EXPECTED RESULTS

The project set up the general objective to contribute to the empowerment of EU Strategies (and, for some aspects, also the National Strategies) through the research, study and experimentation of conditions for the re-qualification of operators in the Educational and Vocational Training Systems involved in national initiatives of alternation training, in function of both the problems of restructuring and of organization of the systems themselves, as well as of innovation of approaches and vocation training processes.
Consequently to this objective, the project is operatively developed through an organic sequence of transnational exchanges, contributions and interventions able to involve the wide group of EU partners of the initiative.
The STOP &RESTART project is meant to research an answer - obviously partial and delimited, but necessarily coherent - to the problem highlighted as well as to some questions connected to it, as, for example:
Are we today able to know which politics and operative devices have been put in action in the various Countries Partners in order to promote innovative training formulas for school-work alternation training which could result as alternative to traditional ones?  

And are we able to comprehend the main background references (normative, laws, reforms, guidelines, support initiatives for training experimentation, etc...) ?

But, above all, are we able to share these analysis and to transfer either the activated procedures, either the eventual good praxis - diffusible in protocols and shared interventions - able to facilitate innovation and to give orientation to national perspectives within the framework of National and EU Strategies?

Even though remaining within the foreseen support to guidance and vocational training in the within of the school staff and vocational training staff, the project hypothesis introduces, under several profiles, elements strongly innovative since:

• do not limit itself to the production of one or more operative "handbooks" as the result of a pure and simple collection, even though reasoned, of the various meaningful practices experienced or proposed by the Country partner;
• it maintains the constant attention - beyond the direct the project beneficiaries - to its indirect beneficiaries, the young people and the adults in training (either if it is institutional training or widelife learning ) not placing the objective to offer solutions for "rescue learning", or of deuxième chance, for young people in difficulty or drop out, but meaning to offer to the operators involved in vocational training in alternation, tools in order to guide choices of more flexible pathways functional, and of equal substantial dignity regarding those traditional ones;
• consequently, it does not stretch to interpret the spaces of alternation training as a "shortcut " towards the labour market, rather than to consider them as innovative experiences to be placed side by side - and not below- to the traditional pathways, for those who feel, for their own attitudes, much more inclined towards a more experimental learning. Such experiences are characterized for the fact to have their start-up and their leading line in the practical experience; for succeeding contextually to realize a vocational training completeness also on the cultural and theoretical plan, so as to supply a product equally competitive, and perceived as really equivalent or even more attractive than those traditional ones, expendable in training terms and/or professional ones.

Wishing to converge on the central nucleus of the problem, the expected result is to highlight - in defining innovative frameworks of operative guidance and support for alternation training operators (teachers, trainers, tutors, etc.)- the wide and different composition of the methodological and organizational systems realized or experimented in the transnational contexts that demonstrated to be able to support quality vocational training processes through flexible and functional learning pathways.
It will have, therefore, to be aimed to extract from the alternation training devices, which find their conducting guidelines in the work experience, a dignity of results and outcomes, that, even though alternative on the plan of the theoretical and cultural learning, should be much more close, in terms of level, to those ones of the traditional pathways.
The acknowledgment in the transnational dimension of politics and of operative formulas that can totally satisfy these objectives is surely not so easy, as the difficulties met, also in recent times, in the attempts of giving a functional coherence to innovative methods and tools for the appraisal and certification of non-institutional learning experiences have demonstrated, specially in absence of organizational as well as of methodological guidelines strongly supported and shared.