Cedefop newsletter

Participants from 11 countries represented mostly ministries of education and labour or their agencies, national level employers’ associations and unions, and vocational education and training (VET) providers. The countries taking part were:

• the nine involved in Cedefop’s thematic and flash thematic country reviews on apprenticeships, i.e. French-speaking Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Malta, Lithuania, Slovenia and Sweden;
• and Belgium Flemish Community and Romania, which are currently participating in the bench-learning process promoted by the European Commission, together with French-speaking Belgium, Malta and Greece.

This reflects Cedefop’s intention to open this peer learning opportunity to a wider range of countries who are undergoing an exercise to reflect and improve their apprenticeship systems and schemes.

In his opening remarks, Cedefop’s Head of Department for Lifelong Learning and Employability Antonio Ranieri told participants: ‘The awareness of the potential of apprenticeships has grown over the past years. Implementation processes are slow in some countries, but the commitment remains high, thanks also to your efforts.’

This year’s forum was dedicated to two topics: apprenticeship governance and apprenticeship in-company training design and delivery. After a presentation of their short papers on the topics, experts from various countries engaged in a vivid discussion with the event participants. Questions addressed included:

• How can governance facilitate an effective link and cooperation between labour market and VET actors to meet apprenticeship demand?
• How is in-company training designed and delivered at employer level to ensure comparable learning outcomes leading to the same qualification and parity of opportunities among learners and employers?

Coronavirus and the future

The closing panel debated the lessons learned from the ongoing coronavirus crisis and the future of apprenticeships.

European social partners were represented by ETUC’s Agnes Roman and Business Europe’s Robert Plummer, the European Commission by Tamas Varnai and Cedefop by Deputy Director Mara Brugia.

Ms Brugia said that apprenticeships embedded in school-based VET systems can benefit from the governance already in place. But there is a risk that such apprenticeships lack a distinct identity. This might make it difficult to communicate the difference or their relative benefits for employers, young people and the wider economy.

She added that, if social partners and other labour market stakeholders are only marginally involved, apprentices’ training is unlikely to go beyond the individual company’s needs; and this will not help address the skills mismatch problem. If apprenticeship is meant to become a social institution to train and empower the future workforce through high-quality training, then it must grow, perhaps not in size but in depth.

Referring to the coronavirus crisis, Ms Brugia said that post-Covid we must continue working on better quality apprenticeship provision and embed apprenticeships in multi-level governance structures. Social partners can guarantee conditions that allow apprentices to grow as skilled and empowered citizens and workers.

Mr Varnai said that the European alliance for apprenticeships wants to boost apprenticeships nationally by incentivising SMEs to offer places, mobilising local/regional institutions and strengthening the social dialogue.

The social dialogue’s importance was also stressed by trade unions representative Ms Roman who found the forum ‘very timely to discuss how to improve quality of apprenticeship and cooperation.’ She was happy to hear from national representatives that many developments involve social partners.

On behalf of the employers, Mr Plummer pointed out: ‘We are happy that social partners are involved in definition of curricula etc., but we need to look at increasing the amount of time apprentices spend in the company.’ He argued that apprentices need to acquire the skills companies are looking for and use them within specific company context.

A long-term initiative of Cedefop’s Department for Learning and Employability, the community aims at strengthening and expanding the knowledge on apprenticeships in Europe. The experts’ voluntary collaboration is expected to improve the understanding of apprenticeship schemes and ultimately support their quality implementation in Europe.

Access to stable expert contact points in the countries provides insights on national developments and the national relevance of EU/European initiatives, by also covering existing gaps in information retrieval from the countries in specific areas of concern. In this sense, the community is conceived as a knowledge hub and reference point for apprenticeships in Europe. 

The community currently gathers 31 experts from EU Member States, the UK, Iceland and Norway. The meeting's main objectives were to take stock of the 2020 activities and to look forward to the community’s strategic orientation for 2021 onwards.

The coronavirus pandemic in early 2020 meant that vocational education and training (VET) schools in Europe had to resort to extended closures and convert physical classrooms and work-based learning spaces into digital learning environments overnight. With the start of the new school year, most European countries are reopening their VET schools under specific protective guidelines for practising social distancing, reinforcing hygiene measures, and ensuring school premises are disinfected and well-ventilated.

Cedefop’s network of ambassadors tackling early leaving from VET shared their insights into the measures taken by 16 European countries (Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Malta, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Turkey and the United Kingdom) for the reopening of VET schools and the challenges that VET providers and practitioners are facing in implementing them.

Most countries have opted for a hybrid system with a blend of physical and virtual learning. This gives schools the freedom to choose the best combination, such as alternating between morning and afternoon classes (in Hungary and Belgium); allocating certain days of the week to online learning (in Finland and Italy); or teaching certain subjects online (in Portugal and Spain). Most countries allow distance learning for teachers, students and their families if they are at higher risk due to serious pre-existing health problems.

VET providers and principals are establishing and testing out a ‘new normal’ for schools. They have faced challenges in the past – the 2008 economic recession, the H1N1 pandemic – but nothing to the extent of the coronavirus fallout. Teachers are faced with a Herculean task. The lost learning time students suffered from the abrupt move to distance learning needs to be addressed, particularly for student populations with special needs or of low income. Instruction must be flexible as schools face the prospect of applying an unfamiliar hybrid learning system, or should a spike in Covid-19 cases force schools to return to remote learning. 

VET providers and practitioners must be supported with all the necessary tools and resources to overcome these challenges, and to be able to keep motivating students in their learning journey in a context marked by uncertainty, dire labour market projections and other economic and social consequences of the pandemic.

A renewed emphasis on effective professional development for teachers and trainers will be crucial in helping students make up for lost instruction time. The professional development they need now should focus on building a growth mindset of resilience, and increasing their comfort with uncertainty and their flexibility to deal with rapid changes.

Being able to apply inclusive teaching practices for all students, supporting learners at risk, and tackling early leaving, are all areas of particular interest to policy-makers and practitioners who fear a dramatic increase of the early leaving rates from education worldwide.

Check out Cedefop’s VET toolkit for tackling early leaving. Join our community of ambassadors tackling early leaving from VET.

Following a consultation phase, the declaration is set to be adopted on 30 November 2020.

Speaking at the meeting, Cedefop Executive Director Jürgen Siebel stressed that the objectives of the draft Osnabrück declaration are spot on: ‘They put VET centre stage in the green and digital transformations and the recovery within the EU and in our neighbourhood.’

He went on: ‘While initial VET remains important and needs to be developed, continuing VET will gain relative importance, accelerated through digitalisation and the Covid-19 crisis, and addressed in Objective 2.’

With Cedefop’s lead in labour market and skills intelligence, said Mr Siebel, ‘we will help policy-makers to address the green and digital skills demands, curricula, and training-delivery methodologies, as requested in Objective 3. For Objective 4, Cedefop and our sister agency, ETF, provide the backbone of VET’s international dimension: Cedefop with the European qualifications framework and national qualifications frameworks, guidance, validation and recognition, and ETF with its neighbourhood outreach activities.’

The Cedefop Executive Director concluded: ‘With ETF we are ready, willing and able to support, facilitate and monitor the Osnabrück objectives – as we have done for Riga in the past.’

Mr Siebel also had the chance to discuss Cedefop and its contribution to evidence-based VET policy-making with German Federal Minister for Education and Research Anja Karliczek who chaired the event.

Encouraging results

Following the conclusion of the two-day meeting, Ms Karliczek presented the results in a press conference. She said that the Osnabrück declaration is ‘a clear signal of how we want to shape VET and how much potential it has,’ adding: ‘All Member States and social partners will sign the declaration, showing our commitment to VET. This focuses on four key goals: increasing economic resilience, establishing a culture of lifelong learning, also in a cross-border sense, embedding principles of sustainability in VET, and strengthening support of its international dimension.’

According to Ms Karliczek, ‘VET is the best opportunity for young people to successfully enter the labour market. One thing we all agreed on is that advanced vocational qualifications are an excellent parallel career opportunity to university studies, and we want to continue to expand on this and make it very attractive for young people.’

European Commissioner for Jobs and Social Right Nicolas Schmit said: ‘Our success with the digital and green transformations, the social and economic future of Europe, its prosperity very much depend on our education and VET systems. The Commission took quick action in this area because we saw this connection between economic change and VET. In July we presented our renewed skills agenda, which includes a Council Recommendation on VET to be adopted in November.’

He thanked Ms Karliczek for launching the Osnabrück declaration: ‘It’s a challenge for all of us, for the Commission and the Member States, to find out how we can shape this cooperation. Our goal is to implement this declaration. We have set ourselves clear goals and that is what we need to work on over the next four-five years.’

Earlier, during the meeting, Mr Schmit argued that ‘we need good data on skills demands and developments; we have to draw on our skills and labour-market intelligence, and here Cedefop is doing an excellent job.’

European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth Mariya Gabriel said that this crisis has shown how much needs to be done to support digital readiness and reinforce the education and training systems in Europe: ‘Our next initiatives will strengthen our cooperation. The digital education plan and the European Education Area will be presented at the end of September and will define our cooperation with Member States up to 2025.’

She quoted Cedefop research, which shows that more than a third of the European active labour force is missing the basic digital skills required in most jobs across sectors, to underline that ‘upskilling and reskilling those already in the labour market will be of key importance in the coming years. Online learning platforms and digital schools can be a great way to achieve that in a flexible and personalised manner.’

This is a special issue looking at European vocational education and training (VET) post-2020. It includes:

• Exclusive interviews on the challenges ahead with the Education Ministers of the previous and current EU Presidency holders, Croatia and Germany, and of Cedefop’s host country Greece;
• A report on the joint Cedefop/European Training Foundation high-level conference which discussed ways to enhance European cooperation in VET;
• Messages from the speeches at the conference of European Commission Vice President Margaritis Schinas and Commissioner for Jobs and Social Rights Nicolas Schmit;
• An article on the joint discussion paper by Cedefop and ETF which explores the challenges and opportunities for VET in the next decade;
• Cedefop Executive Director’s editorial on why VET is centre stage in the coronavirus pandemic era.

You can also browse through the latest Cedefop publications and upcoming events.

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Have a look at the magazine’s previous issues.