Scenarios and Strategies for Vocational Education, Training and Lifelong Learning (LLL)

SCENARIOS AND STRATEGIES FOR VOCATIONAL EDUCATION, TRAINING AND LIFELONG LEARNING (LLL) IN EUROPE

Burkart Sellin

Cedefop/Thessaloniki

1

Abstract

The objective of this article by Burkart Sellin, the Cedefop coordinator for this project[1], is to inform readers about scenarios and strategies likely to be selected in the next 10 years to adapt educational and VET systems and sub-systems to meet current and future challenges. The projects’ outcomes may assist policy makers and practitioners to fully implement the European Union’s Lisbon objectives and benchmarks targeted at 2010. Although current trends appear contradictory and divergent, the scenario method allows to pick important and most likely ones, shedding light on the confusion, especially in the international and European contexts. The objective of the method, inter alia, is to induce decision-makers to take into account in daily decisions not only short-term exigencies but foreseeable medium and longer-term consequences. Policy-making and practice in vocational education and training, particularly in continuing training and LLL, is characterised by an apparent arbitrariness and a tendency to short-termism. With the help of this method a oft-called-for sustainability and pro-active initiative could be achieved. Consensus building and strategies for implementing common views are supported with the assistance of such scenarios.

Key words: Vocational Education, Lifelong Learning, Candidate States, European Union, Prospects

Potential and limitations of the method, cui bono?

This section deals with the potential and limitations of this method compared with others, such as benchmarking or the Delphi method.

Advantages and areas of application

The alternative scenarios and strategies form a basis for players to make medium and long-term workable decisions. They help to clarify complex relationships within a relatively simple framework, encouraging stakeholders to reflect in a team on the consequences of their activities and to evaluate the relevant day-to-day decisions. This can be done despite the players’ divergent or conflicting positions on basic questions, such as undeniably exist between employees’ and employers’ interests. The benchmarking method, in contrast, gives mainly a picture of the moment. It aims to find parameters permitting conclusions on the advantages and disadvantages of specific enterprises or regions on the basis of a number of indicators, of competitiveness, for example. The two methods of analysis are the same in that they study both qualitative and quantitative factors and permit target setting.

Scenarios are semi-militaristic strategic playground games which, here however, have nothing to do with short-term power plays or directly winning ‘battles’, but are targeted towards medium and long-term workable concepts and pertinent action.

In the field of education and VET the method has been practised since the mid-1980s. It is comparable with the Delphi method, which uses multiple interviews with experts to determine options for future development. It aims to find mainly short-term solutions for options already on the agenda. Recently the scenario approach has proved its worth as a method encouraging consensus and mediation between theory and practice, research and application. For some years it has also been used to improve our understanding of trends in an international and European context.[2]

Although this approach is positive for promoting and monitoring dialogue between different players, experts and practitioners, it is difficult to really guarantee its recognition and use. As a rule this depends on a moderator or coach capable of bringing together different interest groups and disciplines, countries and cultures, and requires that players and participants invest considerable time, something which policy-makers and decision-makers do not have in abundance. The scenario method allows to collate and organise a number of factors and variables or variants in a controlled way. This is particularly important for international comparison and analysis and complex issues like VET and LLL.

Cui bono?

This makes the scenario method useful for some endeavours under certain conditions:

1. To develop strategies or systematically investigate alternatives and most important or likely trends against the background of different systematically constructed scenarios, and then to make a justifiable selection of particular actions and measures for policy-making and practice.
2. To reduce the complexity of contradictory and complex interrelationships!
3. To provide impartial support for debates which are controversial due to clashes of interest, and to integrate or at least approximate extreme positions through decisions based on a broad consensus which is pro-active and workable in the medium and long term[3].
4. To mutually support and integrate empirical data from quantitative surveys and factor analyses, and information from qualitative surveys, for example from interviews and secondary analyses. This means that scientists working primarily with quantitative data analyses or surveys can pool their resources with scientists whose work is primarily qualitative.

The scenario method should not, however, be mistaken for a representative opinion poll or foresight research. Although it makes no claim to be representative, it does claim a high degree of credibility and plausibility. Thus it has more affinity with applied science and action research than with pure research, and is closely connected with (political) practice, which sometimes makes pure scientists somewhat suspicious of it.

Scenarios for European policies in general

Before presenting the approaches and findings of the Cedefop/ETF project, the findings of some other groups to facilitate understanding and because of their European frame of reference shall be documented. While their interviews and questionnaires may not have been as numerous or comprehensive, nor their socio-statistic methods as complex, their proximity to political decision-makers renders them equally important. The two exercises permit to draw up complimentary layers on the political level, one on the overall policies’ and one specific to social policies’ level in Europe as seen at the end of the former Millenium.

The work of ‘Cellule Prospective’[4]

On the basis of five major topics chosen as the starting point of their work[5]:

development of institutions and governance;

social cohesion;

economic adaptability;

expansion of the EU; and

international context

this group bundled a number of variables relating to potential scenarios, allocated them to various players and then interviewed high-ranking decision-makers from the Commission and other EU institutions, brought them together in workshops and worked out alternatives. Finally they arrived at five scenarios, which they termed ‘coherent, concerted and plausible images’, representing the spectrum of possibilities, factors and players which could in future play a crucial role. Each of these scenarios has a final, corresponding image, which I summarise briefly here[6]:

-Scenario 1, ‘The Triumph of the Market’, is characterised, as its name implies, by the absolute dominance of economic liberalism and the free exchange of goods and services. Europe, whatever its standard, would hardly be different from the rest of the world, which would then be a single planetary market.

-Scenario 2, ‘A Hundred Flowers’, is typified by growing paralysis (and corruption) of major public and private institutions. Europeans withdraw to the local and micro level and to a primarily informal economy entailing a duplication of initiatives with no logical connection.

-Scenario 3, ‘Divided Responsibilities’, is based on the hypothesis of metamorphosis of the public sector against a background of positive economic development, which could engender renewed social and industrial policies.

-Scenario 4, ‘The Developing Society’, depicts a society undergoing extensive transformation in respect of socio-economic and political developments under the premise that this time ecological and human development values prevail. It includes a basically workable new form of humanism and paves the way for an ‘immaterial and global renaissance’.

-Scenario 5, ‘The Turbulent Neighbourhood’, depicts a weakened Europe in conjunction with sudden and deeply disturbed geopolitical developments, both in the East and in the South, with growing tensions and conflicts causing a ‘European Security Council’ to be entirely concerned with questions of defence and security.

These scenarios reveal one thing at least: they show that the search for a vision for Europe, its institutions, its identity and geopolitical stabilisation is still in full swing. The process of expansion is not yet complete, and the broad-based consensus to find the socio-economic direction which Europe could take in the next 10 years is still relatively open. The further stabilisation of Europe with a maximum guarantee of economic and social prosperity is, at present, regarded as a doubtful hypothesis.

Employment, collective agreements, social protection: what kind of Social Europe?[7]

An expert working group[8] formed under the leadership of the Research and Education Centre for Socio-economic Analyses at the Technical College of Road and Bridge Construction[9], comprising civil servants, consultants, researchers and, not least, speakers for the employers’ organisations and the trade unions, to discuss social and socio-political scenarios in preparation for the French presidency in the second half of 2000:

For some time now, the economic and monetary policies of Europe have been developing without reference to a ‘Social Europe’ it was stated.

The work of the ‘Atélier’[10] focused on the following questions:

1. How can social solidarity be achieved in this new environment (the Economic and Monetary Union, ed.)?
2. Which new models for industrial relations[11] will appear?
3. What will be the future role of the markets in the individual Member States and in the EU?
4. What part will the social partners play on a national and perhaps European scale?

Below we present four different development scenarios for a Social Europe on the basis of three central questions:

-Will the national social systems continue to develop in isolation?

-Will the systems of industrial (occupational) relations converge?

-Will the social security systems be complemented in future by specific European benefits?

The current situation whereby differing national models are preserved and accumulated has engendered friction, contradictions and tension. The process accompanying the construction of Europe may indeed have brought about a degree of approximation of the social systems during its different phases, but by and large this approximation has been limited.

Discussions between representatives of the European Social Partners (European Trade Union Confederation and European employers’ associations, UNICE/CEEP), which started in Val Duchesse near Brussels in the early 1980s, have led to the Social Dialogue and gradually to the 1989 Charter of Basic Social Rights, the 1991 agreement between the Social Partners and joint statements, and to the 1993 appendix to the Maastricht Treaty in the form of a protocol declared binding by 11 of the 12 states making up the Union at the time.

Finally, in 1997 the Treaty of Amsterdam made a breakthrough with important progress in social affairs: annually updated guidelines on employment policies, and anchoring of basic social rights[12] in the Treaty with reference to the respective Council of Europe Conventions.

So what do the four scenarios presented by the working group have to offer?

In the context of the two key issues, ‘industrial and occupational relations’ and ‘social solidarity/security’, and the added dimensions of

a.)continued divergence, or

b.)increasing convergence of the former,

c.)prevalence of national authority,

d.)the added dimension of the European level for the second issue,

the workshop discussions with high-ranking researchers, civil servants and decision-makers resulted in the following matrix.

OVERVIEW: Scenarios of the French government’s planning department, 1999[13]

Type of industrial or occupational relations
// social solidarity or cohesion [14] / Various models retained (status quo ) / Convergence in the sense of harmonisation (increasing approximation)
remains essentially different in each country
(status quo) / Scenario A: Fragmented Social Europe / Scenario B: Competing Social Europe
develops an additional common dimension (stronger social cohesion) / Scenario C:
a Europe united despite its differences / Scenario D:
Integrated Social Europe

The usefulness of these scenarios for the Cedefop/ETF project

These scenarios and those of the above-mentioned ‘Cellule Prospective’ of the Commission had advantage for our work and for evaluating the results of the Cedefop/ETF project: they enabled us to set the scenarios of our project group, which are rather pragmatic and designed for implementation in the three different contexts listed:

-Economy and Technology,

-Employment and Social Affairs, and

-Education, Training and Qualifications,

in the broader context of general policy-making and the construction of Europe, with their varying corresponding visions.

This broad policy context was not in the focus of the Cedefop/ETF project. Its aim was to obtain practical recommendations for strategies and action reasonably quickly. To advance the current political debate on (new) objectives of education and training policies we wanted to examine whether, in the light of foreseeable medium-term developments and against the background of predictable trends, players, decision-makers and experts agree to great extent on their importance and/or the likelihood of their occurring in the next ten years, i.e. in the period up to 2010. In this point (timeframe) our objectives are identical with those of the ‘Cellule Prospective’, who had, however, already completed their work in 1999, when we were just beginning. Both projects, that of the ‘Cellule’ and that of the Planning Commission, which also anticipated 2010, nonetheless allowed us to fill a gap.

Findings of the Cedefop[15]/ETF scenario project on VET in Europe[16]

To clarify the methods employed and the status of work in progress a chronological list of the steps taken is presented.

Phase I (from the end of 1998 to the beginning of 2000) consisted of the following stages:

1. Around 200 written questionnaires were distributed in each of the participating countries on each of the three different contextual environments: economic, social and educational or vocational training, listing around 20 trends per context for evaluation or assessment[17].
2. The survey was evaluated using socio-statistical methods and the findings collated in country reports and combined in a European report.
3. National seminars were held for groups of decision-makers to discuss and verify the plausibility and workability of the findings and for final editing of the country reports.
4. A 1st European Conference was held in Athens (with the support of the Greek Labour Administration, OAED) in January 2000 for the evaluation of the first phase.
5. The full report and the country reports on phase I were published and the most important findings summarised as a synopsis. They were distributed and decisions were taken on the fundamental course of action for Phase 2, which was envisaged from the beginning.[18]

The results of Phase 1 stand alone.

In the second phase the following steps have been implemented with the intention to further refine the results:

1. The material and expertise necessary for conducting and scheduling the various tasks were acquired. They were discussed and decisions made at a first working meeting with partner institutes in Brussels in April 2000.
2. Work commenced on the complementary processing of statistics and objective fundamentals in each country, and a limited number of intensive interviews were conducted on the basis of (European) ‘meta-scenarios’ and country-specific scenarios from Phase 1, which in the following had been checked and amended as necessary. The particular emphasis was on strategies, potential activities and policy or practice measures.
3. Evaluation of the interviews and drafting of the country reports on Phase 2 by the partners in the individual Member States.
4. Second working meeting of the participating institutes in Thessaloniki in January 2001; discussion of the findings from the country studies, preliminary discussion of the planned content of the European Report (Phase 2), discussion of the organisation of national seminars and further planning, and the final conference followed by national workshops and seminars.
5. A third working meeting was organised in June 2001 to discuss the final report by the Max Goote Expert Center[19] and the programme of Cedefop and ETF for the 2nd European Conference.
6. The 2nd and final European level Conference was held with players and specialists in science and practice of VET and LLL in October 2001 organised in Tallinn jointly by ETF and Cedefop with the support of the Estonian Ministry of Education.

Summary of the findings of Phase 1

The 1st European Conference on this theme, completed the first phase of this broad-based survey on the future of VET. An executive summary of the report, based on the survey, and the results of the country reports was presented at the Conference, which was attended by more than 60 participants from EU and candidate states.

The outcome of the first phase of the survey for the European level can be summarised as follows:

Three ‘contextual environments’ were distinguished: ‘Business and Technology’, Employment and the Labour Market’, and ‘Training, Skills and Knowledge’. A number of specific trends and strategies in each of these categories were given the highest values by all policy-makers and practitioners from participating countries.

The most highly rated trends show clearly that public-private partnerships and the new economic order are regarded as vital for improving competitiveness, promoting changes in the workplace and increasing flexibility and mobility among the workforce. This necessitates corresponding flexibility in vocational training courses, a change in the frame of reference of VET providers (vocational schools and training centres), greater acceptance of the social dimension as a frame of reference for VET policies, and individualisation and decentralisation of VET programmes.

Four main scenarios were proposed, based on these factors: one scenario each for contexts A and B and two for context C (see below).