Policies

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The contents of European pages

There are five sections: each can be read separately and you can consult them in whatever order suits you. Simply click on one of the main headings below to be taken to the section concerned.

European policy on disability and the position of disabled people

A commitment to the social model
The legal basis
Action against discrimination
Implications for education and training
The European Action Plan on Disability
Policy of the Council of Europe

European policy linked to the integration of disabled people in mainstream VET

The 2003 Equal Opportunities Resolution

Relevant provisions in other European Union legislation
Qatrain and SCIPS

Overall European policy concerning vocational education and training and its link with disability

General policies and the new Lifelong Learning programme
Disabled people and the training policies of the European Union
A note on learning outcomes

Relevant issues in policy development concerning quality in VET

Quality assurance systems and the Qatrain project
Key components of European policy and its implementation
The Common Quality Assurance Framework
Common Principles for Quality Assurance in Education and Training
Issues related to Qatrain

References and Links

European policy on disability and the position of disabled people

A commitment to the social model

The European Union policy on disability is built on an explicit commitment to the social model of disability. As stated by the Head of the European Commission’s Unit on the Integration of People with Disabilities:

The EU perceives disability as the result of the dynamic interaction between a person and their environment, including social constructions, which lead to discrimination and stigmatisation. It is therefore the environment that should be adapted to each individual person, including people with disabilities, by removing these barriers. (Goelen. 2005)

This, in turn, leads to a commitment to an approach based on the rights of the disabled person.

Disability is a right-based issue, discrimination should be eliminated. Disability policies should follow a socially inclusive and individualised approach: rights have to be supplemented by actions, which provide access to rights, that is to say with equal opportunities. (Goelen 2005)

The legal basis

The legal basis for EU action in this area is provided by Article 13 of the European Treaty, dating from 1999, which permits the European Council to ‘take appropriate action to combat discrimination based on sex, racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age and sexual orientation’ (Goelen 2005). It has been expressed in a variety of forms, such as the Charter of Fundamental Rights and, for example in the Commission communication ‘Towards a barrier free Europe for people with disabilities.’ (European Commission 2000a).

Action against discrimination

The European Commission Directive against discrimination of the grounds of religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation (European Commission 2000b) prohibits discrimination by setting a minimum standard which applies across the European Union. National laws determine the exact form of implementation and member states can impose more demanding requirements if they wish but this Directive sets a common base level.

The Directive (paralleling the UK Disability Discrimination Act) requires employers (and training providers) to provide ‘reasonable accommodations’ to meet the needs of disabled people. So the obligation on employers and training providers is not absolute: for example they are not required to pay costs beyond those that the business could stand, or accept severe disruption to overall training programmes. (The Directive makes the correct assumption that most adjustments require only small-scale changes and that the requirement to make ‘reasonable accommodations’ will therefore considerably improve the labour-market position of disabled people.)

In principle, existing member states of the European Union should have had anti-discrimination laws in place by December 2003, but in practice they were given the possibility of requesting an extension to this period until December 2006. Member states joining in 2004 were required to have such legislation as a requirement for accessionand Bulgaria and Romania will have faced the same requirements on accession in 2007. Member states that fail to meet their obligations can be taken to the European Court of Justice by the European Commission. An individual who is unable to gain redress because a national government had failed to introduce legislation would have to seek compensation from that government. This whole, multi-stage, process can be expected to take some years to work through to the status of practical policy in all member states. (See Straw 2004 for further background.)

Implications for education and training

The Directive covers issues directly related to employment but also includes vocational training and it is important to note that ‘vocational training’, under European case law, is very widely defined including most post-school education, technical training and universities. Therefore providers of VET, the subject of the Qatrain project, face equivalent obligations to those of employers in terms of avoiding direct and indirect discrimination.

The European Action Plan on Disability

More recently the EU has committed to the production, each two years, of an Action Plan on Disability (see example, European Commission 2005). The priority focus for the second phase of the Action Plan is the 1active inclusion of people with disabilities building on the citizens' concept of disability'... `It is implicit in the citizens' concept that disabled people have the same individual choices and control in their everyday life as non-disabled people' )European Commission 2005 p6). Again therefore, the priority of EU policy is towards maximising choice for disabled people - which is difficult to acheive within specialist disability-specific institutions.

Policy of the Council of Europe

In April 2006, the Committee of ministers of the Council of Europe adopted a recommendation to its 46 member states for a 10 year Action Plan to promote the rights and full participation of disabled people (Council of Europe 2006). One of the 15 action lines in the plan is education, extending to this wider grouping many of the priorities established within the European Union.

To return to the Qatrain site, click here.

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European policy linked to the integration of disabled people in mainstream VET

The 2003 Equal Opportunities Resolution

On the 5th of May 2003, the Council of the European Union adopted a resolution concerning equality of opportunity for disabled people in VET. The policy was informed by a United Nations commitment that states should ‘recognise the principle of equal primary, secondary and tertiary educational opportunities for children, youth and adults with disabilities, in integrated settings’(my emphasis). While the Resolution recognised that progress had been made to provide access for disabled people, its purpose was to improve educational and training opportunities for disabled people ‘in a life-long learning perspective’.

The specific reference to integrated settings in the United Nations Standard Rules and the emphasis on life-long learning clearly imply that the Resolution should lead to greater provision for disabled adults in mainstream VET.

Relevant provisions in other European Union legislation

Strong support for this position can be derived from the overall European Union law on disability, which asserts the right of the disabled person to the same educational and training opportunities as their non-disabled peers. In this respect the Commission Directive against discrimination (European Commission 2000b) is a key document.

First, the Directive prohibits direct discrimination. (Cattani, 2003 is helpful here) In other words, barriers on access to educational and training programmes for disabled people are banned unless there are legally justifiable reasons. So mainstream courses should normally be open to disabled people on the same basis as for non-disabled people. (Click here for information about how the new Lifelong Learning programme addresses these issues.) Fair and open admission to mainstream VET is extremely important to disabled people: if education and training is only available within specialist, disability-specific, institutions, their choice of programmes will be limited to those that happen to be available. There is a minimal likelihood of innovative programmes, such as those for adults seeking to change career in mid-life, being available within small, specialist institutions; at the university level, where disability-specific institutions are unknown, the only choices are in mainstream providers.

But the Directive goes further in its provisions against ‘indirect discrimination’ which occurs ‘when an apparently neutral provision or practice disadvantages people with a disability more than it disadvantages people without a disability, and the provision or practice cannot be justified’ (Cattani 2003). This provision opens to legal scrutiny the internal workings of mainstream training programmes: methods of teaching, learning and assessment within mainstream courses can all too easily set up barriers for disabled people. Such barriers may be completely unintentional, but they are nevertheless real.

The Directive requires the providers of VET to make ‘reasonable accommodations’ to overcome indirect discrimination. In other words, training providers (and effectively this will include teachers and trainers, given that they make the day-to-day decisions that are often key to the existence or avoidance of barriers) must seek to change their practices to give, wherever possible, disabled students the same opportunities, within the same programmes, as their non-disabled peers.

QATRAIN and SCIPS

The impact of the Disability Discrimination Act in the UK, which takes a broadly similar approach to the Directive, provides a good indication of the range of issues providers and their staff should address. The SCIPS project, which QATRAIN is in the process of developing for France, Poland, Greece, Bulgaria and the UK provides comprehensive guidance about the range of areas where action may be required and helps staff to develop appropriate courses of action by giving them access to best practice from across Europe and beyond.

Click here for access to the national SCIPS site that best meets your needs in :-

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Overall European policy concerning vocational education and training and its links with disability.

General policies and the new Lifelong Learning programme

The European Union has long been active in encouraging transnational co-operation in education and training. It is not necessary or appropriate to repeat here the readily available summaries of policies and actions (see, for example, Europa – education and training).

The most important recent development has been the introduction of the new ‘Lifelong Learning Programme’ under which the sucessor project to QATRAIN (QATRAIN2) is being funded. Full deatails of the programme and the dates of Calls for Proposals can be found at:http://ec.europa.eu/education/programmes/llp/index_en.html. The Commission press release, issued when the programme was first announced, still provides a conveinent summary, although the site referred to above should be consulted for more recent developments. Here is a convenient summary from the Commission press release:

The Lifelong Learning Programme is actually an over-arching structure that is built on four pillars, or sub-programmes. Grants and subsidies will be awarded to projects under each of these that enhance the trans-national mobility of individuals, promote bilateral and multilateral partnerships, or improve quality in education and training systems through multilateral projects encouraging innovation, for example. The four pillars are:

1. The Comenius programme (€ 1,047 million) addresses the teaching and learning needs of all those in pre-school and school education up to the level of the end of upper secondary education, and the institutions and organisations providing such education;

2. The Erasmus programme (€ 3,114 million) addresses the teaching and learning needs of all those in formal higher education, including trans-national student placements in enterprise, and the institutions and organisations providing or facilitating such education and training;

3. The Leonardo da Vinci programme (€ 1,725 million) addresses the teaching and learning needs of all those in vocational education and training, including placement in enterprise of persons other than students, as well as the institutions and organisations providing or facilitating such education and training;

4. The Grundtvig programme (€ 358 million) addresses the teaching and learning needs of those in all forms of adult education, as well as the institutions and organisations providing or facilitating such education.

These four pillars are joined by what will be known as a ‘transversal programme’ (€ 369 million), which will pursue the following four key activities:

policy cooperation and innovation in lifelong learning;
promotion of language learning;
development of innovative ICT-based content, services, pedagogies and practice for lifelong learning;
dissemination and exploitation of results of actions supported under the Lifelong Learning Programme and previous related programmes, and exchange of good practice.

Finally, these actions are complemented by the new Jean Monnet programme (€ 170 million), which supports institutions and activities in the field of European integration.

The implementation of the Lifelong Learning Programme has been allocated a budget of € 6,970 million for the period of the 7 years from 1 January 2007 to end December 2013.

Disabled people and the training policies of the European Union

Issues concerned with improving the employability of disabled people have been a priority in EU programmes for a number of years. For example, in the last round of the old Leonardo da Vinci programme (under which the first QATRAIN project was funded), promoters were required to ‘apply equal opportunities at all stages of their projects (design, implementation and evaluation of activities)’ (General Guide 2005, p16) and ‘special attention’ in the selection process was to be ‘given to proposals which aim to meet the training needs of people at risk of exclusion from the labour market’ (p17). The Application Form for the programme then gave applicants the opportunity to show how such a commitment would be expressed in practice and, furthermore, expressed an overall commitment to equal opportunities to explicitly included a specific reference to disabled people (see question 5 in the form).

The new Lifelong Learning programme maintains this emphasis, recognising the need ‘to widen access for those from disadvantaged groups and to address actively the special learning needs of those with disabilities’ and to ‘contribute to increased participation in lifelong learning by people of all ages, including those with special needs’ (Common Position 2006). Article 12 of this document provides more detail, committing the programme to ‘making provision for learners with special needs, and in particular by helping to promote their integration into mainstream education and training’ (my emphasis). This article goes on to express a commitment to combating all forms of discrimination, including that based on disability.

It can therefore be seen that the historic commitment of the European Union, that its training policies should support the employability of disabled people, has been given a focus in the latest programme that harmonises extremely closely with the goals of the QATRAIN project.

A note on learning outcomes

Each of the national SCIPS sites is built around the notion of ‘learning outcomes’. This is an extremely important element of the QATRAIN project’s approach to meeting the needs of disabled students. Traditional approaches, based upon syllabus content and standardised modes of delivery can inhibit the development of alternative methods for disabled students. If a VET programme is expressed in terms of learning outcomes, it directly expresses those common results that all students are expected to achieve, whether they are disabled or not. The fixed, essential point is the achievement of the learning outcome. With such an approach it becomes easier to develop, and evaluate, alternative means that may enable disabled people to achieve the essential elements of the programme.

The European Qualifications Framework is based on learning outcomes. Most EU countries are either in the process of developing their own National Qualifications Framework, or already have one, and it is an essential requirement for each NQF that it should be expressed in terms of learning outcomes (Konrad 2006). To have the concept of learning outcomes entrenched in European policy provides important support for the take-up of Qatrain and its national SCIPS sites.

Relevant issues in policy development concerning quality in VET

Social inclusion as a potential ‘challenge’ to quality

In the report of the Working Committee on Quality Indicators (2001) on the quality of school education across Europe, social inclusion was listed as one of the ‘five key challenges’ for the future. It may be useful to consider this as it applies to disabled people and to the Qatrain project in particular.

Teachers, trainers and training providers at all levels of VET often fear that meeting the needs of disabled people may put quality at risk by either (or both) requiring a relaxation of the standards applied to everyone else, or demanding resources that will undermine the overall quality that a programme can achieve. Qatrain seeks to address both issues. The project is committed to the maintenance of standards in VT: if some disabled people are allowed to pass at a lower standard, not only is this unfair to their non-disabled peers, it also will lead to a rapid devaluation of the qualifications achieved by all disabled people. Qatrain helps teachers and trainers to determine the essential learning outcomes of their programmes and to introduce alternative ways by which some disabled people may be enabled to achieve the same outcomes as their peers and at the same standard as their peers.

In terms of the call on resources, it can indeed be the case that some adaptations to meet the needs of some disabled people may be expensive. At the national level it may be easy to see that this cost is relatively low compared to the social costs of the continuing dependency that is associated with a lack of training and education (providing support and the loss of income from personal taxation). But unfortunately governments rarely translate this into direct financial support for training providers. However it is unusual for expensive solutions to be required; the adjustments and adaptations that the national SCIPS websites encourage their users to introduce are mostly cost-free, or involve only very small expenditure.

If it is correct to see social inclusion, in any sense at all, as a ‘challenge’ to quality, then it should be recognised that the Qatrain project is an important tool in managing and overcoming this challenge.

Quality assurance systems and the Qatrain project

Quality assurance has two key roles in the Qatrain project; for both it is essential to understand the development of QA policy at the European level and how this then relates to national QA policies.

First, because QA systems may themselves impose barriers for some disabled people, it is important to identify the means of updating and adapting their requirements should this be necessary. (An example of this kind might be regulations about assessment that imposed tight and inflexible requirements that restrict the flexibility to adapt to meet the needs of disabled people.)

Second, because QA systems, if they ask the correct questions, have the potential to be active stimulants towards the improvement of provision for disabled people in VET.

The process of development leading to consistent QA practices between member states of the EU will take a number of years to rteach full maturity. In order to maximise its immediate impact, the QATRAIN project chose to focus on reaching those who occupy the key roles in the existing systems. Research for the project showed that peer review, combined with the placing of core responsibilities on teachers and trainers, lay at the heart of current QA practice in all partner countries. So the best option for the first QATRAIN project was to target these key figures and to support them in improving their quality assurance practices.

Key components of European policy and its implementation

Following the Bologna declaration of 1999, in which governments committed themselves to ‘European co-operation in quality assurance, with a view to developing comparable criteria and methodologies’ (Bologna 1999), the early work on QA at the European level was carried out by the European Forum on Quality, followed up by the Technical Working group on Quality in VET. Its work led to the development of the Common Quality Assurance Framework, developed as part of the Copenhagen process, in turn then recommended for implementation in member states by the EU Council of Ministers in May 2004. The Framework ‘is designed to help develop, monitor, evaluate and improve quality systems and quality management practices at both national and VET provider level’ (eu2006.fi).

At university level, the custodian of the policy at European level is ENQA - the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education. The equivalent body for VET is ENQA-VET (the European Network on Quality in VET) founded in October 2005. The Virtual Community on Quality Assurance in VET, set up and run by Cedefop since 2003 is also important as a forum for exchange between practitioners in the field,

As part of the Bologna-Bergen process, and the adoption of the common qualifications framework, member states have committed to the achievement of common principles in QA and to comparable QA systems at national level.

The Common Quality Assurance Framework

Planning
Questions cover matters such as the nature of goals, their clarity and measurement practices, and planning procedures
Implementation

Implementation concerns the relationship between goals, the means of achieving them and the principles underlying the process.

Assessment and evaluation

This addresses mechanisms for assessment and representation of key players in the process

Feedback and procedures for change

This key element in the Framework deals with procedures to ensure that the outcomes of assessment are used effectively to ensure appropriate action is undertaken

Methodology

As the name implies, this element of the framework concerns decisions and principles underlying the whole process of assessment and review

There are many explanations of the CQAF available as sources of more detailed information: see for example Technical Working Group (2003).

Common Principles for Quality Assurance in Education and Training

The common principles are another core element of European QA policy. To quote (EQF 2005):

· QA is necessary to ensure accountability and improvement of education and training

· QA policies and procedures should cover all levels of education and training systems

· QA should be an integral part of the internal management of education and training institutions

· QA should include regular evaluation of institutions or programmes by external monitoring bodies or agencies

· QA external monitoring bodies or agencies should themselves be subject to regular review

· QA should include context, input, process and output dimensions, while giving emphasis to outputs and learning outcomes.

· QA systems should include:

§ Clear and measurable objectives and standards

§ Guidelines for implementation, including stakeholder involvement

§ Appropriate resources

§ Consistent evaluation methods, associating self-assessment and external review

§ Feedback mechanisms and procedures for improvement

§ Widely accessible evaluation results

· QA initiatives at international, national and regional level should be coordinated in order to ensure overview, coherence, synergy and system-wide analysis

· QA should be a cooperative process across levels, involving all relevant stakeholders, within countries and across Europe

· QA guidelines at European level may provide reference points for evaluations and peer-learning.

Issues related to Qatrain

Neither the CQAF nor the Common Principles make direct reference to issues explicitly concerning disabled people in VET. They are statements concerned with systems and processes, not with the substantive content of decision-making within these processes. This reflects the need to accommodate difference, whether at the national level or that of individual institutions (European Commission 2004). As an illustration of the reasons for this, consider an attempt to impose uniformity on the university sector, with the inevitable challenge to long-established traditions of academic freedom. It would be doomed from the start and would put at risk the whole transnational undertaking.

The CQAF provides a basic model for co-operation in QA across Europe, both in VET and in other areas (see, for example, Faurschou 2005). It is expressed as a series of stages and a set of questions is associated with each:In April 2006, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe adopted a recommendation to its 46 member states for a 10 year Action Plan to promote the rights and full participation of disabled people (Council of Europe 2006). One of the 15 action lines in the plan is education, extending to this wider grouping many of the priorities established within the European Union. More recently the EU has committed to the production, each two years, of an Action Plan on Disability (see, for example, European Commission 2005). The priority focus for the second phase of the Action Plan is the ‘active inclusion of people with disabilities building on the citizens’ concept of disability’… ‘It is implicit in the citizens’ concept that disabled people have the same individual choices and control in their everyday life as non-disabled people’ (European Commission 2005, p6). Again therefore, the priority of EU policy is towards maximising choice for disabled people – which is difficult to achieve within specialist, disability-specific, institutions.

But the CQAF and the Common Principles do provide clear indications of how the consideration of issues connected with disability could be introduced. For example, the CQAF emphasises the importance of clarifying goals and of stakeholder involvement. Given current European policies concerning VET and the role of disabled people, there is a powerful case to suggest that questions concerning accessibility for disabled people should figure prominently among the goals of VET providers and, similarly, that organisations of disabled people should be seen as being significant stakeholders in many different contexts.

Among the important features of the Principles that have direct implications for Qatrain are:

The reference to regular external evaluation: this could readily give an opportunity for issues about disability to be incorporated into the standard agenda of such events.
The importance of a self-assessment component: self-assessment implies that VET providers should be able to set their own agendas, reflecting local concerns. This indicates the importance of identifying valorisation targets at local levels.
The linkage between national action and co-ordination at the European level: strong commitments at European level, with European legislation that supports these commitments, potentially provide important factors in inducing change at the national and local level.
The importance attached to the updating and improvement of existing systems: if there is an expectation that QA should lead to the enhancement of services provided in VET, then it should be possible to argue that improving the services for disabled people are an essential element in the process of change.

All of these provide opportunities to promote a recognition of the need to incorporate the need to meet the needs of disabled people within normal, mainstream, quality assurance practice. As such they should provide a lever for change at regional, national and European levels and support the partnership in its valorisation activities.

References and Links

Bologna (1999) The Bologna declaration on the European higher education area http://www.bologna-berlin2003.de/pdf/bologna_declaration.pdf R (2000) CattaniThe Council Directive 2000/78/EC of 27 November establishing a general framework for equal treatment in employment and occupation (http://www.viewsahead.org/download/speeches/03_cattani.doc)
Common Position (2006) Common position no 15/2006 adopted by the Council on 24 July 2006 with a view to adopting a Decision … establishing an action programme in the field of lifelong learning Official journal of the European Union C251E/37 17.10.2006s
Council of Europe (2006) Recommendation (2006) http://www.coe.int (search under ‘Committee of Ministers’/’Adopted texts’)

Council of the European Union (2003) Council Resolution on equal opportunities for pupils and students with disabilities in education and training (2003/C 134/04 Official Journal of the European Communities)
DDA (1995) The Disability Discrimination Act (extended to cover education in 2001 by the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act)
EQF (2005) EQF Consultation Document Common Principles for quality assurance
(Brussels, 8.7.2005, SEC(2005) 957, pages 26/27 http://ec.europa.eu/education/programmes/llp/index_en.html
eu2006fi Quality Management recommendations for vocational education and training Finnish National Board of Education 2006
European Commission (2000a) Towards a barrier free Europe for people with disabilities COM (2000) 284 final of 12.05.2000
European Commission (2000b) Directive against discrimination of the grounds of religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation (Directive 2000/78/EC)
European commission (2004) Proposal for a Recommendation of the Council and of the European parliament on further European cooperation in quality assurance and higher education COM(2004) 642 final 12.10.2004 Brussels
European Commission (2005) Situation of disabled people in the enlarged European Union: the European Action Plan 2006-7 COM (2005) 604 final 28.11.2005
Faurschou K (2005) The systems and mechanisms of quality assurance in vocational training: an analysis of the results of projects undertaken on this theme under the Leonardo da Vinci programme 1995-1999 Cirius Denmark 29.01.2005
General Guide (2005) Leonardo da Vinci Community Vocational Training Action Programme. Second Phase 2000-2006. General Guide for Project Promoters European Commission.
Goelen W (2005) An overview of the Disability Agenda in Europe Disability in Europe: Seminar Proceedings. National Disability Authority (Ireland) www.nda.ie
Konrad, J (2006)The European Qualifications Framework: taking stock of the consultation CEDEFOP Virtual Communities - the European Qualifications Framework 20.03.2006
Straw E (2004) Keynote Speech (at the National Conference on the Council of the Europe Union Directive establishing a General Framework for Equal Treatment in Employment and Occupation. Malta. 10.12.2004) National Commission Persons with Disability (Note: Ms Straw was speaking on behalf of the Disability Unit of the European Commission; the officials of this unit have been active in promoting understanding of EU policy at similar events)
Technical Working Group (2003) A European Common Quality Assurance Framework http://trainingvillage.gr/etv October 2003
Working Committee on Quality Indicators (2001) European Report on the Quality of School Education Office for Official Publications of the European Communities Luxembourg

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