Act for Career Erasmus Project

Project Title

Act for Career

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships addressing more than one field

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2014

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: Labour market issues incl. career guidance / youth unemployment

Project Summary

Objectives
Unemployment hurts at any age. Unemployment at a young age, however, generates a long-lasting negative impact. School leavers that fail to find adequate apprenticeship training position stand in danger of acquiring only insufficient vocational training or none at all. As a consequence, many will find themselves being trapped in the low-paid-sectors of the labor market, make ends meet with zero-hours contracts or having no prospect to gain a proper job at all.
The Project’s main objectives:
– To identify interesting practice
– To identify elements for effective transfer from school to work
– To identify structural restrictions
– To initiate long-term collaborations between various schools and institutions to improve employability especially of young people from vulnerable background
– to propose recommendations of how to improve Career Education in Secondary schools, Transition Management school to work, and Vocational Apprenticeship and training to combat long spells of joblessness and high risk of social exclusion.

Partners
The three partners Glasgow, Rhine-Meuse and Nuremberg were selected because of their expertise in combatting Youth Unemployment. The partners’ areas have had to come to terms with an industrial past; they had to master the challenge of structural change and to tackle effectively the plight of Youth Unemployment. In this project, partners shared their expertise on how to tackle Youth Unemployment and how to improve their concepts for ‘Career Education’, ‘Transition Management school to work’, and ‘Vocational Training’.

Description of main activities
The partner institutions worked together through
– international project meetings to compare strategies and approaches to combat youth unemployment
– involvement of external experts
– planning and realizing intellectual outputs as results of joint discussions
– planning and realizing Final Conferences for discussion and dissemination of results.

Working process:
After having established a basis by researching the educational framework and conditions of the local labor market, partners used a cross-section approach and investigated
– career education within institutions of formal education, i.e. secondary Schools, Schools relationship with higher education to inform new transition procedures
– effective strategies and best practice of supporting young people by extracurricular support
– concepts of vocational training, especially for young people from deprived backgrounds, who have not succeeded in contracting for apprenticeship or accessing qualifications relating to meaningful employment.

Results
“Act for Careers” proofs that KA2 strategic partnerships can form local consortia between local/regional/national authorities to improve the educational offer for young people and introduce these consortia into an international partnership. The project succeeded to initiate further improvement of local strategies concerning the development skills of young people, especially from deprived and minority background, in the critical transition period of school to work and vocational training.
Results are shared on the project’s Websites. In addition, results were disseminated as paper publications and through conferences, and offered to schools, youth organizations, vocational schools, local authorities, local stakeholders and the wider public.

Longer-term benefits
The project has been successful in making teachers and experts more aware to the EU-2020 strategy and aims. Several follow-up projects have been initiated, including students’ exchanges of students, amongst them Young People with Special needs.
Because of the successful cooperation, the Lord Mayor of Nuremberg, Dr. Ulrich Maly, and the Lord Provost of Glasgow, Eva Bolander, exchanged formal letters for further cooperation in the fields
– transition management and the improvement of employability
– cooperation for the better integration of asylum seekers by education and the improvement of employability
– cooperation on the educational field of inclusion
– cooperation for the further development of comprehensive schools to improve the chances for All young people.
As a result of the strategic approach adopted by Glasgow and Nuremberg to the development of the capacity of Erasmus Plus engagement to impact significantly on the partner organisations the impact of the project’s professional research and development on Glasgow partners was to improve the employment skills and partnership offer to young people across the city through the adapting and improving of the current model. This has resulted in collaboration with colleagues in Nuremberg to further investigate the elements of Glasgow’s individual education systems, which contribute to success for learners.
One area of particular interest to Glasgow was the way in which apprenticeship programmes are integrated into school, and work based learning is embedded within the German system. This has influenced the design an

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 186742 Eur

Project Coordinator

Stadt Nürnberg – Amt für berufliche Bildung – Koordinierungsstelle SCHLAU & Country: DE

Project Partners

• Glasgow City Council Education Services
• Stichting Expertise Centrum Leren voor Duurzame Ontwikkeling