• After adequate preparation and counselling during the early years, in the last 2 years of high school, students should decide between an orientation toward trades technology science and an academic-arts-business focus. This decision should be based on students' abilities and well-informed inclinations. At this level, suitably structured cooperative education will provide relevant work experience.
  
  
• This end-of-high-school orientation drives students into a choice of three post-secondary routes: apprenticeship (understood here as a wider option than the present system, which is frequently criticized for its narrow occupational coverage and isolation from the education system), college, or university. Each route can provide a combination of theoretical and practical education and training, in various proportions.
  
  
• Transferability between programs and institutions should be ensured to minimize the cost of reorientation and adaptation to labour market demand. Prior learning assessment should be instituted and used to facilitate transferability.
  
  

Some of the features of this model are expected to help reduce the high drop-out rate by providing a curriculum that is more in tune with the "real world," without compromising core academic skills. The education system must impress upon students at an early age that they will have to earn a living and promote the importance of education in improving their future status in the labour force and access to opportunities for lifelong learning. We support programs, such as the Stay-in-School initiative. However, addressing the relevance of the school system would negate the need for such programs.

Educating to high standards

The education system should aim at educating youth and adults to high standards in core academic skills. Schools must provide an opportunity to achieve and an adequate level of support to everyone.

Measures of progress are needed. Failure and dropping out of school are a result of a cumulative process that allows children to fall progressively further behind. In A Lot to Learn, the Economic Council of Canada recommended that "all provinces, school boards, schools should undertake regular diagnostic assessment of children's performance in basic skills from the earliest years of schooling." The diagnosis should be the first step in providing the support required for achievement. We applaud developments undertaken independently by several provinces and also jointly under the auspices of the CMEC.