#LearningConnects: How to maintain excellence in vocational training and education during the COVID-19 crisis.
To help ETF partner countries deal with learning under lockdown, we've been having conversations with people dealing day-to-day with keeping education and training going despite social distancing and school closures to cope with the COVID-19 crisis.
On May 12, we talked to three people at the forefront of supporting excellence in vocational education and training (VET) to understand better how quality skills transmission can be maintained during the pandemic disruption.
Experts from Finland's OMNIA Education Partnerships, the European Commission's DG Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion, and the European Training Foundation shared their knowledge and experience.
Mervi Jansson, CEO, Omnia Education Partnerships, Finland, heads an organisation that is the international consultancy and training arms for four Finnish training organisations, which have around 10,000 diploma students in TVET (Technical Vocational Education and Training) programmes annually.
It also works with international partners such as Egypt, India, Palestine, Saudi Arabia and Uganda.
Finland, like virtually all other countries in the world had been affected by the coronavirus pandemic, with lockdown starting on March 18. However, in contrast to many countries, its system of modular skills training had greatly helped ameliorate an otherwise very challenging situation.
"There are no daily lessons, however it does not mean a total lockdown so teachers and students in certain cases have been able to access facilities," she says.
"We were worried about those students that were about to graduate - sometimes you have to have the certificate in order to get the job or go onto other studies. For us those were the critical students to look into."
A study by the Finnish association for the development of VET found that although practical skills training was adversely affected by a switch to online learning, nearly a third of skills providers said there had been no impact on the graduation date for VET students, most said there had been delays of up to three months, though in the majority of those cases the hold up was no more than a month.
"In Finland we have a modular, flexible system [of VET] and that has helped the teachers," Mervi notes. "There is not one final exam to worry about, it is competency which is assessed in many ways. That has allowed the VET system the autonomy to make those decisions to allow graduation. Teachers have probably had to be more flexible than ever before in their lives. We have managed to pull through and it looks like it is not a major disaster here."
Joao Santos, Senior Expert, DG Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion, European Commission, has 30 years experience in working in the employment and education policy field. His unit is responsible with advising on policy making, working with member states and social partners in VET to "understand the current challenges and try to find a common thread on which we can all agree to work."
In early March his unit launched a survey to "take the pulse of VET in Europe," Joao says, noting, "countries that had already developed distance learning tools were better prepared than others, which had to find solutions overnight."
The pandemic crisis had "brought to the forefront something we all knew for many years - that distance learning in VET was not as developed as it is in HE," he adds.
"Even in the work we are doing on skills agenda and the future of VET policy for Europe, we are always emphasising this need to use digital technologies. It is not only the learners that lack digital skills, but the teachers too. If you ask from one day to the next for teachers who were not trained to use digital skills to do their job, it is extremely difficult."
Identifying this digital deficit is a very important finding: "We have a very big opportunity now because it forces us to get a gear ahead and go much faster than we thought we could in order to respond to these challenges."
Georgios Zisimos, Senior Specialist, EU Education and Training Policies, ETF, who is coordinating and developing a network of VET centres of excellence, says that mapping conducted by the ETF revealed the "strengths and weaknesses" of VET systems in ETF partner countries outside the EU.
Countries are oftem more comfortable talking about their strengths," Georgios says.
"In the ETF we have a very sincere dialogue with our countries and that is the strength of our mapping and reports. These countries can tell us not only what they achieved but also the difficulties.
"In some cases some of ministries had whole departments suffering and even hospitalised."
Despite this, there had been evidence of "impressive exchange of experience" - particularly among countries with shared languages.
"The biggest problem at the moment is exams and work based learning," he adds. "We have organised seminars how exams will take place in a WBL environment."
Finland's long established modular system is an effective tool for tackling a situation where WBL and other dual-learning approaches to practical skills transmission is a particularly difficult challenge, Mervi observes.
"The Finnish TVET system is based on school based, work based and online components. The school based is very practical - OMNIA for example has a restaurant, a car repair shop, beauty salon and others that are open to all."
"Our initial VET programmes are modular - eight to ten modules. Now, when we face a crisis like this flexibility of personal learning plans for students come into play. Students may not be able to be involved in work-based learning, but the tutor will sit down with the student and update their personal learning plan and look at other modules and content they can tackle now. It is the competence that counts competencies may be shown in one way or another. We don't have anything specific saying this is the only right way to do it."
That does not mean that practical learning has been entirely neglected, she adds.
"We have typical online courses now that are student-centred; distance learning does not have to be passive. A lot of students have done amazing things in their home or other environments to show their competence if it is not in the workplace."
Sharing the experience of European centres of vocational excellence could help point a way forward to a stronger skills training system after the pandemic, Joao suggests.
"More than responding to this crisis we need to come up with process and systems that will allow the VET system to be more responsive to what is happening on the ground. That is the essence of centres of excellence - to take VET out of their comfort zones, making them understand that at the end of the day how well people are formed will allow them to find a job and be an active citizen in the world and respond to societal development."
"We have to make sure that the VET system is aware of what is happening and has in-built mechanisms - and that if they are in close partnerships with companies, universities of applied science and other stakeholders, they can quickly feel what way society is going and to respond to the changing skills and training needs."
Georgios agrees that those influencing policy should seek to use the crisis as a springboard to change.
"In 1957 the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and the US reacted with what is known as the 'Sputnik Shock' in education. They saw the Soviet achievement as a national defeat, and a few years later came back a strong proposal for investment in education; they returned to science to support education. It is a similar situation today in how countries will see their strengths and weaknesses. If there is a similar response there is every reason to be optimistic about the future."
Please log in or sign up to comment.