Identity and learning as a lifelong project: situating vocational education and work.

This paper focuses upon the learning of two young people in the UK during a critical and transformatory period of their lives, in a time of widespread social, economic and other global change. The analysis centres on processes of identity transformation including work identification, and raises a number of questions about relationships between these and the learning opportunities made available to young people, particularly through formal education. Consideration is given to the implications for work preparation as well as for the broader lifelong learning agenda. It is concluded that the technical-rational basis of compulsory and post-compulsory education in the UK ensures its failure to articulate with the needs of learners in search of themselves and, as such, provides an inadequate basis for prevocational, vocational and lifelong learning. Finally, a reconstruction of curricula is called for, whether pre-vocational or any other, around principles that allow it to be conceived as a practice in which the agency of the learner is a central driving force, rather than as something which is given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]