JVET Conference - call now live….

16th International Conference
Thursday 24 - Saturday 26 July 2025, Oxford, UK

The JVET Conference Committee invites contributions to our successful biennial international conference. This conference explores Vocational Education and Training through the lens of the themes of journeys and destinations.  We welcome contributions that explore developments in VET as it strives to meet the challenges of economic austerity, climate change, political instability and increasingly rapid technological change. We’d like to explore the journeys of VET systems addressing these challenges as they traverse the occupational boundaries between formal and informal, accredited and unaccredited vocational learning, between regulated and unregulated training, and between ‘vocational’ and ‘professional’ education. The conference will also explore the role of VET in reinforcing or combatting social closure through inclusive practice, and spatial closure through facilitating mobility.

JVET Papers of the Year Award

JVET Editorial Management Committee (EMC) is delighted to announce the winners of its annual Paper of the Year prize awards.

JVET EMC awarded the first place for papers published in 2023 to “Understanding aspirations: why do secondary TVET students aim so high in Chile?” authored by Alice Aldinucci, Oscar Valiente, Scott Hurrell and Adrián Zancajo.

Comments from the EMC on the winning paper included:

  • I think it is a beautifully theorised paper

  • Engages with a wide range of theoretical ideas - a well-crafted paper

  • This study examines what informs individuals' aspirations associated with VET, within the context of a very unequal society. The analysis of individual and social influences is carefully conceptualised and the findings around "the interplay between agential and structural factors at the roots of differential aspiration development" are balanced and carefully explained. This article reveals a lot about Chile, the role of VET for society and individual, and what shapes aspirations.

  • I liked the theoretical framing and the way in which the paper seeks to take our thinking forward theoretically with regard to understanding aspirations.

Second place was awarded to “The (un)making of Dutch ‘care girls’: An ethnographic study on aspirations, internship experiences and labour market perspectives” by authors Talitha Stem and Elif Keskiner. 

Comments from EMC members included:

  • It's a very interesting and carefully written study that foregrounds some central concerns about the role that VET plays in society, in relation to the specific expertise of VET programmes juxtaposed with people's actual work, in the under-researched area of social reproduction work.

  • This paper revisits a well-established literature and offers a fresh take on it by exploration of a different context.

  • A relatively rare example of an ethnographic study based on extensive field work in VET, important topic and insights, well grounded in previous research