Much like other European countries (Assmann & Broschinski, 2021), Denmark has a sizeable group of young people that are neither in education, employment, or training (NEET) (Statistics Denmark, 2023). Denmark simultaneously identifies a lack of vocational professionals resulting in a looming threat of decreased growth (Aarkrog, 2020). At the same time the upper secondary schools struggle with a lack of motivation among students and school refusal (Pless & Katznelson, 2019). These issues became politically intertwined in 2023 as the Minister of Education, Mattias Tesfaye, proposed to make the comprehensive public school more practical and vocationally oriented (Tesfaye, 2023). The proposal was argued to lead to an educational system better accommodating students than is the case today and thus create a more secure future for the individual (Tesfaye, 2023). One of the initiatives in the proposal is the introduction of junior apprenticeships. A junior apprenticeship offers students from grade 7 to 9[1] a reduced school schedule and instead combine school with an internship at a company. The hypothesis is that it will contribute to less school refusal, decrease the risk of students leaving their 9^th grade examinations without plans for further education, and simultaneously prepare students for the future and further education. In this sense, the national proposal seeks to address broader European concerns (Rasmussen & Juul, 2020; Eleveld, Bazzani, De Le Cour & Staszewska, 2022).

Hjørring Municipality has locally experimented with a similar initiative they call prolonged internship for the past four years. The prolonged internship entails students in grade 7 through 9 being able to have as little as an afternoon and as much as multiple days a week where they instead of school go to a local company. The initiative is part of a broader policy in Hjørring Municipality labelled the “Youth Guarantee” (Friche, Enemark & Ydesen, 2021). The policy aims to ensure people under the age of 30 in the municipality avoid a position without education, employment, or training. Hence, it is akin to the European Youth Guarantee (Tosun et al, 2019), but crucially establishes a collaboration between employment and education already at the lower secondary education level. The Hjørring Municipality policy has a constellation of partners from education institutions, the bureaucracy, and companies that guarantee they will take responsibility for young people and helping them on their way (Bolvig, Jeppesen, Kleif, Østergaard, Iversen, Broch-Lips, Jensen and Thodsen, 2019). The prolonged internship is one of the initiatives the partners collaborate on. The aim is, similarly to the recent proposal at the national level, to offer a break from students’ everyday school life, increase students’ motivation, and establish a more secure and certain path for the future at an individual level (Hjørring Municipality, 2023).

This paper therefore takes up the prolonged internship to explore if this is a suitable measure and how this local policy can potentially mitigate national and European issues. The paper is guided by the question: “How are prolonged internships in a Danish municipality enacted and what potential does it have to mitigate European issues in education and employment?”. The paper relies on focus group interviews with students, parents, companies, and the relevant staff surrounding them and explores the question through the concept of policy enactment as an analytical lens.

[1] In the Danish education system tracking occurs quite late in students’ schooling career, namely following the 9^th grade final examinations. This has been the norm since 1975 where the comprehensive public school was unified and means grades 8 and 9 primarily are when students must consider their future education trajectory.

The paper applies policy enactment theory as an analytical lens (Ball, Maguire, Braun & Hoskins, 2011; Braun, Ball, Maguire & Hoskins, 2011). This stems from a recognition that it is insufficient to reduce policy to the implementation’s adherence to policy, but rather grasping that policy is made and remade in social interactions, namely when policy is interpretated, translated, and enacted. Those with policy in their hands therefore become policy actors and are charged with the process of interpreting policy and translating it to their context, which means policy actors include teachers and other staff in and around the schools explored in the paper. However, we also conceptualize students and their parents as being policy actors in the enactment because they participate in the negotiations of how the policy of prolonged internships unfold (Bosseldal, Blennow & Malmström, 2022). Hence, the paper focuses less on the formal intentions of the policy on prolonged internships, but instead on how prolonged internships are translated and enacted in the municipality as well as which issues are potentially mitigated as a result. This lens enables us to explore how local policy is changed, adapted to local contexts and the individual student, in addition to recognizing the agency of all actors involved. The paper relies on extensive interview material, namely 68 focus group interviews with a range of actors. These interviews have been collected as a part of a larger longitudinal project, where we have explored the Hjørring Municipality Youth Guarantee, albeit this paper will exclusively focus on the theme of prolonged internships. The interviews used in this paper have been conducted from 2020 through 2023 with a diverse group of actors involved in the prolonged internship initiative, namely teachers, guidance counselors, school leaders, companies, parents, and students. The transcribed interviews have been thematically coded in Nvivo, where we have focused on how prolonged internships are respectively translated and enacted. We do this to further explore which issues the internships mitigate. The analysis is therefore structured by an initial part focusing on translation followed by a part focusing on the enactment. This leads to a discussion concerning the mitigation of local, but also the potential national and European, issues.

The expected outcomes of the paper revolve around how the prolonged internships as an element of the Youth Guarantee policy is translated and enacted in the institutional school context, and how insights from this local experiment can serve to inform educational research and policy at the national as well as the European level. We aim to highlight the educational political dilemmas and barriers inherent in the initiative, where the policy contains local-political aims but simultaneously seeks to be beneficial for the individual student and their future educational aspirations and path. Namely the dilemma of wanting to offer the students flexible education solutions suiting their needs and local context, while simultaneously closing off opportunities for certain educations in the broader Danish education system. The paper seeks to contribute to discussions about policymaking at different levels, bottom-up policy development, how different policy actors receive, perceive, and use policy to achieve their personal and professional objectives, and how equitable education is recoded and offered as solutions to perceived national issues within education.

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