Einstein4all

Preventing early school drop out is a major issue for the municipality of ‘s-Hertogenbosch and the Koning Willem 1 College when defining their longer term policy. This complies with the Lisbon agreement which states that early school drop out should have been reduced by 50% by 2010. The major aim for the five participating pre-vocational schools (primary vocational colleges) is to prepare their student as comprehensively as possible.

One of the key causes of early school drop out is the bad pedagogical and didactic connection between the education offered at the VMBO (primary vocational education) and MBO (secondary vocational education) schools, but also between MBO and HBO (higher vocational education). The other reason is a bad image of profession and education opportunities.

The aim is to combine above mentioned problems in a stick together route of prepatory and secondary vocational colleges with high attention for:
- good pedagogical and didactic connection
- good orientation possibilities on the labour and education market
- good guidance in career development.

Project core is to achieve this aim with the help of the next three components:
- the development of a Competence Meter, a tool which build a personal competence profile
  and analyses the competence gap,
- the development of a Guidance Model which describes who and how the pupils could be at best supported
 with the help an improvement plan which can be used to erase the differences between present and desired competences.
- the development of a competence based orientation programme on profession and education

The whole route is meant for pupils from the prepatory vocational colleges.

The Competence Meter is a computerised tool which provides insight into the student’s competence gaps with regard to his/her learning plans or profession and is yet to be developed and implemented. This development ought to be documented.
A competence profile will be defined and added (next to own documentation based on the guidance traject) to the student’s portfolio for further education or job application.
 
Any action invoked by results from the Competence Meter will have to be coached. The Guidance Model will be a firm handhold for both teachers and students in the new approach to learning. Shifting the focus from facts to personal growth, from supply to demand.

The development of the orientation programme will deliver a database of assignments based on one or more sectors. Therefore it is important to combine this with a network of cooperating companies and institutes.

This means, that the whole route will have a strong regional character. Municipality of 's-Hertogenbosch is the director of this cooperation approach between government, education and companies. The problem of the dropouts becomes most visible at the regional vocational education centre Koning Willem I College. That is the reason why they operate as management-coordinator. The companies are involved in the project because of their experience and knowledge on operational competences: (regional departments of) Heineken and Philips and Acritas (consultancy office).

Knowledge and experience for the development of the competence meter tool and the competence meter guidance model and training program will be obtained from the  Steirische Volkswirtschaftliche Gesellschaft from Austria. We want in the projectphase to share experiences with the Business and Computing Centre from the Blackburn College.