Two challenges characterise and weigh heavily on Danish vocational education and training (VET). Too few young people enrol in VET directly after lower secondary education, and only around half of the students who enrol in a VET programme complete their studies. A reform of VET from 2014 proposed a set of initiatives to address these two challenges. However, studies have shown that, in general, these initiatives have not resulted in improvements in either enrolment or completion rates. This led to yet another reform of VET in 2018 that included an additional set of initiatives. Based on accounts of the poor effects of the 2014 reform’s initiatives and acknowledging that there is no simple solution to either the low intake or the high dropout, this chapter focuses on two factors that are particularly important for efforts to increase both enrolment and completion rates. These two factors are ‘attractive learning environments’ and ‘students’ decision-making skills, targeting three issues: (i) What constitutes an attractive VET learning environment for young people? (ii) What characterises VET students’ decisions and decision-making process? and (iii) How are students’ ability to make decisions and their perceptions of the training environment interrelated? © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
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