The final presentation and consultation at the end of the Community Based Guidance Assistance Project

On 23 October the final presentation and consultation at the end of the Community Based Guidance Assistance Project within the Leonardo da Vinci Programme was held in Ljubljana on the premises of the Employment Service of Slovenia. Around 60 participants attended including the members of the project group from six participating countries, two prominent experts on careers guidance, Prof. Tony Watts from Great Britain and Prof. John McCarthy from Ireland, representatives of the Slovenian Ministry of Labour, Family and Social Affairs and of the Ministry of Education and Science as well as the representatives of other Slovenian institutions on education, employment and vocational guidance.

Within the CBGA Project Slovenia collaborated as a partner country with Great Britain; also involved were Ireland and Greece whose partners were Bulgaria and Portugal respectively. The wider objective of the project was to link formal and informal ways for preventing social exclusion of young people and young adults.

As a sub-project, with the ESS participated as a partner institution, there was a programme of training for mentors working with groups of young school dropouts who are often without proper formal education. The training programme contains elements of vocational guidance in particular and will receive the Open College certificate.

Apart from the partner countries the CBGA project included the experts Prof. Tony Watts and Prof. John McCarthy who at the end of the project in Ljubljana described the latest trends in the development of careers and vocational guidance. Prof. John McCarthy, who is the director of the Irish National Centre for Guidance in Education (NCGE), gave a lecture on vocational guidance from the European perspective and Prof. Tony Watts, who is the director of the National Institute for Careers Education and Counselling (NICEC) in Great Britain, on vocational guidance and social exclusion.

The participants visited the Vocational Information and Counselling Centre (VICC) and the Slovenian National Resource Centre for Vocational Guidance (NRCVG) in Ljubljana.