Foreword by the Minister of Education

A greater number of our youth must complete a post-compulsory education programme, as those without youth education run a much greater risk of unemployment and an adult life on the margins of the labour market.

The government's “New Goals” platform from February 2005 set the ambitious goal of at least 85% of a youth cohort completing a youth education programme at upper secondary level in 2010, and at least 95% in 2015. Dropouts from youth education programmes - and especially from vocational education programmes - are a serious barrier to reaching these goals. We must therefore be better at focusing our resources on the retention of vocational education students.

Throughout the years, there have been many different initiatives aimed at reducing dropout rates. New, flexible educational pathways have been introduced, as have new tools such as the personal education plan, the logbook, the contact teacher scheme, new goal descriptions, and the web-based planning tool Elevplan. Several studies have shown that schools' use of these tools influences how students experience coherence and structure in the course of their education and, in the end, whether or not they drop out.

We know that many vocational colleges are already making great efforts to retain students and bid farewell to dropping out. I hope we can make these cases of best practice spread like rings in water. I would like to encourage schools to learn from each other and to tell about the initiatives that many schools have implemented. We have brought together a number of these good examples in this publication.

More detailed information about the examples in this publication is available on the Danish Ministry of Education's website (http://www.uvm.dk) in the internet publication “God praksis for fastholdelse af elever i erhvervsuddannelser,” which also contains a range of specific examples of tools and instruments that schools have used with success.

I hope that both publications can inspire vocational colleges, Youth Education Centres, municipalities, and other institutions, in their initiatives directed at fighting dropout levels in vocational education programmes. Because these efforts can succeed - and many good examples show this.

Bertel Haarder
September 2005

This page is included in the publication "Retention in Vocational Education in Denmark – A best practice study" as the foreword
© The Ministry of Education 2004