(The lack of) Localised Cultures of Vocational Education? The case of Oslo

Although upper secondary education institutions are geographically distributed to offer equal opportunities in Norway, local patterns of inequality of participation and achievement are evident. Overall, vocational education programmes attract a considerably lower share of compulsory school leavers in Oslo compared to the rest of the country, students in vocational education show a different distribution across programmes, and they are a more socially selected group according to attainment and social background. Based on these figures, one may easily conclude that the geographical context makes a difference for educational inequalities among young people in Oslo and Norway. However, aiming to move beyond arguments about ‘the difference that space makes’ for educational inequality (Hanson Thiem 2009), this paper seeks to understand how the intersection of localized cultures of education and local labour markets shape and create differences in young people’s Vocational Education and Training (VET) trajectories in Oslo as a local educational context in Norway. On the one hand, the urban context is characterised by globalized labour migration and de-industrialisation. On the other hand, Oslo holds the most knowledge intensive of the national labour markets, and education levels and application to higher education institutions is high. Localized logics of strategies of education are exemplified by young people directed towards or away from VET, e.g., by experiencing peer and parental pressure towards higher education, labour migration adversely affecting the popularity of VET, lack of local cornerstone industries attracting young people, enabling continued attachment to the local community etc. The analysis sheds light on how geography influences different groups of young people’s choice of education, and the complex and space-sensitive ways that social inequality in education may be produced, maintained and reinforced. The analyses are based on qualitative educational life story interviews with 25 students in VET in Oslo