The central aim of the network "School and the world of work" is to give contributions forimprovement of policies, strategies, structures and processes in Europe, to give all youngpeople a chance for a successful pathway from school education to the world of work andemployment. This task is seen as a part of European policies for the Youth, for education andemployment, and as a part of Strategy for Lifelong Learning within the Lisbon Agenda is one ofthe most important tasks of European strategies for education, for employment, for lifelonglearning and for social cohesion. The main approach of the Comenius network "School and theWorld of Work" is, that the best way to fight against youth unemployment is to improveproactive processes at all interfaces between school and the "World of work" that youthunemployment can't emerge at the beginning of career pathways of young people.There exist a lot of experiences, developments and best practices in European countries. Thegap is however missing clear pattern of the main criteria for successful transition for youngpeople from school to work and of the most hindering aspects for successful and smoothtransition. The benchmarks for the last interim report 2006 shows, that some reforms aremoving forward but not enough, especially in the field of youth unemployment and thetransition from young people from school to the world of work. A casual point is that thebenchmarks - especially low achievers in reading, upper secondary completion, early schoolleavers - in several countries don't correlate with the situation of young people in furtherpathways, in labour market and employment. A main thesis is that there are essentialadditional aspects responsible for a successful and smooth transition from young people fromschool to the world of work in a smooth and sustainable successful way. The networkdiscovers, analyzes, documents, disseminates the casual elements of successful preparation,orientation, guidance, counselling and coaching of young people at the process from the initialeducation to a further pathway in profession and the world of work. Principle, criteria andmethods of the network are: strict reference to European policies and strategies, evidencebased exchange of experiences, transfer from best practise examples between the partnercountries, analyse and description of special models in fields of special interest. Thepartnership consists of various types of institutions with responsible and experience at theinterface between school and world of work with additional background of national andregional networks.