The Swedish Presidency of the Council of the EU submitted draft conclusions to the Working Party on Education on Monday 3 April aimed at “making automatic mutual recognition in education and training a reality”. While this is still under development, the text advocates the need to increase the level of trust between different education systems.
“While progress has been made, the lack of automatic mutual recognition of qualifications and of the outcomes of learning periods abroad continues to hamper learning mobility in the EU”, the Presidency concedes, echoing a European Commission report (see EUROPE 13128/19).
Intensify efforts
Sweden will therefore urge EU countries to step up their efforts. It is asking them, for example, to ensure that a qualification giving access to a certain level of higher education awarded by one Member State will automatically grant access to the same level in another EU country.
It is also calling on them to support higher education institutions in setting up recognition processes and to communicate relevant information on the subject to both stakeholders and citizens. “This will allow citizens and learners to understand the possibilities that automatic mutual recognition gives them for studying abroad, and to support a consistent approach by the competent recognition authorities”, she said.
Furthermore, the text wants to encourage cooperation with the European Network of National Academic Recognition Information Centres to “avoid inconsistencies” between different recognition processes. Furthermore, the network’s expertise can also be used to evaluate existing recognition systems.
Moving towards greater trust
More broadly, the Swedish Presidency believes that “enhanced trust” between the different education systems in the EU is essential to “promote automatic mutual recognition of qualifications and outcomes of learning periods abroad”, starting at secondary level.
On the one hand, it calls for “facilitating long-term learning periods abroad” as well as “exchanges between staff, institutions, authorities and other relevant actors” through the Erasmus+ programme.
On the other hand, it wants EU countries to exchange and “build trust and transparency among education and training systems”. In this respect, it believes, inter alia, that “external quality assurance” mechanisms (i.e. assessing whether a higher education institution remains aligned with a set of established objectives) should be conducted by agencies registered with the European Quality Assurance Register for Higher Education (EQAR).
Finally, the Presidency is calling for “full advantage to be taken of the tools of the Bologna Process and the EU”, including the Copenhagen Process and the tools developed with the support of Erasmus+.
These conclusions will add to the 2018 EU Council conclusions to which Member States have already committed themselves, such as introducing automatic recognition by 2025.
Read the draft conclusions: https://aeur.eu/f/67x (Original version in French by Hélène Seynaeve)