Comprehensive planning has been identified as an essential ingredient in the efforts of local schools to increase the responsiveness of vocational education. This report describes the reality of comprehensive vocational education planning as it occurs in a wide variety of educational and environmental contexts, suggests ways that have the potential for improving the technology of vocational education planning, and describes procedures that were used to produce the findings. The report is the result of field work observations in 1980 in the states of Wisconsin, West Virginia, Florida, and Oklahoma and dialogue sessions conducted in these states and in Colorado, Texas, Georgia, and Kansas during the preceding year. The report identifies the legislative and environmental context under which local vocational education planning takes place and notes context conditions which affect such planning. The context conditions serve as a background for descriptions of the nature of interagency coordinative and collaborative relationships in support of planning, for ways that data and evaluation are used in local planning, for local level planning processes, and for a discussion of selected issues in vocational education planning. Planning tools and techniques, and training materials and activities whose development can potentially improve the technology of local vocational education planning and develop the skills of persons who do this planning, are also described. Finally, procedures are presented that serve as a basis for the findings which are reported. (KC)