The EU 2020 strategy also highlights the importance of VNIL since by 2020 “16 million more jobs will require high qualifications, while the demand for low skills will drop by 12 million jobs”. This perspective makes the continuous updating of skills an imperative. Similarly, one of the formulated headline targets is to increase “the share of the population aged 30-34 having completed tertiary education from 31% to at least 40% in 2020”. VNIL can be one of the ways to increase the number of students in higher education and thus to facilitate the required upgrading of skills. Furthermore, VNIL is a part of the Commission’s Flagship Initiative “Youth on the Move” under the priority of smart growth and of the Flagship Initiative of “An Agenda for new skills and jobs”, which intends among others to improve conditions for the modernisation of labour markets and to “empower people through the acquisition of new skills”. In that context, the implementation of lifelong learning principles and flexible learning pathways are called for. In addition, further improvement in the validation of non-formal and informal learning is equally considered to substantially contribute to reaching these objectives.

The OBSERVAL project, in its analysis of the current state-of-the-art in Europe, concluded that countries with VNIL policies showed some features in common.

OBSERVAL-NET has been conceived based upon the following assumptions:

-A pre-existing adult education / VET tradition in a country is one of the strongest drivers of VNIL. For countries without the enabling policies and structures which are already in place thanks to such a tradition, the sharing of best practice and the coordination of policies is of the utmost importance
-The lack of confidence in VNIL procedures, especially from institutions with rigid accreditation and assessment procedures, can be diminished by increasing their confidence in the personnel administering VNIL. Thus, a professionalisation of the post of ‘VNIL Practitioners’ as happened throughout much of Europe in the last decade with the post of ‘Quality Assurance Officer’, would increase trust in the system
-Local-level initiatives have been shown to be effective in promoting and implementing VNIL. However, for them to also be efficient, they need to be better connected with regional and national policy processes so as to maximise impact
-Multi-stakeholder partnerships, particularly when they bring together the public sector, enterprise and educational institutions, are major enablers of VNIL

OBSERVAL-NET has been jointly conceived by institutions of lifelong learning and by public policy makers in order to:

-Bring together policy-makers and stakeholders in a sustainable network to discuss and share best-practices and coordinate policies around VNIL, at local, regional, national and trans-national levels
-Promote policy actions which have a high multiplier effect throughout the lifelong learning community – specifically in the fields of professionalisation of VNIL practitioners, mainstreaming of grassroots initiatives and promotion of work-based competence development and recognition

The main aims of the project are:

1. Create transversal networks capable of developing national and transnational evidence-based models of best practices in VNIL
2. Develop coherent, comprehensive and flexible models for VNIL practices and recommendations, drawn from a comparative analysis of examples of best practices across European countries
3. Mainstream these practices through strategic development and policy making at national- regional level

More specifically, the OBSERVAL-NET will work:

1. To create transversal thematic groups for the first year across the partnership to carry out collaborative comparative analysis of partners’ own case studies
2. To produce comprehensive reports across the thematic groups in relation to the examples of best practices
3. To develop comprehensive and flexible models and recommendations based on the principles emerging from examples of best practice and implementation identified by the thematic groups
4. To involve key policy makers in each national-regional context to ensure strategic mainstreaming

The final products of the project were presented at the project Final Dissemination Conference in Brussels, 15 October 2013. You can download the Advocacy Pack on VNIL from the project home page.

Do you have interesting materials or case studies about Validation of Non-formal and Informal Learning that you want to share? Please send your materials to eucen.