2023-04-20 04:35:00
”We are sacrificing generations of students”
There, it’s done, the inventory has been completed for a few weeks (read elsewhere). “And what, apart from that? We would have liked concrete progress so that the measures envisaged are irreversible. However, at this stage, there is nothing. The authorities have taken note of the inventory, but neither it nor the necessary measures are the subject of an agreement. The man gets angry. “We are losing a legislature on alternation. Politics must wake up!” For him, qualifying education, vocational training, and work-study training in particular, must be carried out as a social project, “and not like that of a minister or a government”. However, today, each minister continues to work in his corner, in silos. And therefore creates no leverage effect on the employment rate, the increase of which is nevertheless a capital objective, with the certainty, according to him, that we will not reach the expected rates, particularly in Wallonia. “As long as we do not move, we sacrifice generations of students, we waste a lot of money, we create cohorts of unemployable young people.”
For Olivier de Wasseige, it is not up to the school to do everything. “Everyone has their part to play, including businesses. But what is their place in the school?, he asks? The roles of education defined in the “Mission Decree” provide in particular that the school works to make young people capable of taking a place in economic life. “The school-business rapprochement is paramount in this respect.”
The managing director of the UWE endorses a series of findings and leads appearing in theState of play of qualifying education and vocational training. Including the need to better inform students regarding trades, sectors, companies in their region. “From basic educationhe insists. When the child still marvels.”
Eight out of ten young people who leave secondary school without a diploma come from qualifying
”No proactive referral system”
For the boss of the UWE, the big concern remains the orientation. Olivier de Wasseige does not hesitate to knock down mentalities which, decidedly, have a hard life: “While it should be a moment of discovery of the capacities and aspirations of young people, we are in a binary approach to guidance.” Either the young person is “good” in his attitude and his schooling. “So he is told to continue in general education until he graduates from secondary school; he will choose his orientation followingwards. It’s just a strategy to avoid relegation in the technical. And if his vocation was precisely that? Either he is not “good”. “And it’s the structural relegation that applies.”
The Pact for Teaching Excellence aims to change this but, in the meantime, “there is no proactive device of positive orientation towards alternation”.
Olivier de Wasseige nevertheless recognizes a proliferation of actions. “But we get lost… In addition, we sprinkle the means. In Wallonia, more than 150 non-profit organizations are active in the field of guidance. Unfortunately, for some of them, only during office hours.”
It is interesting to note that this reluctance also characterizes companies, sometimes cooled by the idea of poorly prepared young people. “One track might be the accompaniment of the young person in business, suggests the managing director. As well as, to bring the worlds of education and business closer together, to encourage mobility between the two by facilitating retraining or even mixed careers.
”Business academies complement training”
Another suggestion: provide, in the continuing education of qualifying teachers, mandatory training days in technologies. “Todaystill evokes the boss of Walloon bosses, growing business academies complement public training.” Concretely, these companies train the candidates themselves on good equipment and, often, with the possibility of rapid hiring.
After the publication of the inventory of the sector, Olivier de Wasseige estimates that there are now “a fertile ground to start a real reflection”. He asks that the governments concerned finally sit around the same table to draw up a common roadmap as quickly as possible.
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