Around one million immigrants, for the most part refugees, arrived in Germany in 2015 alone. More than half of them were aged under 25. Even though numbers have declined significantly in the last few years, it is to be expected that many of the refugees will remain in Germany for several years or settle permanently, as the factors that caused them to flee their countries persist. Facilitating these people’s access to vocational education and training (VET) and subsequently to the labour market is considered to be an important prerequisite for integration. Nevertheless, there are multifarious barriers to access to the (initial) VET system and to employment. The present authors look at the issue of how access to vocational education and training can be structured. In addition to the prior learning of immigrants and the general institutional and legal conditions, they place the emphasis on concepts for (occupational) language support and on the design of training and training preparation. The contributions from science and practice are based on discussions held within a forum hosted by the Vocational Education and Training Research Network (AG BFN).
