Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Technical and vocational education represents a central formative component of high school education in Chile, encompassing nearly 40% of students, who fundamentally come from the poorest sectors of society, in the last two years of compulsory education. Such relevance, however, has not found a correlate in the development of policies aimed at strengthening the training model or articulating with the country’s productive needs. The record shows that TVE graduates have heterogeneous and especially complex life experiences. Structural factors linked to high degrees of social vulnerability and institutional inconsistencies present in school-to-work policies are part of the diagnosis of the situation. In this framework, the article addresses the tensions and the type of resources that young people use to face their immediate future once they leave PTE. Based on an analysis that combines contributions from life course perspective and the sociology of the experience (emphasizing the analysis of breakpoints and structural tests), it is possible to review the decisions, supports, difficulties, and challenges that these young people experience in their school-to-work transition. The effect of structural constraints and the ways in which these young people carry out their personal actions within a highly individualized context and with weak institutional supports, as in the Chilean case, are explored. 

This paper deals with the process of externalization of pupils from compulsory lower secondary education to external programs (PCPI). It describes the negotiations, interactions and strategies deployed in the process, as well as the actors involved and the subjective effects it has on the students. The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a state secondary school in Madrid, and draws on document analysis, participant observation and interviews with students and the school personnel. The proposal of referral to basic vocational training programs external to compulsory education constitutes a status degradation for the students, which are defined as unable to complete compulsory education. Pupils cope with it in different ways depending on previous damage of their academic situation and identities: they experience externalization either as relief or a personal failure; they either accept it or resist. The cooling out activity conducted by teachers and school counsellors, colluding or competing with parents and peers, manages to make pupils accept their downgrading and rebuild their identities. Students interiorize educational selection: eventually, they perceive it as the most reasonable option and they end up representing it a posteriori as an individual choice. This process has also an impact on their choice of vocational course: they make their choice, among other reasons, trying to compensate for their symbolic downgrading and in order to prevent future failures.