After years of marginalisation, the educational guidance started to have a leading role in the Spanish educational system, thanks to progress made in terms of legislation ended with code 2/2006, which has included educational and professional guidance as a fundamental principle of the Spanish educational system. As a result, nowadays, the quality of education is deeply affected by educational guidance.

Although it has achieved its own legal recognition, young people still ask for an educational guidance service, especially among secondary schools, where youngsters want to discover their skills to be ready for the work market. For these reasons, Mad For Europe has decided to talk about educational guidance to be a useful orientation tool for young people.

Specifically, educational guidance consists of several phases:

1. An initial assessment to take all the information about the student in order to establish the right communication strategy for him/her, thanks to the support of teachers and parents

2. A period of knowledge to understand each side of the student’s personality

3. A diagnostic phase in order to recognise passions, academic performance and learning methods of the student

4. A predictive phase to establish how a guidance counsellor could help the student, in light of all the information about him/her

5. An orientation phase, which is divided into:

• a. Counselling stage: analysis of the student’s data in order to help him/her to discover the strengths and weaknesses
• b. Therapeutical stage: introduction of strategies finalised to change some attitudes of the student, where he/she needs most to change
• c. Investigation and evaluation stage: verification of the eventual success of the strategy

Objectives:

• Helping to contain the early school drop-out, trying to increase the quality of education ensuring a school continuity

• Supporting students to discover their strengths and weaknesses so they could make a self-evaluation to reinforce their self-confidence

• Helping students to make decisions on their own

• Guiding students to find the right study method, which can help them to define interests and desires about school and work market

• Supporting students to deeply know the work market, professions and occupations, in order to debunk stereotypes about jobs.

In order to achieve these objectives, the educational guidance needs, of course, the help of students’ families, since the family has a huge role in sons-raising.

Activities:

Some activities will be:

– Self-orientation for students in order to help them to find their own way

– Analysis of professions and occupations in order to support students to discover which job would be right for their competences

– Orientation office for grades three students and their families

From the activities’ results, eventually, each student could ask for a face-to-face interview in order to find his/her own path, if he/she will be not satisfied enough.

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