This paper explores the emerging settlement surrounding vocational education and training in England in the 1990s. It describes and then considers the dangers in the post-Fordist position that argues a high skills/high trust economy/society offers emancipatory possibilities. Insufficient attention is addressed to the way post-Fordist concerns are lodged within capitalist social relations oriented to capital accumulation. Educational practices placed within these relations can easily lose their radicalism and sit readily alongside the concerns of curriculum modernisers who are wedded to capitalist rejuvenation.