Abstract

About half of all students without any educational degree come from special needs schools. These students with special educational needs are highly vulnerable especially with regard to vocational training and labour market participation. Yet there is hardly any knowledge or data basis on the life courses of these students after they have left school. Therefore, this research project continues to collect additional data for an already existing panel sample of former special education students, conducted by the National Educational Panel Study. For the first time, these new data will allow to analyse vocational and job histories of these students in detail. The data collection will focus on institutional support systems for these students (partly provided by the Federal Employment Agency) as well as on individual characteristics and on social resources of these students. These first results will provide useful information to the Federal Employment Agency on how to adjust some of the support programs for the specific group of disadvantaged young people. The current survey wave will be completed in 2016, first results of it can be expected in 2017. The survey is a cooperation with the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB). The survey is connected with the main NEPS survey.