Linking Schools and Workplaces: Lessons from Australia and Overseas.

Efforts to link schools and workplaces in Australia, Sweden, and elsewhere were examined to identify preconditions and effective strategies for linking school to work in Australia. An Australian program that combines applied, contextualized learning structured according to industry standards with students' general education was shown to produce graduates with higher rates of participation in postsecondary education and lower unemployment rates than nonuniversity-bound completers of other secondary education programs. The relative ease with which Japanese and German students make the transition from school to work was attributed to three factors: employers value academic skills and invest in efforts to develop them; work-bound students exert effort because school performance is relevant to their future careers; and teachers have authority to give students access to jobs and to give employers dependable student evaluations. Special attention was paid to the operation and effectiveness of Sweden's new system of upper secondary education, which is based on an implicit partnership between employers and the state and which views enterprises and schools as co-educators and divides the curriculum between workplaces and schools. Links between schools and business were found to be strong in some industries such as construction and wood technology but weak in others, and resourcing was identified as a continuing problem. (Contains 11 references.) (MN)