According to its formulated vision, the European Training Foundation’s aim is to assist its partner countries in making vocational education and training (VET) a driver not only for lifelong learning but also for sustainable development. Thus, ETF’s work in education and training should aim at helping partner countries to address issues of sustainable development, i.e. promoting economic progress in its partner countries, while at the same time helping to reduce the environmental impact of the economy and increasing the social cohesion within their societies.
The EU 2020 strategy also highlights the theme of sustainability. It aims at turning the EU not only into a smart and an inclusive but also a sustainable economy by 2020. ETF is going to use this EU wide consensus and clear commitment to a sustainable future as an occasion to better integrate sustainability issues in its work with partner countries outside the EU, highlighting the fundamentally transnational nature of sustainability issues. To this end, specific work on the theme of sustainable development started already in 2010 with the organisation of an expert meeting and the drafting of discussion papers on the topic. The meeting brought together experts from ETF partner countries, representatives of international agencies and national donor organisations, researchers from EU member states and ETF education and labour market experts. The results from this expert meeting as well as the existing discussion papers will be further developed for a coherent corporate position and practical guidelines for advancing and improving ETF’s assistance to partner countries on the sustainable development dimension.
The ETF plans to explore more and discuss the dimension of sustainable development in VET and skills development context within the CIS region. Besides presenting and discussing the findings of the ETF position paper, Identification and definition of suitable indicators would be the core of the technical meeting that has been planned for (tentatively) October 2011. The regional meeting will bring experts from a number of countries to discuss and validate the ETF proposal. This work may be followed up by a larger dissemination event in 2012.