Vocational Training in France: From the Margin of the French Education System to a Laboratory for its Renewal

Abstract

According to specialists on Education, the French National Education system is affected by a significant institutional inertia: despite a fast changing environment and considerable efforts to reform it, its foundations seem to remain very hard to change. In this contribution, we depart from a national system perspective, and rather look at some experiments going on at a very local and idiosyncratic level of two representative French regions in the vocational training area. On this scale, and in this area, educational innovations became visible. If some of these experiments would become generalized and legitimized, they could represent interesting seeds of change for the future of the French Education system.