"Learning by Doing" in Production Schools, Another Model of Initial Vocational Education and Training?

In France, initial vocational education and training is mainly carried out by vocational high schools, and more rarely by apprenticeship. It plays an essential part in qualifying young people coming from disadvantaged backgrounds. However, it faces a lot of difficulties: low social recognition, high dropout rate, frequent gaps between training and jobs and high unemployment in some specialties at the entering of labour market. A new network of schools, the production schools, brings a renewed approach and bases its pedagogical model on a production situation for customers, summed up by the formula "learning by doing". This paper summarises a qualitative survey led in five production schools. Main results show that students in trouble with the mainstream school system regain a positive relationship towards training, through the responsibility and recognition. But the study shows specific issues met by the production schools, especially the difficulty to find balance between production and training.