Abstract

Vocational rehabilitation (VR) is an important socio-political instrument for promoting the inclusion of people with disabilities. In this context, the Federal Employment Agency is primarily responsible for young people who have difficulties in the transition from school to work. Since 2009, however, there has been a decline in access to VR, which has been further fueled by the covid-19-pandemic. We are interested in the reasons for this decline. First, these reasons may lie in demographic changes, as there are fewer school leavers. Secondly, the labor and training market may also have changed in favor of young people with disabilities so that they can receive training or employment even without VR. Thirdly, the accessibility of potential rehabilitants might be inhibited through general and VR counseling, as more young people with disabilities receive inclusive education. This inaccessibility may have intensified during the pandemic. Our target group is young people with health impairments who left a (special or regular) school between 2009 and 2020. We focus on people without or with a lower secondary school leaving certificate, as they make up around 75 percent of young VR clients (Reims et al. 2023). To identify the individuals and their school history, we only consider individuals who have had contact with general or VR counselling. The data basis for this is the Integrated Employment Biographies (IEB), combined with the vocational counselling data and the VR-specific LTA-RehaPro data (Reims et al. 2018). Thus, it is possible to compare the employment biographies of people with and without an application for VR after leaving school. We follow the young people for 2.5 years and compare the school leaving cohorts with each other. A competing risk model can provide information on how likely the transition into training, employment or inactivity was and how it changed over the cohorts.