The excitement was palpable as day two of the ETF Network for Excellence (ENE)’s third conference entitled, Centres of Vocational Excellence as Engines for Vocational Education and Training Development: Let’s Excel Together without Borders, began on Wednesday, 30 November 2022. Maria Lvova, whose expert moderation kept everyone on track on day one, handed the baton over to another skilled and enthusiastic moderator, Simona Rinaldi.
José Manuel Galvin Arribas, ENE’s content coordinator, opened the conference with a summary of key messages from day one including the importance of financial autonomy and teachers’ motivation in CoVEs. He reminded participants that the progress ENE members continue to make in the 10 thematic dimensions is informed by results from ENESAT, a tool that acts as a compass for CoVEs allowing them to understand how they are doing and where they are going.
ENE’s international scope was once again put on display with speakers from Malawi, Zimbabwe, Morocco and, of course, the European region. The differences and similarities in how national and regional policy contexts impact the way CoVEs operate were highlighted. Indeed, nearly all speakers addressed how CoVEs in their countries contribute to shaping policies. By the end of the morning, the following four themes had been explored in depth with practitioners of and policy makers in VET: social inclusion, entrepreneurial CoVEs, career education and career guidance, internationalisation, and the role of CoVEs in supporting policy reforms.
The interdisciplinary approach not only demonstrated how the themes relate to each other (e.g., career guidance leads to social inclusion while internationalisation fosters entrepreneurship and new approaches to green skills and digitalisation, etc. ), but also identified the often intangible, invisible barriers that prevent growth in each area (e.g., individual attitudes and preconceived notions regarding VET’s so-called bad reputation as a somehow ‘lesser’ educational option, students who prefer finding jobs rather than creating them through entrepreneurship, etc.). The dedication of both practitioners and policy makers came through as they passionately spoke about the ways in which their schools and policies make a difference in the communities they serve.
In Zimbabwe, Priscilla Chihota, the Grants Administrator at DAPP/Ponesal Vanhu Technical College, explained that the social inclusion priorities for her school involve outreach work related to gender balance and students with disabilities. Though the school, located in one of Zimbabwe’s remotest areas, the Champa district, has aligned its social inclusion policies to national ones, quotas have been required to achieve the objectives set. Even so, Ms Chihota says it is not easy to create a student body where 50% of students are female and 15% are disabled, but the outreach work her school carries out helps. “To reach communities that are disadvantaged, we have moved enrolment from the school to the community. We enroll by visiting communities and engaging people,” she says. The school also gives students the option of taking exams in either English or one of the local languages and in so doing promotes social inclusion.
Sound career guidance policies at institutional and national levels contribute to social inclusion as well. Jennifer McKenzie, a Cedefop CareersNet Core Expert and former Director of the National Centre for Guidance in Education in Ireland, pointed out that the labour market of the future is unknown. “There are jobs that people do now that none of us could even think about 10 or 15 years ago,” McKenzie says, “so we all need schools and skills to support students” on this uncertain journey. Among the skills required are adaptability, malleability, and career management.
In Armenia, Haykuhi Gevorgyan, Head of the Career Guidance and Capacity Development (CGCDC) and CEO of the NGO, CareerLab, stresses the importance of having a full-time career guidance counsellor on staff at all schools. The person with this job cannot operate in isolation and must create ties with teachers, school administrators and local businesses. Indeed, one of Armenia’s remarkable achievements is not only that every school has a career guidance counsellor, but that funding for the positions has been secured sustainably.
Employability also made it onto the agenda when Bige Tinmazso Susuzlu, the General Manager at Bursa Coşkunöz Education Foundation in the Republic of Türkiye, spoke about how her school works directly with industry to create degree programs including one for data science. That Bursa is located in an industrial zone makes it easier to forge partnerships with businesses and understand their needs in terms of skills. Both Bursa and DAPP/Ponesal Vanhu Technical College in Zimbabwe demonstrate the importance of engaging directly with the communities they serve by being physically present. These practices demonstrate that the CoVE’s role in vocational excellence is to fully embrace new ways of shaping skill ecosystems, which cannot happen in isolation.
Undeniably, CoVEs cannot pursue excellence on their own. The panellists in the conference’s penultimate session, which was dedicated to vocational excellence and internationalisation, confirmed that without internationalisation CoVEs would lose their raison d’être. Not only will internationalisation raise VET’s profile, keeping in line with the Copenhagen Process, but it will also help create employment and training opportunities locally.
Joao Santos (Senior Expert-DG Employment) reminded EU policy priority on VET internationalisation as a key driver for the modernisation of VET. The Centres of Vocational Excellence (CoVEs) have proven to be ideal breeding-ground to bring partners from all over the world to work together towards such new impulse to VET.
The experience of TKNIKA (Country Basque-Spain) shared by Iñigo Araiztegui - (Director of Internationalization) builds on how VET international dimension allows improving local activities of VET centres, for example, by improving their teacher's knowledge about technology and the upcoming trends, as well as raising the bar of competences of their students through their involvement in international projects. However, according to ETF Experience (Julian Stanley Senior Expert), many efforts should be still done to make VET internationalization more inclusive, and widely accessible to CoVEs-and other VET providers.
José Oberson Mau, the Head of the Vocational Education, Training and Youth Work Division at Movetia in Switzerland, argued that in going global, CoVEs should not lose sight of the local. After all, the main goal of internationalisation is to use comparisons with VET systems in other countries and regions of the world to improve national VET systems. However, in order for CoVEs to have international standing in the same way institutions of higher education do, resources are required to give VET students and educators the opportunity to reap all the benefits international mobility has to offer.
What is the role of policy in improving VET systems? When is a top-down approach appropriate and when do bottom-up approaches work? These questions were explored in the conference’s last session on connecting policy learning to policy making. To highlight this dual perspective, the session brought together representatives from CoVEs and policy makers/shapers from governments.
According to Iryna Shumik, the Director General of the Directorate of Vocational Education at the Ministry of Education and Science in Ukraine, the difference between policy making and policy development is akin to the chicken or egg question: which one comes first? Whatever the answer, one cannot exist without the other. Before the war, Ukraine’s main focus with regard to VET was policy development. Since the war, their focus has obviously changed, but they are still very keen to learn from CoVEs in other parts of the world as this will inform their own policy decisions and help them modernise their VET system.
This top-down policy approach contrasts with the Moroccan example where Najib Hamouti from the International Relations Department at ESITH (Ecole Supérieure des Industries du Textile et de l’Habillement- School for the Textile and Garment Industry) described how the school was founded in the 1990s based on a need expressed by the textile industry to their local public authorities. ESITH is now a centre for vocational excellence and since its inception policy makers have followed its example to establish similar schools based on public and private partnerships across the country.
To sum up, VET’s contribution to human capital and community development was among the many themes covered by this two-day conference that a visibly moved José Manuel Galvin Arribas brought to a close. He referred to ENE as an international family and expressed his pride at what the network had accomplished over the past three years. The European Commission has recognised them by entrusting the ETF to implement the “International Dimension of the Centres of Excellence” project through a Service Level Agreement signed in November 2021.
Today, 258 CoVEs from 42 countries around the world belong to this unique network; they include 16 EU Partner Countries, 10 EU Member States, 14 Sub-Saharan African countries, Philippines and Switzerland. This distinguished family of schools is steadily growing. The network is still open to membership and aims to continue working on behalf of the European Commission to strengthen CoVEs’ international dimension. ENE is a key tool to increase learning capacities in relation to the internationalisation of VET. Wherever they are in the world, ENE members are connected to each other and support each other in times of peace and war, which unfortunately is the case for Ukrainian schools and policy makers whose steadfast participation has doggedly continued despite the challenges they currently face.
The examples shown during the conference illustrate the sentiment expressed by Enock Jumah (Partnership Manager at DAPP Mikolongwe Vocational School in Malawi), during conference’s fifth session: “the pandemic showed us that everyone is excluded at one point or another, but it has also shown us how we can come together”. ENE has created just such a space where conversations with peers directly or indirectly change lives. After two years, 20 webinars, more than 20 coaching sessions across different ENE initiatives, countless peer learning activities, three peer leaning activities (PLAs) onsite, and other conferences, ENE’s pursuit of vocational excellence will continue.
More info about the blog on Day 1.
Key messages from the ENE annual conference on 30 November 2022 (Day 2):
Please log in or sign up to comment.