Professor Lorna Unwin OBE (1953-2024)

It is with great sadness that JVET remembers Lorna Unwin, who was editor of this journal from 2011 to 2014.

In what follows, we will follow the fairly standard path of such memorials, recounting Lorna’s career in brief before turning to the more important consideration of what she meant as a person. I will write something at that point as someone she mentored in a brief but intense period before giving the floor to those who knew Lorna far better than me both as a person and an academic.

Lorna was an eminent academic figure in the study of vocational education and training. Importantly, this was enriched by a grounding in the realities of the field in her native England. Before joining academia, she was a teacher of English and General Studies at Barnsley College of Technology; a tutor for the Sainsbury supermarket chain on the British government’s Youth Training Scheme and a trainer of other workplace supervisors; and a tutor for the Workers Educational Association.  During her later academic career, she continued a strong engagement with policy and practice communities. The list is exhaustive (and perhaps

exhausting for those with less energy than Lorna) but includes serving as an expert panel member for the UK Commission for Education and Skills; advisor to the Commission on Adult Vocational Education and Training; chair of the Commission of Inquiry into Group Training Associations; a member of the Skills Commission All-Party Parliamentary Group; and a council member at Oldham College. She also wrote an important textbook for college lecturers - Teaching and Learning in Further Education. It was entirely appropriate, therefore, that she should be given the national award of an OBE in 2014.

Transferring to higher education in 1987, she held posts at the Open University, Sheffield and Leicester before moving to the Institute of Education, University of London in 2006 to the Chair of Vocational Education, serving also from 2008 to 2012 as Deputy Director of the ESRC-funded Centre for Learning and Life Chances in Knowledge Economics and Societies.

Lorna was an expert on English vocational education and training, with a strong interest both in the historical development of the college sector but also in learning in workplaces, including studies of apprenticeship and other modes of developing occupational expertise. Throughout this, she always maintained and insisted upon the need to see vocational learning and participation as sites of broader human development.

My interactions with others who knew Lorna better than me all speak to her academic rigour, her passion for an often-neglected field, but above all else to her personal warmth and generosity.  

Professor Simon McGrath, JVET editor-in-chief

Remembering Lorna Unwin


JVET Conference 2025

16th International Conference
Thu 24 - Sat 26 July 2025, Oxford, UK

The JVET Conference 2025 will explores Vocational Education and Training through the lens of the themes of journeys and destinations.  The call for abstracts (now closed) invited submissions that explore developments in VET as it strives to meet the challenges of economic austerity, climate change, political instability and increasingly rapid technological change. We look forward to exploring the journeys of VET systems addressing these challenges as they traverse the occupational boundaries between formal and informal, accredited and unaccredited vocational learning, between regulated and unregulated training, and between ‘vocational’ and ‘professional’ education. The conference will also explore the role of VET in reinforcing or combatting social closure through inclusive practice, and spatial closure through facilitating mobility.

Call for papers for a Special Issue of the Journal of Vocational Education and Training (JVET)

VET in the era of digital transformation: New forms of work and their implications for vocational learning

 Guest editors: Jim Hordern, Monika Nerland and Kevin Orr

This Special Issue aims to critically examine the workplace as a site of learning in the context of digital transformation in order to discuss and reflect on how vocational education and training is challenged and should respond to changes in expertise required in the workplace. To this end, the issue will:

  1. review the potential implications of digital transformation for work and vocational expertise;

  2. present in-depth studies of work and learning in occupational settings affected by digital transformation, and

  3. describe and conceptualise characteristics of work practices and learning that can be recontextualised within VET systems and practices.

Relevant topics include but are not limited to the implications of digital transformation for:

  • Forms and shifts in vocational expertise

  • Roles, responsibilities, and trust in the reconfiguration of work practices

  • Workers’ agency and participation in learning at work

  • Ways of facilitating and/or recognising learning in the workplace

  • Implications for VET pedagogy and curriculum