The creation of the vocational school subsystem in Portugal constitutes a particularly rich and complex illustration of the testing of new modalities of provision of education. The features of this socio-political innovation condensed some of the main vectors that later assumed great importance in the transformations undergone by the management of the education system in general. Moreover, the same is true in respect of the changes verified by several areas of social welfare policy; the vocational school subsystem was organised from the beginning on the basis of autonomy, privatisation, social mobilisation and state regulation. These constitute crucial political tendencies whose development and articulation can be found in different forms in some of the changes produced in public services, including education, during the last decades, and with particular force in recent years.
Reform of the State; education governance; social policies; quasi-markets in education
