Factors Influencing the Use of Quality Assurance Data in German (I)VET for the Health Care Sector

Abstract

In Germany, VET is mainly organised according to the ‘Dual System’, meshing theoretical education at school and practical instruction at the workplace. Dual apprenticeships in Germany exist in nearly all branches of the economy including the professions and parts of the civil service. Every year, about 600,000 adolescents enter the dual system (for figures see Bundesministerium fur Bildung und Forschung 2007: 11). All in all, more than 1.8 million young people – with a female share of 41.5% – are learning their trades through the Dual System. Apprentices come from different educational backgrounds although most have at least an intermediate or lower secondary school certificate. About 17% of all people beginning an apprenticeship in 2006 had been entitled to go to university as well (BMBF 2007: 104). The German Dual System is primarily an alternating training structure – which means that training takes place in a company providing the apprenticeship as well as in a compulsory vocational part-time school (which accounts for one to two days of the weekly training provision). This alternating structure aims at combining two guiding principles genuine to VET in its German interpretation. First, VET is seen as an education, comprising not only skills and capacities, but the idea of education being part of a developmental process leading to an autonomous individual (Brown and Evans 1994). In 1991, this idea was specified by the Standing Conference of the Lander’s ministers of education as ‘being able to be actively involved in shaping the world of work in social and ecological responsibility’. Curricula of German VET schools have to address this aim. Second, the German system is rooted in an ‘occupation orientated’, or genuine ‘vocational’ training culture; vocationalism in the German meaning of the term