From school to work: enhancing cross-cutting competences in vocational education outcomes

Vocational education and training (VET) is expected to facilitate a smoother school-to-work transition compared to general secondary education. However, the transition often proves difficult, influenced by plethora of regional and institutional factors. Vocational schools in underdeveloped regions, for example, tend to demonstrate comparatively weaker outcomes than those in more developed areas, highlighting the critical role of regional contexts in the effectiveness of VET policies. This paper examines the effectiveness of the Slovak Government’s Linking Secondary Education and Practice scheme, designed to enhance success rates in secondary vocational education. The scheme involved 25,219 students across 74 school, emphasising cross-cutting literacy competences. The study employs factor analysis alongside the synthetic control method (SCM) to evaluate the scheme’s impact. Unlike most previous studies, which focus on national-level trends, this research considers both regional and school-level variations, distinguishing between lower and upper secondary VET and different study fields. The research results suggested that the intervention yielded the most significant impact in service-oriented fields within lower secondary programmes and in the economically disadvantaged regions of Slovakia. The findings provide insights into the role of professional versus cross-cutting competences in employability, the influence of school reputation, and the varying quality of vocational education across regions. The study contributes novel methodological insights by applying SCM to assess individual school performance.