Blended Programme (BP), a project developed and piloted by Ireland, Finland and The Netherlands in a lifetime of 2 years. It combines and includes a variety of educational aspects, based on home curricula of the 3 participating countries. BP partners cooperate for students to experience, adapt and adopt study and culture away from home. Partners are confident to not only realize broadening of students’ horizons in knowledge and skills of their future profession but also in the natural use of English, basic learning of a new language, get knowledge on EU, their position within EU as (young) professionals and as citizens, to familiarize themselves with life and culture of other countries. BP is contrived as currently many VET students go abroad for an international internship where they go from work placement back to their apartments, finding their ways themselves in a foreign country. The majority of them are also to experience delay in achieving their diplomas as assessors are not recognized by home institution, so students are not to be assessed while abroad: no continuation of education. This results in demotivation of VET students for international internship. Students and parents also miss guidance, coaching when abroad. As result of BP VETstudents are inspired forward in their careers. BP participants do not experience delay in studies after return in homecountry. Vocational Education and Training are keywords for BP. Vocational Education in home countries is intensified and innovated by the offer of a curriculum-based module attended by participants in host country. Students attend classes in English or where English as a 2nd language. Students learn but also share their knowledge. Vocational Education is further extended by cultural and teambuilding activities. Students learn more about their home and host countries, about living-alone-together and tolerance of other cultures and way of living, they gain more knowledge on the EU and beyond, are further skilled in one or more languages. The training/the internship executed in this other country is extended with exam of the participating student by accredited assessors. The incompany tutors are assessors in home countries but BP offers a training to better understand the education of the international interns. BP is curriculumbased, part of the home curricula of the VETstudents. BP guides the VETstudent from pre-departure to host country and after its return home. Participants are to have successfully finished the first two years of their courses at level 3 or 4 and are in for a new challenge. Students apply for participation. Students are aware of the content of the program, from Pre-Departure till and including after return home. The content of the Pre-Departure part demands input of the students next to the execution of his studies at the moment this part of BP starts (ca 30 to 40 hours extra meetings/homework). When abroad BP demands full participation of students at organized activities, next to carrying out of internships and assessments, attendance of classes and homework for those. After return students meet and talk about experience and learning outcomes. BPparticipants become BPambassadors and are invited to share their experience with potential ones. BP reached more than 25 students of the three partner countries in the two years. The project offers 2 differing pilots, incl 2 different lengths of the program, to secure it at the end. One pilot have students from Finland and The Netherlands to Ireland. The second pilot have students from the 3 countries going across borders. BP offers a 10-week program and an 18-week one. At the end of the project visitors find the following documents on the website: Blended Programme Guide that is a compilation of useful resources developed during BP’s lifetime to guide students, inform VET institutions and VET workplacement organisations. It takes one through the development of the aim of BP: VETstudents being skilled and examined across borders, within the EU in full cooperation with organisations offering internships. All booklets of the Pre-Departure Program adaptable to one's own need and situation. Partners are a team of engaged colleagues that have realized BP with love for VET students who are determined to reach farther and achieve the best possible challenge to become more qualified and international oriented young professionals in the future. BP team believe to have contributed to innovation in VET curricula. We worked closely together as 2 VET institutions, Finland and The Netherlands, and 1 language centre, Ireland. A perfect combination of different views on one specific goal. At the end we reached in engaging more departments of education in our BP, more VET participants to help us develop BP and more organisations involved for workplacements of BP students. BP is clear and innovative for VET, its path is adaptable for institutions in order to integrate internationalization in any curricula.

According to Paris Communique adopted by 195 countries on December 12th, 2015, the main long-term aim for all countries is to work together to reduce emissions of climate pollutants in order to help improve air quality, public health, food security and energy efficiency at the local and regional level and therefore contribute to achieving the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development. At the same time, the European Union has set a timeline for 2020 to radically reduce the CO emissions by 20% in member states. In many EU countries the solid fuel burning stoves and fireplaces are still the main source of heating in households in rural areas accounting for considerable emissions of CO. The stove building sector has to respond to the changes by introducing up-to-date technologies and solutions as well as enabling the VET sector to change and adapt to the current needs. The ENEFFIS project targeted the need to promote environmentally friendly and energy efficient stove building by developing a common European qualification standard (O1), training curriculum for initial and continuous vocational education and training (O2), the certification scheme of a stove builder (O3), and policy recommendations (O4). The project partnership developed an innovative course on energy efficient stove building aiming to empower the stove builders with a new set of skills and competences, with regard to principles and technologies related to the designing and building of energy efficient and green stoves and fireplaces fired by solid fuel. The developed learning resources on stove building specifically address the skills needs in the technical, environmental, regulative and customer consultation aspects. The link to the European reference tools (EQF, ECVET) supports future recognition and validation and addresses the mobility needs of the stove builders workforce in Europe.The project partnership consisted of 5 organisations from from Lithuania, Estonia, Germany and Finland that represented VET providers, non-governmental associations as well as the specialists and practitioners in stove building.Main results and impact achieved: - By using the best practice examples from Germany and Estonia, development of an updated qualification standard for a stove and fireplace builders, accompanied by a modern curriculum and training/learning resources; - Establishing a Qualification Scheme which ensures transparency and accessibility in competence acquirement, assessment, validation and certification, thus creating favourable conditions for labour mobility within a country and across the EU; - Implementation of two short-term transnational training activities for trainers of VET institutions who acquired the knowledge and skills for development of the curriculum and implementation of the training course in their respective countries; - Delivering recommendations for normative documents on energy efficient and environmentally friendly stove building.

"The ECVET technical framework allows the recognition of learning outcomes in many and varied cases, particularly in the case of the European mobility of apprentices or dual system’s trainees. The CCCA BTP has been using it for several years and wishes to extend its scope of application in its European mobility actions. To this end, it wishes to conduct the Easy ECVET project transnationally in order to strengthen the formal recognition of learning outcomes in other European countries, and that it be integrated into the processes of validation of competences that can lead to national qualifications.Due to more or less well-founded reluctances and/or to various misunderstandings, we have been able to observe that the ECVET framework is only used by a limited number of the partners with whom the CCCA BTP has been cooperating for several years. Our objective is therefore to develop, even trivialise its use, in the course of mobility of apprentices’ actions. We wish to ensure that the ECVET framework is implemented as widely as possible until it can be taken into account in the certification of training path in the various countries concerned.Five vocational and educational training organisations or centers from five different countries (Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France and Spain) will be involved in this project. They have been chosen on the basis of their reliability, seriousness and motivation. Each of them has a particular interest in ECVET either because they have already implemented it and wish to go further, or because they wish to implement it and need the help from more experienced organisations.This mixture of experience and novitiate seems to us to be conducive to the quality of a common reflection. This project will be carried out over a period of three years and will be punctuated by the alternation of six transnational meetings (two per year) and two learning activities.- The transnational meetings are intended to be the ""think tank"" (analysis of practices, exploration of other contexts, training engineering) of the project and to support the steering committee, which will be responsible for producing technical guides and recommendations. Each country will mobilise two participants, for a total of ten people.- The learning activities will rather be ""exchange of practices and production workshops"" (pedagogical engineering, production of tools and protocols) in which two participants per country (pedagogical staff of the training institutions concerned) will collaborate. The 2 usual referents of each partner will also take part. That is to say 20 people for each activity.These two working groups will produce, in close collaboration and synergy, protocols and tools necessary for carrying out ECVET assessments.The aim is not to model a single procedure, but to facilitate the implementation of the ECVET framework, based on a common understanding and co-constructed arrangements.In a more operational phase that will follow, these supports will be tested during mobility actions that will be carried out during the last fifteen months of the Easy ECVET project, to test the reliability of these tools in the field and to improve them if necessary. Apprentices or trainees and company tutors will also ultimately benefit from the project.An ECVET expert will intervene at the very beginning of the project to give or give back to all the partners the same degree of information and answer their questions. He or she may be mobilised during the project if needed.Each partner will be responsible for relaying the decisions taken and the work to be carried out in its country. They will supervise the work, lead the educational teams mobilised and ensure the implementation of mobility actions which will allow the tools and protocols produced to be tested. Confrontations between participants from different countries will promote a mutual understanding of their different national contexts in order to facilitate collaboration.The production of appropriate guides, materials and recommendations, as well as their implementation in the field, should enhance the skills of the teaching teams in transnational evaluation issues and disinhibit the use of the ECVET framework in the context of apprentice mobility.Beyond the project, we aim to develop our partnership and our bilateral links with all our European partners, to contribute to the dissemination of the ECVET system and to set up or strengthen internationalisation strategies within our organisations.The state of mind of the project can be summarised as follows: ""confront in order to understand, compare in order to question, collaborate in order to co-construct, cooperate in order to implement""."

The Government Office for Békés County implemented the project entitled ’VET to Job – Promoting Employment through VET’ in a consortium with the cooperation of a Finnish vocational education and training school, a Cypriot and British non-profit counselling and adult education and training institution, a Spanish training and counselling organisation and an Austrian employment service. The general aim of the project was to search – through European cooperation – for appropriate solutions to enhance the employment and social integration of people either without any qualifications or with qualifications not demanded by the labour-market, and so help prevent them becoming unemployment. There was a need at every partner organisation to train the leaders and professionals working in the field of career guidance and VET and to improve their professional competences.The basics of the partnership came from the fact that the integration of people either with no or outdated qualification into the labour-market was a problem across partner organisations’ countries. At the same time every partner applies good practices for handling the problem, which can be adapted into the partner countries. Therefore learning from each other helps accomplishing the project aims. To ensure the successful implementation of the project, the partners organised international meetings in every participating country, during which – as well as introducing the organisations themselves – the methods and best practices applied at the partner organisations for improving the employment situation of people with no or outdated qualifications were presented.The most important result of the common work for the Hungarian, Austrian, British, Cypriot, Finnish and Spanish partnership is the Brochure of Best Practices. 2 best practices or labour-market programmes per country were presented, each of which contribute to raising the learning motivation of job-seekers to acquire new qualifications and/or employment. The Brochure of Best Practices was created in English and Hungarian. Every partner individually created a brief guide in English and their own national languages, which provided some guiding instructions on what methods and best practices professionals should apply in order to realise the project’s aim. The guide contains brief recommendations for 3 target groups: counsellors; institutions offering training and VET and professionals working at employment services; teachers working in VET and are interested in reducing the number of drop-outs.The most important results of the project are widely spread and disseminated during and even after the project, on the partner organisations’ websites, at professional forums, meetings, they are available for everybody interested, in each partner country. The organisations will use the acquired knowledge in creating partnerships linking the actors of employment and training, the system to be established in such a way will contribute to operating methods helping job-seekers having outdated skills or any skills to find employment through VET and motivate students finishing formal education in choosing VET.

ContextThe School Improvement Partnership Project (SIPP) contributes to addressing the EU 2020 targets of reducing the rates of early school leaving below 10% by trialling and transferring the concepts behind the Grade Predictor, a web based tool, to enable students to choose the right course across Europe and avoid dropout whilst studying. In particular it addresses 2 of the 2009 ET 2020 EU objectives to address challenges in education and training systems by 2020 by improving the quality and efficiency of education and training and promoting equity, social cohesion and active citizenship. Our project upskilled teachers and careers counsellors in supporting students to enter and remain in suitable courses. ParticipantsLearning Plus UK Data Ltd (LPUK) from the UK were the lead organisation. Originally a partnership across 6 countries was formed to address the need identified. Unfortunately, one partner Capademy, had to withdraw at an early stage and the project continued with LPUK and 4 partner organisations:•SATAKUNNAN KOULUTUSKUNTAYHTYMA (Sataedu)•Galway and Roscommon Education & Training Board (GRETB)•CENTRO DE FORMACION PROFESIONAL XABEC (Xabec)•Zlínský krajThe broad and diverse partnership includes 3 organisations, GRETB, Xabec and Zlínský kraj with experience and success in implementing tools and Sataedu and Xabec developing the use of the tool in vocational settings. It brought together great research and creative skills which were used to trial and develop significant resources and training and included schools from highly innovative settings. We targeted teachers with leadership roles, Heads of Year, career counsellors and guidance specialists involved in the education of young people.Activities Five intellectual outputs were delivered through this project: 1.European Grade Predictor Tools2.Superb Intervention Videos3.Strategy Papers4.User Manuals5.Intervention Guide2 training courses were delivered to upskill teachers and other associated professionals, including training on the tool usage, intervention techniques and resources.7 transnational meetings were planned, 5 went ahead successfully, 2 were held online, due to Covid-19. A multiplier event planned to take place in the final term of the project did not take place due to Covid-19 A wide range of dissemination activities took place including: creation of a SIPP website hosting all resources, e-newsletters, presentations and training events.Methodology The methodology was based on transfer of innovation enabled by the exchange of best practice through audit, data collection transnational meetings and comparative studies, experiential learning delivered through training activities with the support and steer of experts in the field, the development and provision of resources to support delivery and the use of information technology including the internet and video to overcome communication barriers. Training and transfer of innovation was at the heart of our methodology. Whilst LPUK were overall project lead, all partners contributed actively to the project with a strong collaborative ethos. Each output had a partner lead, chosen for their expertise in that area, output milestones and targets were agreed by the partner organisations and our action research approach enabled the outputs to develop during the project.LPUK appointed an experienced Erasmus+ external evaluator. They enabled the partnership to succeed whilst adhering to agreed Quality Assurance standards. An evaluation plan was approved and the evaluator provided regular updates at meetings and evaluation reports.ResultsEuropean Grade Predictor tools are now developed for each partner country, supported by a range of materials including: user manuals, intervention guide, 20 superb intervention videos and institutional case studies available from the SIPP website. Strategy papers were circulated to 271 education decision makers. ImpactAlmost 1400 students have benefited from upskilled professionals and their interactions with them and guidance from them. Evaluation of the trial has shown that retention has been positively impacted upon and destinations improved. Students will choose well and have been supported to remain on courses or choose alternatives. Long term BenefitThe tool has shown potential long term benefits in Spain and the Czech Rep. With wider use in Ireland further positive results would be expected. European Grade Predictor tools provide a building block for addressing the employment target of 75% of 20-64 year olds to be employed. Schools will produce more and better qualified students and young people will enter non-traditional careers addressing skills gaps. We are aware of no other tool in Europe which can do this. We cover a vast area of Europe and our work will have pertinence beyond national boundaries. This transfer of innovation will benefit Europe as a whole and address governments increasing accountability measures for schools.