The Transition and Access Working Groups have a total of 73 members. Of these members, 10 completed the survey, 10 did not completed the survey but made suggestions of school-towork initiatives for CCDF to follow-up on, 47 did not respond to the survey or follow-up phone requests and six were not aware of any school-to-work practice, programs or policies. While the overall response rate was not high, suggestions by the working group, both of initiatives and contacts, resulted in a high rate of return per suggestion (almost 3 per responding member).

Literature Review

To contextualize the inventory, a literature review was conducted to develop a situational analysis of Canadian youth in transition and to understand the elements that make up successful school-to-work initiatives. The results of the literature review are discussed fully in the paper. Once the situation and the components for success were understood, criteria for what makes for successful school-to-work initiatives were identified. With this knowledge, CCDF began to research and review the suggestions for the inventory made by the working groups. A combination of online and active (telephone) research was used to identify and gather data on existing initiatives from relevant sources.

Sixty initiatives were identified and researched. A Data Capture Template was filled out for each policy, program and practice identified. Invitations to vet the templates were sent to the lead contact for each program, policy and practice identified. Sixteen of the suggested sixty initiatives had data capture templates that could not be validated. They could not be verified because there was either not enough information about the initiative, the contact for the project could not be reached or there was no evaluative data that spoke to its impact with youth. Fortyfour of the initiatives could be validated and once this had been completed the researchers began the task of reviewing and analysing the data.

Data Analysis: Innovative, Effective, Promising School-to-Work Initiatives Categorization

Once the templates were returned to CCDF, they were edited, assessed and assigned to the categories of innovative, effective or promising. The inventory includes 44 entries (Appendix E: Data Capture Templates for Each Entry).

An initial guide for categorizing initiatives came from the WKLC Request for Proposals (RFP). In the RFP, WLKC defines:

• Innovative practices as those which differ from other approaches in order to achieve their objectives more effectively, more efficiently, more quickly, on a wider scale, or on a more sustainable basis.
• Effective practices as those which have evidence, through formal/quantitative evaluations or assessments, that they reliably achieve their objectives. These may include long-standing practices which have proven their worth over time, even though they may not be termed ‘innovative’.
• Promising as newer practices which have not been evaluated or assessed or standing practices which have been only assessed informally or qualitatively; yet, their approach is deemed to have the potential to achieve their objectives successfully.

Most initiatives had some features from all three categories however, an attempt was made to separate out the most prominent features for classification purposes. Category assignments were made based on three sources: 1) the opinions of the WLKC Transition and Access Working Groups; 2) more in-depth information acquired from the follow-up inquiries and; 3) from the criteria for success expressed in the literature. The researchers do not see the designation of innovation, effective and promising as hierarchical. All practices in the inventory are didactic. In addition to WLKC definitions, the researchers considered an initiative innovative when it showed elements of creativity especially when addressing a specific youth target (e.g., young immigrants and refugees). Effective programs, policies and practices were typically longstanding initiatives which had evidence-based data boasting excellent positive impacts (e.g. a high percentage of participants were employed as a direct result of being in the program). The promising category encompassed all of the pilots (because of their lack of longevity and evaluative data) and programs, policies and practices that were too new to have evaluative data that speaks to innovative measures, longevity and effectiveness.