The purpose of the CVE study is to find out how schools collaborate with businesses in order to provide a better environment for their students to improve their performances and have better future career prospects. Corporate Volunteering is an important way of linking willing and skilled professional people to organisations, such as charities and schools. Corporate volunteers are paid employees who are supported by their employer to do voluntary work, usually in company time.
There is wide agreement that our future prosperity depends acutely on increasing the skills and knowledge of the working population. The curriculum changes now being introduced engage employers to help young people develop the professional skills that allow them to prosper in the new economy and achieve more by exposure to different and potentially more motivating styles of learning. Partnership with employers can bring new perspective to subjects for both students and their teachers, as employers can bring with them a deep subject knowledge and broader range of theoretical and applied experience. Inclusion of employer input into subject delivery can allow teachers to offer their students a wider range of teaching and learning styles.
Opportunities to work with employers will give students insights into the types of skills that are needed in the workplace both generically and specifically. Involvement of employers in the curriculum will allow students to develop their functional skills and personal learning and thinking skills with closer reference to the requirements of employers. Teaching staff can also make use of relationships between schools and employers to keep their professional skills up to date. Employers in industrial sectors relevant to subject specialism can provide opportunities to make it easy for teaching staff to understand the economic world into which their students will ultimately emerge. This can lead to the inclusion of high levels of theoretical and practical knowledge in the materials. Furthermore, employers will provide a wider range of subject expertise and experience, resulting in high levels of theoretical and practical knowledge and a greater variety of approaches to creating the material.
The most important problem is: how to involve employers in school life? The best way is by VOLUNTEERING, because volunteering has a great, but so far underexploited potential, in many EU Member States, for the social and economic development of Europe. Special role o in this area is Corporate Volunteering. Many companies consider volunteering part of their overall business plan. The corporate employees-volunteers perform activities of different types, according to their skills and talents, while the companies they work for support this type of involvement depending on their organisational culture: they send employees to work as volunteers during working hours (as opposed to lunch breaks, which is more common), provide material aid, logistic and financial support. But schools management do not have sufficient knowledge about these possibilities. Implementing volunteering in schools through Corporate Volunteering is a new concept and should be more known in schools.
The CVE methodology helps to outline problems and to find possible solutions and news ways of cooperation between schools and businesses. It is based on involving the target groups in the following activities:
- A survey on the awareness concerning the cooperation between schools and the world of the work and Corporate Volunteering idea among trainers, teachers of teachers, school leaders, teachers and other personnel in secondary schools.
- Finding good practices in the area of cooperation between schools and the world of the work including Corporate Volunteering in the partner countries.
- Developing a training course for school leaders, teachers and other school personnel concerning the methods and ways of cooperation between schools and the world of the work by using the idea of Corporate Volunteering.
The trainer’s guide could be used by trainers and teachers of teachers to instruct school leaders, teachers and other personnel of secondary schools on the methods of transferring the Corporate Volunteering idea from business and the world of work to secondary schools.
The main results of the study are:
In all researched countries a high percentage of schools collaborate with companies (52,70%) (not only with volunteering) while in 48,70% this collaboration do not exist. The support to vocational training for students is the most extended way of collaboration between companies and schools (31,80% of the cases). A high percentage of the schools surveyed used more than one way of collaboration. Studying the reason why the schools do not cooperate with companies the participants mainly referred that they do not have the chance but they think that the collaboration could be usefulness for their schools: 53,00%. A significant number of them (38,20%) referred that they find interesting the collaboration but they do not how achieve it. Moreover, schools are aware of the potential benefits corporate volunteering can bring. The perception that this collaboration may allow a more direct relationship between companies and schools is very high (30.00%). 22.70% of schools consider that the implementation of CVE programs allow a good framework for increasing students’ knowledge and allows schools to establish partnerships with the companies of these volunteers (20,30%). Employees who participate as volunteers are more motivated and more involved in school (9,80%) and CVE is useful to improve the knowledge of the schools professionals about the world of business (11,00%).
CVE programs help to enrich the activities of counselors working in schools and strengthen cooperation between secondary schools and regional companies, to match the curriculum of the schools better with the demands labor market.
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