When School and Workplace are meetingIn most European countries vocational education contains theoretical as well as practical, school-based as well as workplace-based elements, even if the balance and organization of them is varying. In Sweden the vocational education is mainly school-based. However, at least 15 weeks of the three years at secondary school should be located at a workplace. So here, work and school very concretely meets each other, in a meeting which contains conflicting as well as cooperative elements. More theoretically, this can be formulated as a meeting between two of the most important institutions of society, work life and the educational system, the productive and the reproductive sector of society. Following questions are focused in the study:- How is competence regarded in work life and at school? Are different factors stressed? Five elements of competence are distinguished: Psychomotorical, cognitive (which is divided into a practical and a theoretical component), affective, personal and social.

How is the meeting between the value system of school (where e g democratic values and equal possibilities are salient) and the value system of the labour market (where e g market mechanism and competition is salient) worked out? How school and work life, represented by students, teachers and employers, look at this is studied through interviews in relation with the workplace practise. One class from the Business- and administration programme was followed during three years .The first year 9 students and 10 employers were interviewed in longer interviews. Teachers were interviewed in recurrent group interviews all three years. All students answered a questionnaire after year one and year two; they also wrote compositions about their experience of the workplace practise. All material was analysed in a qualitative way. The results imply that work life (employers) to a high degree emphasizes aspects of competence which are not directed emphasized in the school curriculum: affective, personal and social competence. These are also competencies which were developed during the periods of workplace practise and very much appreciated by the teachers. The teachers also stressed that practical learning developed the interest for theoretical learning at school. On the whole the periods of practise were appreciated by the students as well by the teachers. However, over time, the appreciation diminished for the students. Some conflicting points are seen, conflicts which to a high degree are related to the different value systems of school and work life. For example there was a conflict between the desire of employers to keep good students for longer periods (which is rational in a market - competitive perspective) and the desire of school to offer students experience of more than one workplace (which is rationale in a perspective of equal opportunities)