The motivation to launch a project on career guidance lies in individual self-assessments of practices carried out at all partner schools. All participating schools consider the career guidance practices on offer insufficient and often provided too late to fully meet the needs of our students.

The German school took the initiative to find partners for such a project on the eTwinning platform and received an incredibly high number of applications from interested schools all over Europe, a fact that proves the high relevance of this project. Six schools eventually teamed up to jointly work submit an Erasmus+ proposal. 

In line with the EU 2020 Strategy which targets at reinforcing educational improvements to help employability and reduce poverty, we agreed to identify good practice and viable approaches in career guidance in the partner schools and then point the way to embedding such practice in all of our schools and ideally beyond this scope. The rationale and objectives of our project are geared towards reaching benchmarks which were set by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation in their report “Good Career Guidance” (2014) This report analyses the provisions on offer in schools in the UK, compares them to provisions in European countries like Finland and Germany et.al., and defines benchmarks identifying different dimensions of good career guidance.

In short the benchmarks ask for

- A stable careers programme that is known and understood by all players at school level and employers

- Learning from career and labour market information; access to good quality information and support to make best use of the information

- Addressing the needs of each pupil; equality and diversity considerations should be embedded in the programme throughout

- Linking curriculum learning to careers, the relevance of STEM subjects should be highlighted

- Encounters with employers and employees

- Experiences of workplaces

- Encounters with further and higher education

- Personal guidance

The six partners agree that these benchmarks are applicable to all our schools and can therefore be used as a guideline for actions and activities in the framework of the. To measure up against these benchmarks different actions need to be taken at the 6 schools. The exchange of good practice with 5 European schools will help identify necessary steps towards what can be considered good career guidance within given structural and systemic constraints.

Project funds enable partners to visit schools in five different European countries, study their career guidance provisions and jointly develop effective and efficient measures to meet abovementioned benchmarks. Apart from that, students from the six respective countries get a chance to explore educational systems, labour markets and job opportunities in other European countries and make use of English as the European lingua franca. Such activities would not be feasible without the funding of this school partnership under the auspices of the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union.