Apprenticeships are considered an effective way to prepare young people for the labour market because they provide a realistic experience of working life during upper secondary education. Research shows that countries with strong apprenticeship systems, such as Germany, Switzerland or Norway, tend to have a smoother transition to the labour market and lower youth unemployment than others (OECD & ILO, 2017). However, in many countries with apprenticeship-based vocational education and training (VET), young people struggle to gain access to apprenticeships. This is also the case in Norway, where this study is situated. Every year, between 7000 and 9000 young people are left without an apprenticeship; the majority of them are legally entitled to upper secondary education (Utdanningsdirektoratet, 2019). VET in Norway comprises two years of mainly school-based education followed by two years of apprenticeship in a company (known as 2 + 2 model). This means that young people in Norway do not normally start apprenticeship training before completing two years of school-based VET. Therefore, upper secondary schools play a crucial role in preparing young people for trade-specific apprenticeships – and they may play a critical role in the placement process.

The main formal responsibility for the apprenticeship placement process lies with regional educational authorities (county municipalities). Yet, the typical employer-owned training agencies, who relieve the companies of administrative tasks, and the upper secondary schools play very important roles in mobilising new apprenticeships and establishing contact between applicants and training companies. However, according to the Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training, poor cooperation in the placement process is one of the main barriers to accessing apprenticeships (Utdanningsdirektoratet, 2019). This raises the question of cooperation between the different actors, namely, vocational teachers, employers and representatives of training agencies, which is in the focus of our multi-method collaboration project. In this particular study, we are interested in the distinct role of vocational teachers, and, specifically, their sense of responsibility for students’ transition to apprenticeship. Formally, vocational teachers are not responsible for ensuring that students have an apprenticeship after the second year of VET in schools; this responsibility lies with the students themselves. Yet, vocational teachers are responsible for preparing students for the transition to apprenticeship, which, in general, includes preparation in terms of vocational subjects according to the curriculum, support in finding internships in the first two years of school and support in the apprenticeship application process (e.g. writing CV and applications). However, the role of vocational teachers can be described as diffuse, as there are hardly any formal requirements specifying what is expected of them in preparing students for apprenticeship training. Considering vocational teachers’ key role in students’ transition to apprenticeship, depicting their experiences is crucial. Therefore, in this study, we ask the following research question: How do vocational teachers experience their responsibility for students’ transition to apprenticeship?

The study is based on theoretical perspectives on boundary crossing, e.g. teachers as “boundary workers” (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011) and teachers’ sense of responsibility (Lauermann & Karabenick, 2011). Teachers’ sense of responsibility refers to “a sense of internal obligation and commitment to produce or prevent designated outcomes or that these outcomes should have been produced or prevented” (Lauermann & Karabenick (2011, p. 127). In our study, teachers’ sense of responsibility is related to students’ transition from the school-based part of VET to apprenticeship, and, more specifically, to ensuring that students succeed in finding an apprenticeship place. The study represents a contribution to vocational teachers work at the boundary of school and work and a supplement to studies on, for example, vocational teachers agency in boundary-crossing settings (Vähäsantanen et al., 2009).

The study is part of a large multi-method collaboration project on students transition from the school-based part of VET to apprenticeship training. The study is conducted with regional educational authorities in two counties in Norway, and three different sub-projects look into the roles of the different actors in the apprenticeship placement process. Our particular study is based on qualitative interviews with 37 vocational teachers (25 male, 12 female) from two counties and three different vocational programmes. We used a combination of focus group interviews (9 groups with 2 to 5 teachers, 27 teachers in total) and individual in-depth interviews (10 teachers). The teachers were recruited from schools in two counties in Norway and from three different vocational programmes: electrical power, health work and sales and tourism. The interviews were conducted between April and October 2024 at the schools where the teachers worked. The teachers were interviewed with the help of a semi-structured interview guide comprising questions about how they prepare students for working life, how they support them in finding an apprenticeship place, how they understand their role during this process and how they collaborate and co-operate with other stakeholders. While the focus group interviews were mainly related to teachers’ work at the school level, the individual interviews with teachers supplemented this information with teachers’ personal understanding of their role at the boundary of school and work. Qualitative method triangulation is advocated as a strategy to achieve more comprehensive understandings of phenomena, as the data may be similar, different or complementary (Lambert & Loiselle, 2008). Thus, a combination of focus groups and individual interviews was chosen to strengthen the validity of our data. The interviews were analysed following the principles of reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022). Based on the codes that we generated during the first steps of the analytical process, we are currently working to divide the study participants into different groups, based on different ways in which they related to their sense of responsibility for students’ transition to apprenticeship. The aim of the analytical process is to generate a typology (e.g. Halkier, 2011), related to their sense of responsibility for students’ transition to apprenticeship.

Findings indicate that the teachers in our study have different understandings of their role as “boundary workers” during students’ transition to apprenticeship, and they differ in how they experience and describe their sense of responsibility for students’ success in finding an apprenticeship. As per our current work, study participants were divided into three different groups, related to how they experience their sense of responsibility for students’ transition to apprenticeship training. The first group of teachers may be described as “the relational teachers”. These teachers go to great lengths to support students during the process of finding an apprenticeship, and they would, as an example, drive students to the practice location to make sure they find their way or call the students after the internship days to ask them what they have experienced. In addition, these teachers stated that it would be hard for them if they were unable to find an apprenticeship for everyone. A second group of teachers can be labelled “the pragmatic teachers”. Similarly to the first group of teachers, these teachers stated that they were genuinely interested in students’ lives. However, they also clearly expressed that it was not their responsibility to ensure an educational solution for every student. The third group of teachers struggled to find their role during students’ transition to apprenticeship, and they described how they felt torn between a sense of responsibility for students’ educational success and a feeling of discomfort about the responsibility they experienced. These teachers are labelled “the struggling teachers”. We are currently working to refine our analysis and to gain a more in-depth understanding of vocational teachers’ sense of responsibility for students’ transition to apprenticeship training. Final findings will be presented at the conference, where we will also discuss the relevance of our findings for different educational contexts.

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