In Europe there are living about 400.000 Deaf people. They have to face immense discrimination and disadvantages concerning their own culture, their own language and their possibilities in education and employment. Deaf people still don`t have equal opportunities in social and public life.
More than 90% of the Deaf have no higher education. It is also a matter of fact, that for Deaf people adequate educational guidance – neither for education in general nor especially for vocational education – does not exist. Aptitude test procedures being used in counselling settings are only available in written language but most of the Deaf have difficulties in understanding written language. Therefore results of aptitude test procedures don’t give the expected expressive information about the abilities, interests and wishes from this target group. By now, there are hardly any test procedures including sing language in the test instead of written language. The dilemma is, that without adequate professional counselling Deaf people are hardly able to choose from the wide range of educational offers for life long learning. As a consequence they are also excluded from education and vocational trainings and have even more difficulties in employment.
On the other hand, the former experiences, aptitudes, interests and competences of Deaf people are not considered for their future educational decisions in their lifelong learning process. Deaf people as experts for their needs and competences are not included in the counselling process by now.
This continuously leads to a further isolation of this group from important society process like lifelong learning.
With the VOGS-project we want to react on the great demand of Deaf people for adequate educational measures and raise their level of social integration and participation trough individual guidance in life long learning and education. The strategy to solve this problem is to develop a special guidance model in terms of a holistic European guidance model including the aptitudes, competences and the needs of the Deaf (concerning their language and culture as well as Deaf advisors) in this special VOGS-model.
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