As educational reforms have progressed in Finland throughout the 1970s and the 1990s, increasing attention has been paid to the changes taking place in activities at the level of organizations and curriculum implemen- tation as well as to monitoring and evaluation. The Finnish occupational education comprises upper secondary-level vocational training and tertiary- level professional education aimed at young people and adults. In Finland, occupational education has been structurally integrated with the educational system as a whole. An objective of the editors of this book was to provide an overview, based on the research and development work of the past two decades, of the current status of Finnish occupational education. Another objective was to suggest what directions the development of occupational education might take in the next decade. The volume is based on a selection of articles written by Finnish experts on educational administration, research, teacher education, and educational policy. The approaches and contents of the articles, which are the choice and responsibility of each author or team of authors, vary from analytic overviews to policy plans for educational reform, from reviews of existing research to descriptions of developmental projects concerned with particular issues of school restructuring. The authors discuss a variety of reform plans and educational policy strategies on the basis of theoretical and empirical analyses that bring together, across disciplinary boundaries, the views of educationists, sociologists, psychologists, administrators and business scholars on various aspects of vocational education reform. The editors believe that vocational teachers, teacher educators, planners, administrators and researchers working in the area of occupational education and training will find the book a valuable case description of the Finnish experience. The book is the first publication of the Upsilon Chapter of the Omicron Tau Theta, the National Honourary Professional Graduate Society in Vocational Education. The Finnish name of the Upsilon Chapter is 'Ammattikoulutuksen tutkimusseura'. .