For the free movement of labour across the European Union, establishing transparency and comparability of qualifications across member states is vital.

This book examines how qualifications, knowledge, skills and competences are understood in different national contexts and trans-nationally and reveals a complex picture of differences and similarities both within and between countries. Against the background of EU policy initiatives, and in particular the European Qualifications Framework, an important focus is on the prospects and difficulties of establishing cross-national recognition of qualifications.

Drawing on case studies of particular sectors and occupations in England, France, Germany and the Netherlands, this insightful book, written by leading academics in the field, will be a vital resource for students and researchers involved with vocational education and training, continuing professional development, human resource management and European Union policy.

For the free movement of labour across the European Union, establishing transparency and comparability of qualifications across member states is vital.

This book examines how qualifications, knowledge, skills and competences are understood in different national contexts and trans-nationally and reveals a complex picture of differences and similarities both within and between countries. Against the background of EU policy initiatives, and in particular the European Qualifications Framework, an important focus is on the prospects and difficulties of establishing cross-national recognition of qualifications.

Drawing on case studies of particular sectors and occupations in England, France, Germany and the Netherlands, this insightful book, written by leading academics in the field, will be a vital resource for students and researchers involved with vocational education and training, continuing professional development, human resource management and European Union policy.

Coming to Care offers an original contribution to the understanding of care and care work in children's services in Britain in the early twenty first century. It provides fascinating insights into the factors that influence why people enter and leave care work, their motivations and the intersection of their work with their family lives. Focusing on four diverse groups of workers - residential social workers, foster carers, family support workers and community childminders - who take on the care of vulnerable children and young people in the context of relatively low levels of qualifications, the book examines their life course as care workers. It explores: the range of factors that attract people into care work, including the biographical circumstances and the serendipitous factors that propel them into the work; their understandings of and commitment to the work; and how their identities as care workers are created and sustained. The book is highly relevant to current policy debates about the development of children's services and reforming the childcare workforce and offers a range of practical recommendations. It should provide interesting reading to policy makers and service providers, as well as academics and students in the childcare and social care fields.

Learner biographies and learning cultures constitutes an important contribution to the under-researched field of vocational education and the school-to-work transition. Drawing on Butler's concept of discursive agency and Alheit's biographical approach, the book offers a new conceptual and methodological framework for exploring young people's construction of identity over time as well as in the specific learning sites of apprenticeship - the workplace and the college. The particular approach, concerned with young people's situated subjectivities, sets it apart from existing research, much of which focuses on social reproduction and portrays young people in vocational education as 'non-academic' with enduring identities. The comparative, multi-method ethnography is an in-depth study of sixteen apprentices in England and Germany, on two contrasting apprenticeship programmes-retail and motor vehicle maintenance. Bringing together a wealth of rich material, including young people's life stories and data from observations in workplaces and colleges, it paints a compelling picture of the individual young people as they negotiate learner identities over time, in multiple life domains and in the 'learning cultures' of the workplace and the college. The cross-national comparative design, contrasting the high-quality German dual system with the variable provision of apprenticeships in England, highlights the significance of discursive regimes in young people's identity construction. It is argued that learner identities are not natural or abiding, but are formed through concrete experiences of learning and constituted in institutional settings with discursive frameworks that prioritise certain forms of knowledge. The findings challenge one of the most common stereotypes of young people in vocational education in England today-that they are 'naturally' non-academic and that vocational pathways need to provide predominantly 'practical' training. The book is of potentially far-reaching impact in view of current government initiatives to expand apprenticeships and in the climate of high youth unemployment and rising university fees. The findings suggest that learner dispositions may change and that quality vocational education, based on the integration of theory and practice, can engage and challenge all learners across the range of 'achievement' levels, including those deemed 'disaffected' with classroom learning.