REPORT COMMISSIONED BY CEDEFOP USING THE OECD QUESTIONNAIRE
REVIEW OF CAREER GUIDANCE POLICIES
REPORT
Sweden - May 2002
N.B The views expressed in this document are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of Sweden or Cedefop. This text has been written by a non-native English speaker and has not been subject to language revision or editing by Cedefop services.
Authors:
Anders Lovén
Policies for information, guidance and counselling services in Sweden
Dr. Anders Lovén, Malmo University, June 2002
BACKGROUND
In autumn 2000 the OECD’s Education Committee and its Employment, Labour and Social Affairs Committee endorsed a new activity on policies for information, guidance and counselling services. The principal objective of the activity is to understand how the organisation, management and delivery of these services can help to advance some key public policy objectives: for example the provision of lifelong learning for all and active labour market policies.
The OECD devised a questionnaire covering key policy issues in information, guidance and counselling services and types of policy initiatives. It sought basic information on how countries organise, manage and provide information, guidance and counselling services, in order that the context of policy initiatives can be better understood. Fourteen OECD countries have taken part in the review: Australia; Austria; Canada; the Czech Republic; Denmark; Finland; Germany; Ireland; Korea; Luxembourg; the Netherlands; Norway; Spain and the United Kingdom. Each country has completed a detailed national questionnaire, and was visited by a small review team.
At the request of the European Commission Cedefop and the ETF commissioned studies based on the OECD questionnaire to cover those Member States and future Member States which had not participated in the original OECD initiative.
A key definition
The term “information, guidance and counselling services” refers to services intended to assist individuals, of any age and at any point throughout their lives, to make educational, training and occupational choices and to manage their careers. It includes a wide range of activities. For example activities within schools to help students clarify career goals and understand the world of work; personal or group-based assistance with decisions about initial courses of study, courses of vocational training, further education and training, initial job choice, job change, or work force re-entry; computer-based or on-line services to provide information about jobs and careers or to help individuals make career choices; and services to produce and disseminate information about jobs, courses of study and vocational training. It includes services provided to those who have not yet entered the labour force, services to job seekers, and services to those who are employed.
The scope of the questionnaire
The questionnaire, and the OECD activity of which it is a part, focused upon career information, guidance and counselling services: in other words services intended to assist individuals with their career management. These often overlap with other forms of personal services. Job placement, personal counselling, community-based personal mentoring, welfare advice and educational psychology are examples. Frequently these other services are delivered by people who also deliver career information, guidance and counselling. The instructions given in the questionnaire were that where such an overlap existed, these services were to be included when answering the questionnaire. However where separate guidance services existed that do not provide career information, guidance and counselling, these separate services were to be ignored when answering the questionnaire.
Organisation of the questionnaire
The questionnaire was structured in twelve sections:
1: Overview / 7: Delivery settings2: Key goals, influences, issues and initiatives / 8: Delivery methods
3: Policy instruments for steering services / 9: Career information
4: The roles of the stakeholders / 10: Financing
5: Targeting and access / 11: Assuring quality
6: Staffing / 12: The evidence base
Sources and Methodology
Some material has been translated from more formal documents such as guidelines or governmental reports. Most of the text is however, written in a more non-formal way and based upon different sources. The work is mainly in the form of desk-research, which means that the author has collected the data and analysed it. There are a lot of sources to the data and the written ones are mentioned in the references. The author has also performed a lot of interviews with key persons on different levels.
Some information, especially about the educational system and labour market activities, is assembled in the appendix.
Only the author is responsible for the results and conclusions. Finally the author is very grateful to all persons who have shared their knowledge and experiences.
1. Overview
1.1
In Sweden there is a strong tradition of independence amongst the different social service departments, including that of school and education. These different departments form their own goals and are unique in the sense that the government itself has no legislative power over their activity. However, the social service departments are restricted to certain guidelines from their superior ministries but their main work is basically independent, as the majority of their working officials are state employees and not elected representatives. In turn, the social service department of education has a number of different subordinated departments. The departments, which are involved in information, guidance and counselling, are The National Agency for Education (Skolverket) and Swedish National Labour Market Administration (AMV).
However, in recent years there has been a tendency to a greater decentralisation both of the responsibility and of the actual design of public guidance and information. This is due to a number of different factors such as an ideological shift towards a view where decentralised decisions are prioritised. Another reason is the economic depression since the beginning of the nineties, which had an effect on the way local authorities financed and organised guidance and information.
Thus, today the local authorities individually form their services of information, guidance and counselling according to special guidelines and goals set by the department of education, which in turn answers to the government.
It is from these general goals that the local authorities form their own courses of action to achieve educational guidance and job orientation for all students. The local authority is responsible for the comprehensive and upper secondary school as well as adult education, providing the schools with career counsellors and other necessities to achieve the national goals. However the guidance that takes place at university level and other higher education is the local responsibility of each university. Below follows a figure over different counselling arenas in Sweden.
2. Key goals, influences, issues and initiatives
2.1
The main goals and key objectives of guidance and counselling differ considerably between different Swedish ministries. In general, there are two main views upon guidance and information and its basic purpose, those of the educational departments and those of the labour market and its superior departments.
However, there has been a change from a more extensive description of the services of guidance to a more goal-oriented approach. Thus, the former detailed documents have been replaced in favour of more general guidelines and objectives. This decentralisation has given the local authorities and schools greater freedom in how to provide information and guidance but also greater responsibility.
The goals of the compulsory school can be read in LPO ’94 (the curriculum of the compulsory school from 1994) stating that the school should strive to ensure that all pupils should:
“…acquire sufficient knowledge and experience in order to:
· Be able to examine different options and make decisions on questions concerning their own futures,
· Gain insight into their immediate society, its working and cultural life as well as its organisational activities and
· Be informed about opportunities for further education in Sweden and in other countries.”
Guidelines for the activities in compulsory school include:
“…all who work in the school should:
· Act to enrich the school as a learning environment by establishing contacts not only with working, cultural and organisational life but also with other activities outside the school and
· Contribute to working against any restrictions on the pupil’s choice of study or vocation that are based on gender or social or cultural background.
The teacher should:
· Support individual students when choosing further education and
· Assist in establishing contacts with schools that will be receiving the pupils as well as with organisations, companies and others who can help enrich the school’s activities and establish it in the surrounding society.”
As for the direct work of guidance officers and other similar staff the following can be read:
“Student guidance officers and vocational guidance staff or staff performing equivalent tasks should:
· Inform and guide pupils prior to the next stage of their education and vocational education (…) as well as
· Assist the study and vocational guidance efforts of other members of staff.”
In LGF ’96 (a similar curriculum for non compulsory schooling from 1996) the goals are more set on creating an awareness amongst the students, providing them with the tools, information and guidance to make a mature and well-reasoned decision concerning their future.
It says that:
“The School shall strive to ensure that all pupils:
· Develop their self-knowledge and ability for individual study planning,
· Are consciously able to take a standpoint with regard to further studies and vocational orientation on the basis of their overall experience, knowledge and current information,
· Increase their ability to analyse different choices and determine what the consequences of these may be,
· Obtain knowledge of the conditions of working life, especially within their study area, as well as on the opportunities for education, practice etc. in Sweden and other countries,
· Are aware that all vocational areas are changing, as is technical development, changes in civic and vocational life and increased international co-operation. Pupils shall thus understand the need for personal development in their working life.
As the organisation of guidance and information services of the non-compulsory school is a local matter, the guidelines are not as detailed as those of the compulsory school. For example there are no individual guidelines stating the exact role and responsibility of the teacher, the guidance officer etc.
The guidelines state that:
“On the basis of the division of work drawn up by the school head, the staff shall:
· Provide support for the pupils’ choice of education and future work,
· Inform and guide pupils prior to their choice of course, further education and vocational activity and thus work to counteract restrictions based on sex and social or cultural background,
· When providing information and guidance, use the knowledge that exists among the pupils, the school staff and in the immediate society working outside the school,
· In the education use the knowledge and experience from working and civic life that pupils have or obtain during their education,
· Develop links with universities and university colleges as well as with supervisors and others within working life who can contribute to the achievement of the goals of education,
· In education take advantage of contacts with the surrounding community, different organisations, and its working and cultural life and
· Contribute to prospective pupils receiving information on education provided by the school.”
As for higher education such as university level studies, the goals and guidelines are much shorter and abstract stating:
“Students shall be provided the right to educational guidance and job orientation. The universities are obliged to make sure that necessary information about university studies and other higher education is accessible for all those who intend to commence any higher education.”
As this is the only thing mentioned about guidance and counselling in the national curriculum for universities, the provision and management of services can be organised by counsellors, as they think fit. However a view over the organisation of counselling in higher education shows a rather similar picture, summarised in 7.6.
Some differences
As educational departments strive to provide their “customers” with tools and information to accomplish individual self-realisation as their main goal, the labour market offices have a slightly different view upon the purpose of guidance and counselling. This is a view that is marked by general labour market policy meaning that helping people to find out what they really want to do and also how to realise this, is not the only key goal of the guidance officer. However important it may be to find a future that coincides with the persons’ interests this must always be adjusted to being a resource to the labour market.
The Swedish Labour Market Administration (AMV) has the task of translating Swedish labour market policy into practice. In concrete terms, this means:
· providing employment to the unemployed and manpower to employers,
· taking steps to counteract manpower “bottlenecks” in short-handed occupations
· deploying resources on behalf of those who have difficulty in obtaining work
Labour market policy shall also help to overcome the segregation of the sexes in the labour market. The Government and Riksdag (parliament) are AMV’s principals, and as such they decide targets, regulatory systems and funding conditions for labour market policy.
The Employment Service is the core of the operation and AMV’s principal interface with employers and job seekers. AMS is the central authority and as such issues guidelines and instructions to the County labour Boards (21 in number), allocates resources and monitors activities at county level. Each County Labour Board is similarly responsible for the employment offices in its county. Both AMV and the County Labour Boards have Directorates to decide general policy issues. A more graphic description of the tasks is described in Appendix 3.
2.2
The major influences currently shaping national policies for information, guidance and counselling services are numerous. Examples of these are:
· increased decentralisation, giving local authorities a greater freedom to individually shape their own counselling services,
· greater individualism combined with immensely increased freedom of choice in the educational sector making great demands on counsellors,
· a rapid changing labour market where especially new technology play an important role,