Second Survey School and WOW.pdf

WORKING GROUP: PRINCIPLES AND CRITERIA
… and particular problems 6
From our point of view, the model described has some problems beside its strengths. One of
the systematic problems is the weak position of guidance in school. In compulsory schools,
there is no trained stuff for guidance or counselling activities and no general curriculum for
guidance and issues of the world of work until now.
With the renewed agreement between die FES and the KMK there is at the one hand the
prolongation of this problematic, but on the other hand, there is a shift of some competencies
to the schools. E.g. the schools are responsible for own activities in bridge building, in
organising contact between the industry or the world of work in general and the pupil or to
integrate economic issues into the curricula. Now, each of the 16 Federal States is developing
more or less an own plan for the different school types to realize this new tasks. The funding of
this activities as well as the coherence can be questioned. Good examples can be found in the
Federal State of NRW 7 .
Another problematic aspect is the acceptance of the guidance activities offered by the LEA.
Until now, there is enough research on this issue in Germany, but some findings of qualitative
studies, e.g. done by a “Customers Test” 8 show a high rate of young people who are not
satisfied with the guidance offers they get. Other studies, done by the FES, show a more
differentiated picture. From a more theoretical perspective, there is also some doubt about
the existing structure. The distance between the counsellor, as a part of a very huge and
mighty institution, and the single pupil might be too big in the given structure. It seems that
the counsellors are in a high number of guidance activities not in the position to overcome this
distance, so counselling or guidance activities lack the needed relationship 9 between the
counsellor and the pupil. For example, until now, a lot of the activities have the character of
“test and tell”. A single practitioner comes to a school class, helps to fill in the tests (on
interests or Holland‐Types 10 ) and transmits the results to the children. This general criticism
aims not the single counsellor, but more the system, that provides the guidance activities not
close to the target group.
An other problem are school leavers after secondary one, who do not enter a school that leads
to baccalaureate or do not enter a dual vocational training, but are confronted with
problematic alternatives: the school based vocational training and much more the bridge‐overprograms
are risky. These bridge‐over‐programs have increased over the last years (today 40%
of the part of an age group who do not enter the higher education system takes part in this
6 The chapter is based on a paper by Bernhard Jenschke, written as country report for the Joint Action Projekt in
2006
7 Der Landesausschuss für Berufsbildung des Landes NRW (2004):
8 Stiftung Wahrentest 2007
9 The importance of relationship for sucessfull guidance and counselling activites is showned in many studies, for
germany for example by Grawe (2000) or Schiepeck (2006), see also Schiersmann (2008)
10 The used test is ”Explorix”, which is developed for the vocational educational system in Germany and Switzerland.
(Explorix 2002).
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