Qualified Vocational Education

UBC Commission on Education and Norrtälje Municipality organized a seminar in April on post-secondary education and training in the EU. It gathered participats from Sweden, Estonia, Finland and Lithuania.

Following the points of view and experiences that were presented, the Commission continues to work on the application to the EU's Leonardo da Vinci Programme with alignment on a TOI - Transfer of Innovation-project on the main theme "Develop vocational skills considering the labour market needs". The realization of the project assumes that methods for participants from the business world and for teacher - and student exchange, exchange of lectures and vocational training places, etc. will be developed. The application is to be preperaed by the end of February 2010.

Questions and tasks in the project application

• Describe the need of qualified vocational education in the re gions that participate in the project.
• What can we do to satisfy the needs of a vocational education?
• What benefits are there in cooperating with educations in other EU-countries?
• Participants? This will be a matter for the current education or ganization in the regions but also representatives from business world. What motivates these partners to participate?
• The budget for the project will include 25 % that the partici pants have to pay themselves. The EU-subsidies can get up to maximum 300 000 Euro for 2 years.

What can we focus on? The Swedish side will try to concentrate on:

• to learn from those qualified vocational education programmes that are more developed in our partner countries.
• to adjust to the methods used in other countries to be able to validate our education elements and knowledge requirements, so that they can be approved in other EU-countries.
• to be able to offer teachers and students cooperation partners, exchange of experiences and practise in other countries.
• to develop common educational programs, for example English, business economy, entrepreneurship.
• to develop the methods we use today in our vocational educa tion programs, to involve the businesses into the education.

We now continue the contacts with partners present at the seminar but we are interested to cooperate with other partners around the Baltic Sea.