Book excerpt: This book discusses how the Dutch vocational education system has undergone significant waves of reform driven by global imperatives, national concerns and governmental policy goals. Like elsewhere, the impetuses for these reforms are directed to generating a more industry-responsive, locally-accountable and competence-based vocational education system. Each wave of reforms, however, has had particular emphases, and directed to achieve particular policy outcomes. Yet, they are more than mere versions of what had or is occurring elsewhere. They are shaped by specific national imperatives, sentiments and localised concerns. Consequently, whilst this book elaborate what constitutes the contemporary provision of vocational education in the Netherlands also addresses a broader concern of how vocational education systems become formed, manifested within nation states, and then are transformed through particular imperatives, institutional arrangement and localised factors. So, the readers of this book whilst learning much about the Dutch vocational education system will also come to identify and engage with a selection of contributions that inform factors that situate, shape and transform vocational education systems. Such a focus seems important given an era when there are concerns to standardise and make uniform educational provisions, often for administrative or political imperatives. As such, this book will be of interest not only to those who are engaged in the field of vocational education, but those with an interest in educational policy, practice and comparative studies.