The book analyses educational trajectories of young people in eight European countries: Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovenia and the United Kingdom. Chapters explore interactions between structural and institutional contexts of educational trajectories, the individual meaning attached to education and the strategies adopted by young people to cope with its demands. The book also analyses the decision-making processes of individual students, placing them firmly within the social contexts of their families, local schools, national education systems and welfare states, as well as transnational policy contexts.

In considering educational disadvantage, the book is based on primary, cross-national research with systematic analysis of the different themes addressed. As every chapter is co-authored by two or three researchers, each based in a different country, the book goes beyond the usual country-based chapter design to provide an enriched insight into both comparative theory and research methods.

Bilbliographic info: Walther, Andreas; Parreira do Amaral, Marcelo; Cuconato, Morena; Dale, Roger (Eds.) (2016): Governance of Educational Trajectories in Europe: Pathways, Policy and Practice. London, New Delhi, New York, Sidney: Bloomsbury. ISBN: 978-1-4725-8952-1

More information at the publisher's website: www.bloomsbury.com/uk/governance-of-educational-trajectories-in-europe-9781472589521/

This book discusses how the ways that young people’s educational trajectories into and beyond lower secondary education are regulated can influence their future lives. It draws on the results of empirical studies in eight European countries: Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Slovenia and the United Kingdom (England and Northern Ireland), carried out under the EU-funded GOETE project. The book explores the different ways that educational trajectories are – actively or passively – conceptualised, negotiated and organised in the individual countries, and the ways that these shape educational opportunities and life chances. Its central aims are to elaborate the different ways in which educational trajectories are governed in the eight countries, and to compare the differences between those approaches and their outcomes in the eight countries. It focuses on the relationships between the different (national and local) forms and outcomes of interactions between collective and individual actors, structures, institutions, mechanisms, and discourses that exert influence on education policy and practice at various levels: inter- and trans-national, nation-state, regional, local or school levels.

Marcelo Parreira do Amaral, Roger Dale & Patricia Loncle (eds) (2015): Shaping the Futures of Young Europeans - education governance in eight European countries. Oxford: Symposium Books.

ISBN 978-1-873927-62-5

More information about the book at Symposium Books.

The report including an executive summary is available from the OECD's Online Library.