Employers placing orders and students as commodities: Swedish post-secondary vocational education and training policy

Established in 2009, Swedish Higher Vocational Education (HVE) gives employers an opportunity to initiate state-funded but locally conceptualised and managed training programmes. This article investigates the system, the ideas used in policy to mandate this arrangement of vocational education and training (VET) and the institutional relations of power and control between stakeholders that it represents. Fourteen Swedish educational policy documents relating to post-secondary VET and the establishment of HVE were analysed. The findings show that policy has placed much of the power and control over HVE with employers and that both public and private education providers are dependent on employers. The system does not create any institutional relations between trade unions and HVE. Nor does it encourage employers to collaborate more comprehensively than locally regarding single programmes, to conceptualise them and their curricula. Hence, the qualifications and positions of HVE graduates in enterprises, unlike those of graduates from initial VET in upper secondary education, are not negotiated by the stakeholders in the conventional Swedish model, where national employers’ organisations and trade unions are central actors. The findings also reveal that the HVE students, in policy documents, are construed as input material that, through training, are turned into products with exchange value – into commodities.