Practices

Practices were in most cases pilot programs that were completed or for which research was still going on. In each case, the assignment was promising as there was either no final evaluation data and/or there was no guarantee that the initiative would continue. Two of the national initiatives were established and on-going; however, they are optional and implemented at the will of the school, teacher or counsellor, with no formally structured implementation across boards, regions, provinces, etc. One was notably effective with the target audience and the other was outstanding in its innovative game format that engages classroom students in career information and decision-making. Both of these initiatives introduce career exploration in elementary school, a strategy identified in career literature as part of a process for providing Canadian Students with career-management competencies.

Many of the policies, programs and practices in the WLKC inventory have several of the 12 features of successful school-to-work transition programming listed in the literature review. In addition to the above components, CCDF noted that initiatives in the inventory had a range of the following characteristics which we believe are also significant to improving school-to-work transitions in Canada:

  1. 1. Transferability (locally, provincially, nationally and internationally);

    Many of the initiatives in the inventory are locally contained. None of them, with the exception of the Real Game and Techsploration, have transferred their program to another community or province. The Real Game is a notable exception and has managed with great efforts to involve stakeholders in the practice’s development to not only transfer the practice to all provinces and territories in Canada, but adapted it to 10 other OECD countries.
  2. 2. Policies that had associated programs to support success;

    Given that there are no stated as such school-to-work transition policies in Canada, it is not surprising that we found few related policies. One related policy in the inventory, Learning to 18, is a relatively new strategy put in place by the Ontario government which has developed corollary programs to support its success. Extensive evaluation efforts will monitor this program to see if it will meet its outcomes to improve the graduation rate in Ontario by its stated goal of five percent.
  3. 3. Evaluated outcomes that were significant and spoke directly to the initiative’s success.

    Evaluation is critical in measuring the success of school-to-work measures. Unfortunately, many initiatives listed in the inventory had no formal evaluation process and it is believed that this is a reflection of the evaluation practices of other initiatives in Canada. There were exceptions such as Conestoga Human Resources Post-Grad. But, mostly outcomes of the measures in the inventory were anticipated or anecdotal. Much more effort needs to be made to build an evidence-base for improving school-to-work transitions. Four pilot projects funded by the Millennium Scholarship Foundation: Le Nonet, AVID, Making
    Education Work and Future to Discover are part of a six-year longitudinal research on how to best support access to and completion of PSE for all youth including those most at-risk. This is likely the most extensive evaluation of career-oriented programming in Canadian history and worth watching for the results.