Page 18 - Euroguidance Insight Magazine

1.4 Academia

Academia, the exchange programme A quality research approach
for guidance professionals Indeed, Academia network works hard to harmo-
Academia is a programme launched in 1995, which nise study visits and to ensure a quality approach.
has seen over 2000 guidance practitioners each The Academia Vademecum, has been updated
benefit from 3 to 5-day study visits across Europe. in 2022 and includes a lot of information on the
The aim of these study visits is to share good prac- roles and duties of everyone: the national coor-
tice between guidance practitioners and to raise dinators, the host organisations and finally the
awareness of the different guidance systems across participants.
Europe. The themes are proposed in advance by the A common evaluation for all study visits
national Academia coordinators at an annual meet-
ing, and the visits then consist of peer exchanges, The expectations in terms of training professionals
school visits, meetings with professionals and users, and the evaluations of these study visits are at
and practical workshops. 12 study visits took place the heart of the debates. A pilot project (Estonia,
in 2022, including a virtual one in Ireland with 128 France, Ireland, Latvia, Slovenia, Sweden) on pre-
participants. and post-activity evaluation took place in 2022 and
will be extended to all visits in Spring 2023. This
The organisation of the Academia network research supports quality improvement and aims
The participating countries are Austria, Belgium, to verify that the objectives of the programme are
Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Germany, Italy, being met everywhere. Having pre and post surveys
Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Romania, Slova- helps to make evidence-based conclusions on the
kia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden. The network meets improvement of practitioner competencies. The
physically once a year, and the last meeting took results of 2022 were very encouraging and showed
place in Tallinn in September 2022. In addition to that the expectations of guidance professionals
this physical meeting, several remote meetings are corresponded well with the objectives of the pro-
organized during the year. gramme.

18 1. NETWORK LEVEL ACTIVITIES