The continuous and needs-based collaboration between schools and child and youth welfare can be understood as a crucial prerequisite to enable different forms of learning for young people and thus ultimately open up more educational opportunities for them. Conditions for success and failure of a successful cooperation are examined based on surveys of teachers and school social workers. It turns out that school social work often only takes on the function of ‘crisis management’. In order to strengthen the cooperation of both professions and to use the full range of services offered by school social work, a structural anchoring of school social work in individual schools is urgently necessary.