Cedefop newsletter

She said that Cedefop is an invaluable source of expertise for the European Commission to rely on, adding that ‘wherever I go, in discussions on vocational education and training (VET), Cedefop’s work is on the lips of my interlocutors.’

The Commissioner was greeted by the Chair of Cedefop’s Governing Board Micheline Scheys, Director James Calleja and Deputy Director Mara Brugia.

Ms Scheys pointed out the importance of the Commissioner’s visit in getting to know Cedefop first hand.

Mr Calleja welcomed the Commissioner to ‘the European house of vocational education and training’. He said that Cedefop is where ideas on skills, qualifications, youth employment and European tools are generated for stakeholders. ‘The next big challenge is the upcoming Skills agenda to which we have contributed and we look forward to helping implementing it so that no citizen is left behind,’ he added.

Addressing the Cedefop staff, Ms Thyssen said that the Commission wants to get Europe working again by creating job opportunities. She added that ‘youth employment is a priority and thanks to Cedefop’s help we can make it happen.’

Ms Thyssen explained that the Commission’s Skills agenda aims to achieve a new boost for jobs, growth and investment and stressed that ‘we need your help to transform the agenda from ideas to results.’

The Commissioner said: ‘You are in a unique position to monitor and analyse VET trends. You can give direct support to policy implementation in Member States.’ She welcomed Cedefop’s ‘ambition to produce more country-specific reports.’

The Commissioner met with students from a local VET school who offered her home-made sweets and bread

‘I am more motivated than ever to work with you to make social changes European citizens deserve and to make VET a first choice, not a second option,’ she concluded.  

Cedefop experts presented to Ms Thyssen various aspects of the agency’s work focusing on employability for citizens, particularly on skills anticipation and forecasting and the Skills Panorama website, apprenticeships and work-based learning, with special focus on SMEs.

In the fifth in a series of articles on insights from the European skills and jobs (ESJ) survey, Cedefop expert Konstantinos Pouliakas looks at the key challenges for the New skills agenda for Europe, which is set to be adopted by the European Council in June.

He notes that ‘a New skills agenda for Europe must further facilitate the transparency and validation of qualifications and skills and invest in better skills intelligence. This will ultimately foster mobility of the groups most in need.’

Cedefop’s ESJ survey was carried out in 2014 in all 28 EU Member States, collecting information on the match of the skills of about 49 000 EU workers.

Read the whole article.

Cedefop conducted an in-depth review of the apprenticeship schemes in Lithuania in 2014-15. Ms Pitrėnienė said that the review process has prompted a wider dialogue with stakeholders to promote work-based learning. She spoke of the challenges vocational education and training (VET) reforms pose, particularly in securing adequate financial resources and in speeding up reform processes themselves.

Mr Calleja said that Cedefop stands to gain from directly supporting Member States and social partners as these experiences provide a reality check to ideas, recommendations and proposals on how to improve VET’s image, on what makes learning more accessible to all age groups and on how to create structures that ensure skills for jobs run parallel with skills for life.

The two later addressed an international conference on apprenticeships and work-based learning organised by the Ministry of Education and Science. Ms Pitrėnienė stressed her commitment to continuing promoting a culture for apprenticeships and work-based learning.

Mr Calleja argued that ‘in VET we need to work in a simpler, sharper and smarter way.’ Transparency of tools and processes must go hand in hand with qualifications which are occupation-, progression- and employability-oriented. Parity of esteem, dignified work and career prospects should be a foundation of VET provision at all learning levels.

The Cedefop Director added: ‘A new VET culture is needed more than ever to attract learners to learning environments which provide a window to jobs and better quality of life, and for employers higher trust in quality and relevance of learning processes.’

The conference, which targeted VET providers, social partners and policy-makers, was also addressed by Austrian, Latvian and Estonian speakers. The Baltic Alliance for Apprenticeships is an active commitment changing the image of VET and work-based learning and serving as a platform for stakeholders to pool resources and offer alternative pathways to learning and employability.

Mr Calleja was also interviewed by Lithuanian television. You can watch the report here in Lithuanian (from 18:50).

ReferNet is Cedefop’s network of institutions representing the 28 Member States, plus Iceland and Norway. Each national partner is a key organisation involved in vocational education and training (VET) in the country it represents offering first-hand information on VET’s role, purpose, governance and structure, insights into developments and trends in VET policies, and in-depth analysis of how each country is progressing in its implementation of common European policy objectives.

Both meetings focused on partnership and knowledge-sharing. Partners used this excellent opportunity to exchange thematic knowledge on one of the topics high on the European agenda: transnational mobility in initial vocational education and training (IVET).

They also tested the new platform designed by Cedefop for reporting on recent developments in national policies, and formed ‘partner pairs’ to prepare mutual peer reviews on their VET in Europe reports.

The meeting included information and hands-on sessions providing participants with the opportunity to bring back new ideas and know-how to their institutions.

Ms Thyssen talks about Cedefop’s importance, its contribution to the upcoming Skills agenda, the challenges for employment and social inclusion the current refugee and migrant crisis creates, and shares her thoughts on how vocational education and training can become a first choice for young people.

Other highlights include an eight-page supplement on inspiring ways to tackle skill mismatch, and interviews with Cambridge University Professor Geoff Hayward and Dr Denise Amyot, President & CEO of Colleges and Institutes, Canada on the link between vocational and higher education.

The Member State contribution comes from Estonia where vocational education and training for adults makes finding work easier.

As usual, you can browse through the latest Cedefop publications and upcoming events.

Yet, many of these initiatives have neither attracted attention nor found a market beyond their local context, in spite of their success. What has prevented policy-makers and practitioners in other places to reap their benefits? What does it take to make successful practices work in different settings?

Cedefop has identified several key features common to successful policies and analysed the conditions for mainstreaming successful projects and initiatives into regional/national programmes and for policy learning from one country to another. If the European Union wants to substantially improve early leavers’ perspectives, and keep in education and training learners at risk of dropping out, it needs to mainstream successful preventive and remedial measures and initiatives into national policies.

This is all the more urgent as labour market integration of thousands of young refugees and migrants will require a large-scale implementation of guidance and labour market inclusion measures, some similar to those proposed to early leavers or learners at risk of early leaving.

More information on what it takes to mainstream policies addressing early leaving can be found in Cedefop’s new briefing note.

The objective of this seminar, attended by Work Bank officials and Romanian key stakeholders, was to discuss the findings of Cedefop’s four-year project on the role of vocational education and training (VET) in reducing early leaving from education and training (ELET) and its applications to related policies and programmes in Romania.

Cedefop expert Irene Psifidou, who leads the project, said: ‘The project findings may help the Romanian government to better understand the broader European context and the early leaving from education and training phenomenon, key features of successful measures in other European countries, and the conditions needed to mainstream and scale up examples of good practices in Romania.’

Janssen Edelweiss Teixeira, senior education specialist at the World Bank, presented the worldwide importance of preventing early leaving:  ‘Worldwide, 100 million (1 out of 6) children will drop out before completing primary education by the end of this year. For Romania, early leavers suffer from long-term negative consequences: lower lifetime earnings and employment; greater incidence of anti-social behaviour; poorer health; lower participation in civic activities; lower education rates for their own children.’

Liliana Preoteasa, from the Ministry of National Education and Scientific Research of Romania and director of the World Bank funded ROSE project in the country, pointed out that 100 000 Romanian youths were in 2011-12 without the prospect of continuing on to tertiary education.

While the EU target is to reduce early leaving from education and training to below 10% by 2020, Romania (18.1% as of 2014) is struggling to reach its own target set to 11.3%. What is alarming is that the average dropout rate increased from 2.2% (2009) to 3.8% (2011), with higher rates in technological high schools (5.3%) and in rural high schools (7% in grade 11).

ELET prevention/mitigation is a top priority for Romania. With a newly adopted strategy to tackle early leaving, Romania is faced with a difficult reality as more than 82 000 students failed the Baccalaureate exam in 2013-14.

During the workshop, participants discussed the fundamental role of lifelong guidance in enabling citizens to use LMI to make better learning and career decisions.

They analysed how LMI could be integrated into guidance systems and discussed challenges, such as the pressure this puts on practitioners’ skills and work methods.

Participants also explored the opportunities arising from the development of new technologies, such as mobile applications and their impact on careers services.

The workshop closed with a session on designing and implementing resources and tools for careers service practitioners and managers.

The outcomes of the workshop will feed into Cedefop’s work to support European careers services, LMI, information and communication technology (ICT), and capacity development.

Speaking at the conference in Brussels, he stressed that the framework covers all key aspects of apprenticeships, with quality as a common point of reference. The framework is based on evidence from at least 20 countries and provides a logical and practical roadmap to reform or start up an apprenticeship programme.

Mr Calleja said that the ‘framework itself is endogenous – it comes from within existing systems in the employment, and education and training sectors to achieve a higher profile for apprenticeships.’

The Cedefop Director highlighted five key quality standards needed in Member State systems:

• quality learning, particularly in behavioural skills and key competences;
• updated guidance and counselling services in secondary education which may make or break apprenticeship systems – it is vital to give young learners a positive and professional outlook of the apprenticeship experience;
• teacher, trainer and mentor training for apprenticeship programmes in which the blend between work experience and formal education is unique and requires special pedagogical skills;
• recognition of qualifications as key to the success of apprenticeship programmes and a main element of quality apprenticeships;
• structures in which businesses meet schools nationally or locally, depending on country size.

Mr Calleja reiterated that vocational education and training and apprenticeship programmes need systematic implementation in practically all Member States: ‘It is time to act; time to put reports, publications, recommendations and frameworks into practice so that learners enjoy the benefit from the enormous body of work all over Europe since the Copenhagen process took place.’

The conference was addressed by ETUC Confederal Secretary Thiébaut Weber and Detlef Eckert, Director at the European Commission’s DG Employment. Other speakers included Jeff Bridgford who conducted the research leading to the European quality framework for apprenticeships.

NOKUT works on foreign education recognition in Norway under the Ministry of Education and Research. They have a well-developed system for recognition of qualifications; in 2015 they treated more than 7 500 applications for recognition both from Norwegians and foreigners.

The group visited Cedefop to learn more about its work on vocational education and training (VET) qualifications at EQF level 4 in connection with the establishment of a new recognition procedure for VET NQF 4 A/EQF 4 in Norway.

As their expertise, in turn, is precious to Cedefop experts working in similar fields, part of the visit was devoted to a peer-learning session which was highly useful to the experts who attended.

The visitors from the Ankara Chamber of Commerce had a similar focus of interest. To strengthen qualified and certified labour in Turkey, they are designing a certification system based on vocational standards. They have opened a pilot certification centre in Ankara which deals with certification of (foreign) qualifications, linking this work with other labour market services (e.g. career guidance, training and work placements).

Both the Norwegian and the Turkish visitors were looking for Cedefop expertise against the backdrop of the refugee and migrant crisis, as their countries are among those who have been receiving high numbers of refugees and migrants, and urgently need to find ways to integrate them into their labour markets.

They spent two days discussing with Cedefop experts, especially Ernesto Villalba-Garcia who co-authored Cedefop's recent reference publication on European guidelines for validating formal and informal learning (available in 5 languages).

Miguel Mendez, one of the researchers, explained how they intend to build on the knowledge gained during their visit: 'I see two main areas where we will apply our new insights. One is developing a quality framework for our validation process and discuss it with external parties. This will help us improve the practice of validation of prior learning in our country. The second area is to develop a close relationship with stakeholders related to our validation process. This will improve the identification of candidates and the external recognition of their certificates.'