ABSTRACT

This chapter explores Michael Young’s contribution to theorising the role of knowledge in vocational education qualifications and seeks to extend it by arguing that social realists need to focus on the institutional conditions for the development, elaboration, codification, and institutionalisation of theoretical knowledge in vocational education. It demonstrates how competency-based models of curriculum contribute to reproducing social inequalities, and it uses the principles of insularity and hybridity to develop this argument. It draws on new-institutionalism to theorise the institutional conditions for theoretical knowledge in vocational education qualifications. It argues that the principle of insularity needs to be applied to vocational education institutions.