Which future for VET?
“Building European VET – time to move on” was a conference organised in Thessaloniki (Greece) between 29th and 30th September by CEDEFOP – the European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training – in cooperation with the Directorate General for Education and Culture (DG EAC) of the European Commission. Apart from the European Institutions, several other actors took part to the conference, such as representatives of national governments and Ministries, VET providers, employers, employees and trade unions. In this context, OBESSU was invited to bring the voice of learners.
Thanks to our expertise and involvement over the past years in the European debate on VET and following the remarkable campaign “Claim Your Voice”, we are very pleased to be recognised as a valuable stakeholder when it comes to Vocational Education and Training, and we would like to thank CEDEFOP for considering learners and their needs in this debate.
The conference was a stocktaking of the so called Short Term Deliverables given on Vocational Education and Training in the Bruges Communiqué, a document on which member states, social partners and the European Commission agreed upon in 2010. This document is aimed at “enhancing cooperation in Vocational Education and Training” as one of the strategies Europe 2020. This year the European Commission and CEDEFOP are doing the first stocktaking of this process and the conference was about learning from the past and trying to define a common approach for implementing the strategy and its objectives towards 2020.
As OBESSU, in addition to attending two working groups, one on incentives for learners and institutions and one on the role of VET for innovation, we were also invited to join the closing panel of the conference.
On behalf of student representatives, we brought forward the demands stated in our Political Platform and in our main policy documents on VET, stating that students should always be included in shaping curricula on a national level. We also brought the focus of participation and democracy in VET schools, because we deserve and want VET students to be considered as such and to have their own representation. Moreover we underlined the importance of work-based learning and its need to be an educational feature and not only cheap labour for employers, and we asked for more finances to be allocated in VET in order to raise its attractiveness for students and families.
The topic of ensuring the bridge between VET and the labour market was widely explored in various working groups and interventions. However, as students should be at the centre of the educational process, OBESSU demanded that they should also have the right to access higher education.
These were some of the topics on which OBESSU focused during the closing panel, requesting again that the follow-up event of this conference – the meeting of Directors General for VET to be held in Rome in October – keeps our demands in mind and pledges for the involvement of students on a national and European level.
Written by Giuseppina Tucci, OBESSU Board member
