EfVET coordinates a working group in CEDEFOP’s initiative on promoting quality in VET delivery
On the 18th of May EfVET hosted in its Brussels’ office the first meeting of the sub-group 2 “Learning providers and the EU Mobility” in the project, implemented by CEDEFOP on quality in VET delivery. Rasa Zygmantaite, Secretary of EfVET has the honour to coordinate the work of this group, where she is involved together with other EU experts and participants from other VET provider associations. On behalf of CEDEFOP the work of the whole initiative is coordinated by Tina Bertzeletou, an expert from the Department for VET Systems and Institutions.
The aim of the expert group is to identify the strengths and weaknesses in the existing mobility schemes. Further on a compendium of good practices and of key problems identified in Erasmus+ programme countries will be produced and shared in the large VET providers’ community of Europe. Since the group comprises representatives from education (VET and HP VET), businesses, intermediary organizations and other EU VET associations, the experts will be able to analyse mobility as one of the key factors to ensure quality education in VET/HP VET from different perspectives. In other words, this community of practitioners in mobility will be feeding in the information from the grass-roots level. As its ultimate goal the expert group will prepare a list of suggestions and recommendations for the Commission to improve all sides of mobility action in Europe and in each member state. Since the work of the group is scheduled until 2020, these suggestion shall be taken to the new programme funding period.
A large team of EfVET national representatives are involved in the work of the Group 2: Alfredo Garmendia (Spain), Tibor Dori (Hungary), Jon Harding (UK) and Inge Jakobsen, international coordinator and lecturer from Koege Business College, Copenhagen.
The “Learning providers and EU mobility” group is one of the three groups, established by CEDEFOP together with VET4EU2 VET provider associations’ platform and other experts in the field. The other two groups, where EfVET experts participate are “Learning providers and the challenge of technology enhanced learning (TEL)” (EfVET is represented by Pangiotis Anastassopoulos, national representative of Greece) and “Learning Providers and Migration”, where EfVET is represented by Niina Puumalainen from EfVET/FI, Ylä-Savo Municipal Federation of Education.
Background
An expert group was created by DG EMPL in 2015 as a Platform for European Associations of VET providers, composed by six European Associations (hereafter ‘Platform’). CEDEFOP, which participates in the Platform, plans to complement the Platform by setting up a VET practitioners’ Community to further structure its cooperation, discuss and disseminate its work and useful results with a broader audience of VET providers.
The role of these two bodies would be respectively, to provide strategic guidance and feed into general Commission policy while the Community would: produce concrete practical guidance for practitioners, identify good practice and make use of European activities and results, with a focus on selected themes.
Following participants’ agreement on the CEDEFOP proposal for the follow-up of the Workshop on “Promoting quality in learning delivery: the way ahead” (1), the Community will comprise at this stage three thematic sub-groups: one sub-group per theme to be analysed. As already confirmed (2), three themes were selected to work on between 2017-20, all focusing on providers’ priorities and having them as point of entry: Learning providers and the challenge of technology enhanced learning; Learning providers and EU mobility; and Learning providers and migration. The themes should reflect the European VET priorities and be anchored in the work areas of CEDEFOP.
- The proposal on the follow-up was endorsed by participants by 5 December 2016
- The conclusions on the discussions during the workshop on Promoting quality in learning delivery: the way ahead that took place in Thessaloniki on 15-16 September 2016 were enriched and endorsed by participants by 9 November 2016