VET in practice - and in politics: Paper præsenteret på konferencen ‘Research for VET practice and Policy’. Torino 31.8 – 3.9. 2011. The annual meeting of VET and Culture research network in collaboration with the European Training Foundation (EFT).

This draft paper addresses the issue of building the bridges between VET politics, practice and research and contributes to the ambition of making evidence based policy making possible.
The examples derive from the Danish context but the principle of understanding and analyzing VET politics and practices will apply on other contexts both in EU countries and Non EU countries. The theoretical approach is the theory of social fields developed by Pierre Bourdieu.
On major point of departure for the analysis is the fact that despite many political attempts to change the way VET systems in different countries functions in practice most attempts political intervention has little or no effect. In other words the basic principles on which VET is founded are more or less resistant to outside interventions (Koudahl 2006). One example is the discussion on how to provide a sufficient number of company based training places for the dual systems which apparently never gets solved.