Workplace learning in full-time vocational and technical secondary education

With workplace learning, Flemish government wants to better connect secondary education to the labor market and to reduce the unqualified outflow and youth unemployment. The Court of Audit investigated whether schools of full-time vocational secondary and technical secondary education offer work-based learning, and in particular the internship form, sufficiently and qualitatively and whether they achieve the predetermined objectives. It found that the schools certainly largely comply with the internship obligation, but that they sometimes struggle to find suitable workplaces and to offer quality traineeships. Dual learning has had limited success to date. In the absence of suitable internship data, it is unclear to what extent work-based learning achieves its objectives, although there are strong indications that this is not the case in the special secondary education study area of trade.