The international dimension of Centres of vocational excellence: Building a strong international cooperation dimension on Vocational Excellence: Stakeholders’ Consultation meeting
In November 2021, EU Commission Direction General Employment signed an agreement with the ETF for the implementation of the project “The international dimension of Centres of vocational excellence: Building a strong international cooperation dimension on Vocational Excellence”.
The project design builds on the successful work of the ETF Network of Excellence (ENE) launched in 2020. The ENE initiative promotes the development of Centres of Vocational Excellence (COVE), through close international dialogue among EU and partner countries, building on evidence, fostering peer learning and exchanges, and the co-creation of development tools. The ENE Network currently has more than 200 members and 6 active partnerships where CoVEs are cooperating internationally to advance particular domains of CoVE activity.
This project on the ‘international dimension of CoVEs’ is part of the EU’s major CoVE initiative which has helped to make CoVEs an engine for the development of vocational excellence, for innovation, for cooperation and for improving the attractiveness and relevance of vocational education and training and ensuring that it contributes to current priorities, in particular, the digital and green transitions.
This initiative supports a bottom-up approach to Vocational Excellence involving a wide range of local stakeholders but encourages CoVEs to work together and to share their practices in order to help improve vocational and training systems. It places emphasis on developing the organisational capability as well as the quality and range of provision but also upon their capacity to work with stakeholders, partners, businesses and other local actors to collectively steer local and regional skills ecosystems. In particular, the initiative places an emphasis on international cooperation between CoVEs, which extends the aspirations and the capability of CoVEs to innovate and improve.
The project will run 24 months and consists of four work packages:
1: Creating an international vocational excellence self-assessment tool for CoVEs
2: Explore the feasibility of a Quality award on Vocational Excellence
3: Building evidence to support vocational excellence for the digital and green transitions and in the area of innovation and applied research
4: Policy support activities and capacity building
The purpose of the stakeholder's consultation meeting which will be on 30 March 2022 from 10.00 to 11.30 CEST is to present the project and to discuss with interested stakeholders (international and EU organisations) their potential role in the project and, in particular, to explore opportunities for consultation.
The fist deliverable of this project is the Mapping of self-assessment tools relevant to vocational excellence: https://www.etf.europa.eu/en/publications-and-resources/resources