Conference Agenda

Topic and Research Question

VET systems across Europe are under pressure to secure educational participation, reduce inequalities, support training completion, and facilitate labour market integration. These expectations arise amid growing learner heterogeneity, psychosocial strain, language support needs, demographic change, and persistent risks of exclusion.

This paper addresses support courses in Swiss vocational education and training as a case for analysing school-based support measures as instruments of inclusion-oriented governance. Support courses have been legally anchored in Switzerland since 1978 and were originally introduced mainly as compensatory support for learners with weaker academic performance. Over time, their function has expanded towards broader support, including language support, learning strategies, individual guidance, and psychosocial stabilisation.

The paper addresses the following research question:

How can support courses in vocational education and training be conceptualised as instruments of inclusion-oriented governance, and which multi-level conditions shape their contribution to inclusive educational participation?

Aim and Conceptual/Theoretical Framework

The aim is to reconstruct the historical development of support courses in Swiss VET and to situate this development within a European perspective on inclusive support architectures. The paper analyses support courses not as additional pedagogical provision, but as institutionally embedded support measures at the intersection of policy, school organisation, professional practice, and learner participation.

The study applies a multi-level perspective. At the macro level, it examines legal anchoring, governance arrangements, responsibilities, and institutional frameworks. At the meso level, it analyses school-level implementation, curricular embedding, access and referral procedures, professionalisation, and cooperation between learning venues. At the micro level, it considers learner access, pedagogical support processes, participation opportunities, and risks of stigmatisation.

The conceptual framework combines multi-level approaches in educational and comparative VET research, governance perspectives on coordination and institutional steering, and a broad understanding of inclusion as participation-oriented access to and retention within VET.

On this basis, the paper develops an analytical framework for understanding support courses as part of inclusion-oriented support architectures. This framework highlights target-group definitions, access logics, institutional embedding, curricular integration, professionalisation, learning venue cooperation, quality assurance, and destigmatisation.

International Dimension and Preliminary Results

The international dimension is central to the paper. The Swiss case is analysed in relation to inclusive support architectures in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, and England. This comparative perspective shows that support in VET is not organised according to a single model, but is framed, governed, and legitimised differently across national contexts.

The historical document analysis shows a shift in Switzerland from a deficit-oriented tutoring logic towards a broader and more inclusion-oriented support logic. Support courses increasingly respond to heterogeneous learner needs and are no longer limited to subject-related remediation.

The comparative analysis identifies commonalities and differences across European support architectures. Key dimensions include target-group definitions, access procedures, institutional responsibilities, curricular embedding, professionalisation, cooperation between learning venues, quality assurance, and destigmatising communication. In Switzerland, support courses are strongly anchored in law, while their implementation depends on cantonal regulations, school-level room for manoeuvre, and local resources.

Contribution and Conclusion

This paper provides added value for VET research and educational policy. Conceptually, it offers a multi-level analytical framework for understanding support courses as instruments of inclusion-oriented governance within broader support architectures. Empirically, it shows how historical and comparative document analysis can reveal conditions under which support measures contribute to participation, equity, and training completion.

The paper contributes to the European debate on how VET systems can respond to heterogeneity, psychosocial strain, demographic change, and labour-market-related demands. It argues that support courses should not be understood as isolated remedial measures, but as institutionally embedded forms of support mediating between policy objectives, school practice, and learner needs.

Contemporary European societies are confronted with multiple, overlapping crises that demand profound transformations. Technological and digital innovation, the pursuit of sustainable equilibria, climate change and shifting global geopolitical dynamics, demographic transformations — these phenomena interact with one another, generating challenging scenarios and new vulnerabilities. Such dynamics call existing institutions and organisational structures into question, prompting the search for new rules and unprecedented forms of balance.

In this “age of disorder”, education and training are frequently invoked as instruments capable of supporting individuals in navigating ongoing transformations, in a twofold sense: as a transformative tool that fosters the exploration and experimentation of new solutions; and as a means of strengthening resilience, helping individuals—particularly the most vulnerable—adapt to the changing contexts in which they must operate.

Attention to the most vulnerable groups, who are disproportionately affected by the negative consequences of current transformations, is one of the key motivations behind an ongoing study on training policies adopted by European countries to address the challenges facing contemporary societies. The study focuses on several European countries—France, Germany, England, Italy and Spain—and examines in depth their adult learning and training policies. The analytical lens adopted is that of inequalities and the role that training policies may play in:

• countering individual and social inequalities, particularly among low-skilled adults.
• reducing territorial disparities, understood in the various ways they manifest across the countries examined: disparities between macro-regions (North–South; East–West), between large urban agglomerations and rural areas, and between residential areas and disadvantaged neighbourhoods.
• addressing the challenge of the twin transition.
• supporting transitions in individuals’ professional and life pathways, including through the establishment of an individual right to continuous and lifelong learning.

The findings emerging thus far highlight a significant commitment to adult learning policies across all countries, reflected in a wide range of projects and initiatives. These are increasingly characterised by the experimentation of approaches designed to engage, above all, the most vulnerable user groups. In the most advanced cases, the focus on vulnerable adults gives rise to initiatives grounded in cooperative and multidimensional approaches, involving networks of public and private actors entrusted with supporting individuals in a holistic manner. This support is provided through outreach activities and the provision of integrated services—training, employment guidance, and socio‑health interventions—that can transform diverse individual difficulties (economic, health-related, care responsibilities, motivational issues, etc.) into opportunities for re-entry into the labour market. Relevant examples of such approaches can be found in nearly all the countries analysed, albeit with national specificities.

Catastrophes that affect society, such as pandemics or wars, create obstacles to organizing and participating in education. While the pandemic boosted the development of online education, the effects of other catastrophes on education, such as the war caused by Russian aggression against Ukraine, and how the resulting obstacles can be overcome, have received less attention. Higher education institutions (HEIs) in Ukraine have suffered substantial damage to their infrastructure and disruption to their operations as a result of Russian aggression, which has reduced their ability to provide high-quality education and practical training. Institutions of vocational teacher education (VTE) have been particularly affected, as destroyed or inaccessible facilities hinder the organisation of supervision and hands-on learning. Displacement of students and teachers, and obstacles to participation in education, have impacted their motivation and emotional state (Lavrysh et al., 2022; Grunyuk et al., 2023; Kurapov et al., 2023). Despite the operational challenges, Ukraine has initiated VET reforms guided by the 2017 Law “On Education” emphasizing decentralization, institutional autonomy, and competency-based learning (Deißinger, & Melnyk, 2024).

The concept of learning loss, along with related terms such as the learning gap, qualification gap, academic gap, and achievement gap, has been studied in order to understand the underlying factors that cause certain individuals and groups to learn less.

Based on previous research, it is important to differentiate between educational deficits and learning loss. The former is a broader term that refers to any discrepancy between expected and actual learning, whether due to inadequate instruction or a lack of opportunity to learn the materials in the first place (Human Rights Watch, 2016; Patton, Davis & Museus, 2019; Mitchell & Greer, 2022). An educational deficit can manifest as underachievement in relation to the standards and benchmarks set for a given year group. It can also manifest as a lack of foundational skills necessary for subsequent learning, creating cumulative learning gaps when earlier gaps remain unaddressed. In contrast, learning loss refers to a specific or general decline in knowledge and skills, or a reversal in academic progress, which is typically caused by prolonged interruptions to the educational process. This can happen when learning does not take place due to school closures or when learners are not actively engaged with educational institutions, causing them to forget previously acquired knowledge (Azevedo et al., 2021; Nath, 2024).

This study aims to improve understanding of how learning loss caused by societal disruption, such as war resulting from another country’s aggression (like that experienced by Ukraine at the hands of Russia), can be addressed in education.

1) Based on previous studies, the following research questions have been identified: 1) How is learning loss conceptualised in the literature on crisis-affected post-compulsory education? and 2) What kinds of pedagogical and institutional responses are described?