Beyond Decentralised Cooperation – New Reform Trajectories in European Vocational Education?

European skill formation systems have undergone significant change throughout the past decades: digitalisation, demographic change and the transition to knowledge economies have put pressure on the systems to respond to continuously changing skill demands. For the past two decades, research on initial and continuing vocational education and training (VET) has described a trend of liberalisation and segmentalism in collective skill formation systems such as Germany or Denmark and a trend of decentralization and collectivization in statist skill formation systems such as France or Sweden. In contrast to what previous literature argues, this paper finds that recent reforms in both collective and statist skill formation systems establish alternative modes of governance that entail a stronger role for the central government and are based on hierarchical coordination while weakening their reliance on the decentralised cooperation between employers. This paper first captures the new trajectories of change through an in-depth comparative case study of France and Germany, two typical cases of a statist- and respectively collective skill formation system. Towards this end, I draw on government documents and eleven elite interviews with decision-makers and experts from government organisations, trade unions and business associations in both countries. Next, I use natural language processing (NLP), specifically topic models and dictionaries, to test whether the direction of change identified in Germany and France can be found in a larger group of cases and whether VET reforms follow a common European trajectory of change. I draw on a novel data set consisting of governmental self-descriptions of education systems and -reforms. The data is a high quality and cross-country standardised account of how governments across the European Union describe the functioning of their education and training systems over time.