20.500.12556/DKUM-90132 Dreams and realities of school tracking and vocational education School tracking has been introduced as a means to provide skills the labor market demands, and as such has been in place for several decades in most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. The time is thus ripe for a critical review of the effects this has had on the equalities in education and opportunities later in life, and on the quality of vocational education in general. A synthesis of the existing literature reveals gaping holes between the dreams of superior vocational education and training that educational tracking ought to deliver, and the realities of lost opportunities and facilitated inequalities, especially in students with poor socioeconomic background, weak social capital, and sparse social networks. This is all the more true the sooner educational tracking comes into effect. While most OECD countries will start tracking students aged 15 or 16, some countries, such as Germany, will start doing this as early as age 10. Our review shows that this can have catastrophic consequences for students that for various reasons perform poorly early on, as they are indeed unable to recover due to the Matthew effect and preferential attachment in social networks, both of which punish false starts in life and reward first movers. To remedy the situation, we propose educational tracking be held off until later in life, and even then be undertaken with flexibility and late bloomers in mind. We also propose to restructure vocational education by decreasing the degree of curriculum differentiation, by allowing broader vocational education curricula, and by decreasing the number of training occupations in order to account for the changing labor market dynamics. vocational education network preferential attachment educational system poklicna izobrazba omrežje preferenčno povezovanje izobraževalni sistem true true true Palgrave Macmillan Angleški jezik Slovenski jezik Znanstveno delo 2024-08-23 04:14:28 2024-09-17 13:29:31 2025-02-01 03:19:31 0000-00-00 00:00:00 2020 0 0 Str. 1-7 št. članka 34 Letn. 6 2020 0000-00-00 Zaloznikova Objavljeno apc 2019-10-19 2020-02-12 2020-02-28 53 25154824 10.1057/s41599-020-0409-4 2055-1045 Ozer-2020-Dreams_and_realities_of_school_track.pdf Ozer-2020-Dreams_and_realities_of_school_track.pdf 1 7B47C2B0C1584DB4FE5391BCAE51D978 34ca2360a0eb6416c256d2f08f26068bd54c4fcb5fc07e722aea6c3a6ce38583 8450c7e7-dfc9-11ef-ae92-00155d000105 https://dk.um.si/Dokument.php?lang=slv&id=188374 https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-0409-4 0 901c344e-dfc9-11ef-ae92-00155d000105 https://dk.um.si/Dokument.php?lang=slv&id=188375 Fakulteta za naravoslovje in matematiko 0 0 0