This article addresses challenges regarding relevance in vocational education and training (VET) curricula. Recent research on Norwegian VET shows that the educational content is not sufficiently related to the students' needs for qualification in the actual vocations. I will present a new curriculum research project aimed at investigating and improving the vocational relevance in Norwegian VET. An important part of the project is to investigate epistemological perspectives on how vocational knowledge is constituted and developed, and consequences for the curriculum. The article presents results from these epistemological investigations. I will argue that the relevance problem relates to a one-sided rationalist epistemology in which a main idea is that vocational knowledge consists of theoretical principles and procedures to be applied in practical situations. This idea influences educational traditions and structures, and leads to a separation between theoretical and practical subjects and learning arenas. From a pragmatic epistemological perspective, it can be argued that vocational knowledge is contextual and holistic, and consists of complex wholes of physicality, motor skills, intellectual understandings, values, and verbalized concepts. To ensure curriculum relevance, a curriculum is needed in which authentic practical work is the base, and subjects are integrated with students' practical work experience.

The status and quality of vocational education and training (VET) represent a challenge in many countries, including Norway. In recent decades the political goal in Norway has been to ensure that vocational programmes at upper secondary level achieve equal status with academic programmes. Considerable efforts have been made to strengthen the quality of vocational programmes to achieve this. This article presents an analysis of the challenges of the school-based part of Norwegian VET. The analysis is particularly directed at issues of vocational relevance and coherence between the educational content and the qualification needs of the vocations. The aim is to identify the obstacles to relevance and coherence and show the attempts made to strengthen both quality and status.

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Collaboration between schools and enterprises in vocational education and training (VET) is a challenge in many countries, Norway included. There is a tendency to organise VET in separate theoretical and practical learning arenas that lack mutual coherence. This article presents the findings of a four-year action research study in which 30 vocational teachers, who were taking an in-service master’s degree programme in vocational pedagogy, completed systematic research-based projects on developing partnerships between schools and enterprises in the school-based part of Norwegian VET. The goal was to strengthen the relevance of vocational education by creating stronger links between the content of the education and the content of the vocation. The study was based on a pragmatic, holistic perspective on vocational competence and education where essential, authentic vocational tasks to which theory is related are regarded as the core educational content, both in the enterprises and in schools. The findings are based on an analysis of 30 master’s degree theses documenting each of the teachers’ development projects.The results show examples of and principles for how collaboration between schools and enterprises can be organised around vocational tasks. Core principles include formal agreements on collaboration between schools and enterprises, regular dialogues between vocational teachers, instructors and students about educational tasks and content, joint planning and follow-up of students’ placements in enterprises, and exchanges of experience and competence between teachers and instructors. The results show that, according to students, instructors and vocational teachers, the application of such principles contributed to vocational relevance and students’ motivation and learning outcomes.