradiction constituted a main
antagonism between the two competing systems of the Cold War. Yet Denmark and the other Nordic
countries demonstrate that state based planning and market economies can be combined in a
 5

‘negociated economy’ (Amin & Thomas 1996). And even in the heartlands of ‘free market
economies’ much of the social and economic development is planned, not by public authorities
under democratic control, but by the agents of the market especially the strategic planning of large
corporations.
The main characteristics of market based planning are that it is atomistic, fragmented and
decentralised. It abandons the comprehensive planning and leaves the planning to many different
agents relating to each other in a market. While state based educational planning was based on some
kind of democratic process of decision-making, the planning by the agents of the market is decided
on primarily by the managers of businesses and educational institutions and by fragmented
‘customers’ or ‘consumers’ of education and training.

In the field of VET the liberalist Danish government that took over in the 1980ies, launched a
political reform program that announced increased market governance with more choices and a new
form of management by goals and guidelines instead of management by detailed regulation. In
addition there was an increased attention to the employability of educations and their accordance
with the requirements of business (Undervisningsministeriet 1990). The reform in 1990 brought
about a decentralisation to the level of educational institutions that were to compete for students on
an educational market. In addition the stakeholders on the local labour market were to have more
influence on the development of the colleges. Generally their funding remained public, but it
became closely dependent on their performance and efficiency. In addition the funding was cut
systematically every year in expectation of constant increases in productivity.

The fate of market based planning in VET

The reform of the Dual VET system in year 2000 brought about a further decentralisation to the
individual level. The organisation of the VET programmes were individualised and every student
were required to make a ‘personal educational plan’ in accordance with their individual interests
and goals. A new motto in VET was that the individual student should be assigned the responsibility
for their individual learning.
Two types of arguments were put forward for this reform. One argument for this reform was based
on the neo-liberal discourse of individual freedom, rolling back of the state, deregulation of
institutions and the instalment of the students as users (or even customers or consumers) of
education. Another argument for the reform was inclusion, since the tailoring of education to
individual needs was supposed to make room for what was seen as an increased diversity among the
youth. A concept of a ‘new youth’ that originated in youth research (Illeris 2003) had gained ground
among politicians and in the community of VET managers. The concept implied that a radical
individualisation had taken place among young people and this gave additional arguments for a
drastic individualisation of educational planning. With a more flexible and modularised structure
the programmes were expected to be able to adjust better to the divergent interests of the
individualised students and thus increase retention.

Developments since the reform have not fulfilled these expectations as drop out rates have not
decreased, but increased noticeably. In 2006 only half of the vocational students complete the
educational program that they have begun, and this has become a major political concern, since it is
a central political goal to make 85% of all young people to complete a higher secondary education
in 2010. One of the reasons for the growing problems of retention in VET is that the
individualisation of the programmes has weakened the social learning environments in the colleges.
 6

The personal educational plans do favour the most goal-oriented and ambitious of the students who
can navigate independently inside the new flexible framework. But a large group of students, who
are less self-confident and more uncertain about their interests and future, have less structure, less
institutional guidance and less social community that they can hold on to. A majority of these
students come from a family background with weak traditions for participating in education, and
many of them are ethnic minorities. They have great problems in handling the individual
responsibility for the planning, learning and completion of the education.
It is a paradox that the reason for the shift to market based and individualised planning was that it
would be more inclusive, but it has produced more exclusion. It was among other things meant to
weaken the dominance of the educated middle class in the educational system, but it seems to have
strengthened the position of young people who are well acquainted with education and who can
handle the many choices in the system and navigate on the educational market.

Another reason for the shift to market based planning was that it was expected to increase the
employability of the students and support a shift from employment in the public sector to
employment in the private sector. The neo-liberalist ideology assumed that students’ choices of
education were made by individuals rationally seeking the maximum advantage of their investment
in an education. The market principle would guide them towards the educational programmes that
had the best chances of high wages and the best employment prospects. Both practical experience
and research have shown that the practice of educational choice do not fit with the assumptions of
instrumental rationality. It can more precisely be characterised as expressions of a subjective
rationality (Boudon 1992; Jørgensen 2006) or pragmatic rationality (Hodkinson a.o. 1996). This
means that educational choices are based more on socially shared norms and cultural orientations
than on individual and utilitarian motives. For the professional planners in the Ministry of
Education this appeared as unexplainable and somewhat irrational, as the number of applicant to
some educations could double in a few years without this being related to changes in the
opportunities for employment for these educations (UVM 1996).

The relapse to state regulation

As a result of the malfunctioning of the market based planning the government has fallen back on
ad-hoc state interventions to regulate the number of students in different programmes. In the Dual
VET system the access to school based training in the most popular programmes has been closed in
order to avoid overproduction. Another way of trying to steer the market is through campaigns to
persuade young people to choose the educational programmes that are politically considered as
most useful. For example in 1999 the government launched a new plan to get more young people to
study engineering science in higher education after a forecast had predicted a deficit of more than
one thousand engineers every year especially in the software industry. This intervention had some
effect, but only two years later the IT-bubble busted, and unemployment for this group of
professionals rose rapidly. It demonstrated once again that a return to state based planning and
intervention and is a risky enterprise in a globalising capitalist economy.

According to the principle of market based planning the state should abstain from direct central
control and concentrate on securing the functioning of the educational markets, e.g. by securing
transparency, information and fair conditions of competition. In reality the government has on many
occasions intervened directly as mentioned above. Furthermore the shift to input to outcome based
allocation of public funding to educational institutions has not meant that the former detailed state
 7

based regulation has been reduced. The application of the principles of New Public Management
(NMP) has resulted in a strong increase in the requirements of documentations, accreditation,
evaluations and measurements of quality indicators on all levels of administration. It has reached a
level so that even some of the social engineers of NMP in Denmark have apologized and criticised
the result that resembles very much the centralised, bureaucratic regime of state based planning.
In addition since education and training have remained strongly contested policy issues, political
interventions and regulations are frequent and often very detailed – in a way that violates the formal
autonomy of the educational institutions, for example by instructing them to reorganise their
administration in specific manner.

Concluding points
In sum the policy of leaving the development of VET to the workings of a fragmented and market
based planning led to number contradictions. As a result the government has on many occasions
relapsed into traditional forms of direct state intervention and has resumed the highly detailed
regulation of the former paradigm of planning. The main differences seem to be first that in the
earlier phase of state based planning the regulation was based on long-term planning, while now it
is based on ad-hoc reforms and flexible adjustments similar to the tradition based planning of the
first period. It is a paradox that the neo-liberal policy that set out to deregulate the traditional
institutions, has relapsed to a policy of incremental adjustments of the existing institutions as
pointed out in a recent OECD study (OECD 2008).
Secondly, the difference is that the regulation earlier was oriented towards input while it now is
oriented towards outcomes. The outcome based funding might solve some of the problems of
unlimited expansion of public budgets associated with input based funding, but also creates new
problems – or unintended consequences and risks (Beck 1986). For example in VET the standard
payment to colleges for each completing student gives incentive to focus on the standard student,
who will complete the programme directly and on scheduled time. But this is counteracting the
political aim of increasing retention and doing more for the ‘problem students’ at risk of dropping
out. As a result the government has in 2007 launched an initiative where all colleges are required to
make detailed ‘plans of action’ to reduce the drop-out rate under close government supervision.
The resulting form of planning can be described as a paradox of ‘centralised decentralisation’
(Watkins 1992), where the educational system is subjected to the discourse of market based
regulation, but is kept in a tight rope of central political control.

Literature
Aarkrog, V. & C. H. Jørgensen 2008: Introduction - Divergence and Convergence in Education and
Work, in Aarkrog, V. & C. H. Jørgensen (Eds) Divergence and Convergence in Education
and Work, Zurich, Peter Lang AG Publisher.
Allmendinger, Philip 2002: The Post-positivist Landscape of Planning Theory, in Philip
Allmendinger & Mark Tewdwr-Jones (Eds): Planning futures: New directions for planning
theory, by London ; New York : Routledge, 2002.
Amin, Ash & Daminan Thomas 1996: The negotiated economy: state and civic institutions in
Denmark, Economy and Society, Volume 25, Issue 2 May 1996 , pages 255 - 281
Antikainen, Ari 1990: The Rise and Change of Comprehensive Planning: The Finnish Experience,
European Journal of Education, Vol. 25, No. 1 (1990), pp. 75-82
Beck, Ulrich, 1994: The reinvention of politics: Towards a theory of Reflexive Modernization, in
Beck, Ulrich, a.o. (eds), 1994: Reflexive Modernization, Polity Press, Cambridge.
 8

Boudon, Raymond 1992: Subjective rationality and the explanation of social behaviour, in Simon,
H. A., et al., (eds.). (1992) Economics, Bounded Rationality, and the Cognitive Revolution,
Aldershot: Edward Elgar.
Durkheim, E. (1907/2006) Education: Its Nature and Its Role. In Lauder, H. & Brown, P. &
Dillabough, Jo-Anne & Halsey, A. H. (Eds), Education, Globalization and Social Change.
Oxford. Oxford University Press.
Gleeson, Brendan, 2000: Reflexive modernization: The re-enlightenment of planning?, i
International Planning Studies, Vol 5, no. 1, Carfax Publ., Abingdon.
Greinert, Wolf-Dietrich, 1998: Das 'deutsche' System der Berufsausbildung. Tradition,
Organisation, Funktion, Baden-Baden: Nomos.
Harris, Suzy 2007: The governance of education : how neo-liberalism is transforming policy and
practice, New York, NY : Continuum International Pub. Group.
Hodkinson, Phil & Andrew C. Sparkes & Heather Hodkinson 1996: Triumphs and tears : young
people, markets and the transition from school to work, The Manchester Metropolitan
University Education Series, David Fulton.
Illeris, Knud 2003: Learning, Identity and Self-orientation in Youth, Young 2003; Vol 11(4):357–
376.
Jørgensen, Christian Helms 2002: Better jobs through training and education, in: Jefferys, Steve &
Beyer, Frederik M & Thörnqvist, Christer (eds.) European working lives: continuities and
change in management and industrial relations in France, Scandinavia, and the UK,
Northampton, Mass., Edward Elgar.
Jørgensen, Christian Helms 2006: Utbildningsplanering – samspel mellan utbildning och arbete,
(educational planning – interplay between education and work) Lund, Studentlitteratur.
Juul, Ida. (2005). På sporet af erhvervspædagogikken, Ph.d-afhandling, Institut for Pædagogisk
Sociologi, Danmarks Pædagogiske Universitet.
Fischer, Frank & John Forester (Eds), 1993: The argumentative turn in policy analysis and
planning, Duke University Press, Durham, N. C.
OECD 2008: OECD/CERI Study of Systemic Innovation in Vet, Systemic Innovation in the Danish
VET System, Country Case Study Report, 2008
Wilson, Arthur & Ronald Cervero, 1997: The song remains the same, the selective tradition of
technical rationality in adult education program planning theory, i International Journal of
Lifelong Education, Vol 16, nr 2.
Streeck, Wolfgang 2006: The Study of Organized Interests: Before ‘the Century’ and After, Colin
Crouch & Wolfgang Streeck (Eds) The Diversity Of Democracy - Corporatism, Social Order
and Political Conflict, Edward Elgar Publishing.
Telhaug, Alfred Oftedal & Odd Asbjørn Mediås & Petter Aasen 2004: From Collectivism to
Individualism? Education as Nation Building in a Scandinavian Perspective, Scandinavian
Journal of Educational Research, Vol. 48, No. 2, April 2004
Watkins, Peter. E. 1992: The marketing of education in a coordinated decentralised context: alfred
p. sloan revisited, Australian Association for Research in Education Conference, Nov.1992
http://www.aare.edu.au/92pap/watkp92014.txt (accessesed Sept 2. 2008)