Youth unemployment is a serious problem in Spain. Unemployment rates are much higher than in most European countries. The same applies to early school leaving, where the Spanish rate is more than double of the average European rate.

While Vocational Education and Training policies have improved in the past decades, apprenticeships have been out of the debate, and the involvement of social agents is scarce in this regard. The fiscal crisis has had a negative impact also on social bargaining and apprenticeships are once more an arena for confrontation: employers demand cheap labour while trade unions resist apprenticeships to be used to replace qualified workforce.

Several solutions have been raised in the  past years: training contratcts, the reintroduction of apprenticeships, plans against early school leaving that include measures to facilitate access to Vocational Education and Training, introduction and expansion of distance Vocational Education and Training among others.

The authors of the paper have studied in the past three years all of these measures, and two of them have been members of a network set up by the European Social Fund Unit in Spain in order to address measures against early school leaving at postcompulsory level. Within this network, we have known the positions of most of the social actors at different levels: state wide, regional as well as local. These actors vary from ministerial staff to employer and union representatives, students and parents associations, regional administrations, municipalities as well as Non-Governmental Organisations, as well as individual schools.

We have also known several experiences developed by administrations, employers, schools and Non-Governmental Organisations that provide some form of other of Vocational Education and Training to young people who have left the system or who are at risk of leaving it.

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