Enhancing the Quality of Career Guidance in Secondary Schools: A Handbook 

(Siena: Pluriversum; 134 pages; ISBN 97-88894-032802) 

Professor Ronald G. Sultana, who is a member of the Faculty of Education and founding Director of the Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Educational Studies, has just published a Handbook for enhancing quality provision of career guidance services in education settings. Career guidance has attained unparalleled policy attention over the past years given that transitions from school to work have become more complex, less linear, and often incomplete, with frequent returns to education and training in order to enhance or maintain employment and self-employment prospects right through to late adulthood.

The Handbook, which is one of the main outcomes of the Erasmus+ funded MyFuture project, pulls together the key findings of several international reviews that Professor Sultana was involved in over the past years. Practitioners and researchers can thus benefit from the funds of knowledge that have been created thanks to analyses of policy and practice in close to 60 countries. By identifying lead initiatives across Europe and beyond, the Handbook suggests ways in which career education, information, and guidance in schools can be enhanced. Quality guidance services are thus presented as a citizen’s entitlement in the same way as health and education are.

The Handbook moreover critiques neoliberal conceptions of quality assurance as promoted within the New Public Management discourse, and makes a case for improved services for citizens thanks to a commitment to reflective practice.

The Handbook, which is published by Pluriversum (Siena, Italy), has been already been translated into Italian, with other versions being prepared in other languages, including Norwegian and Romanian. Professor Sultana is a frequent invited keynote speaker on matters related to education and employment, with addresses being recently made in Algiers, Ancona, Bucharest, Cairo, Dublin, Genoa, Göteborg, Krakow, Ljubljana, Luxembourg, Malmö, Stockholm and Paris.

A e-version of the Handbook can be downloaded from this link.

A list of the author’s publications on career guidance is available online, with the latest being two edited volumes on career guidance for social justice, published by Routledge (details at this link).