H.14. Lifelong Guidance Against Social Inequalities: Toward Integrated Policies

Career guidance plays a crucial role in shaping social inequalities. It significantly impacts educational paths, the school-to-work transition, and an individual's entire working life. Proper guidance can prevent students from dropping out, help young people find jobs that match their potential, and support workers through career changes and adult education.

Despite its importance, we are far from having integrated policies that enable lifelong guidance. This includes the continuous acquisition of career management skills and access to decoded information on training and the labour market. This lack of integration is largely due to fragmented guidance services and poor coordination between the institutional systems responsible for it. For example, in Italy, there is not coordination effort between the ministries overseeing education and universities, and the ministry in charge of active labour market policies and the regions.

This panel seeks contributions exploring the following dimensions, from a sociological, pedagogical, psychological, philosophical, political science perspective. Scientific contributions, both in theory and empirical research, related to the following issues will be considered:

• Studies and research on the role of guidance in creating or preventing lifelong inequalities.
• How the three guidance areas (school, school-to-work transition, employment) interact. What their common grounds and specificities are.
• What the current state and evolution of the relationship between the different institutional systems at European, Italian, and local levels is. The relevant European best practices that can be mentioned.
• The approaches (e.g., capability, human rights-based, etc.) that can best frame the concept of lifelong guidance.