Silvia Pieretto, member of EFIL’s Pool of Representatives, attended the full European Youth Forum Education Week on 4-7 November.
The YFJ Education Week was organised by the European Youth Forum in cooperation with its Education Working Group and aimed at gathering representatives from Member organisations with stakeholders in the field of education and policy makers to discuss the most important topics in the European agenda for what concerns education. The week was structured on thematic days: Day 1 Policy & practice of quality education for young people, Day 2 Skills and employability of young people, Day 3 Non-formal education: building bridges for quality and recognition.
This year the focus has been on giving the floor to member organisations of the European Youth Forum to share their practices on the topics mentioned above.
In particular, EFIL organised jointly with EEE-YFU, YEU, AEGEE and ESN the workshop ‘‘Learning mobility: the contribution of youth organisations to quality education”, organised jointly. The workshop was moderated by Silvia Pieretto from EFIL and speakers were the Secretary general of EEE-YFU, Brian Jurczik-Arnold, Stefan Janke, President of ESN, Paul Smith, President of AEGEE, Sven Retore of YEU, coordinator of their Pool of Trainers, Elisa Briga from EFIL, Advocacy coordinator.
Each organisation gave a general introduction about the non-formal and informal learning of participants within their mobility programmes (eg. university exchange, summer school, secondary school exchanges, youth exchange..) and how quality of learning is ensured. A joint panel of 30 minutes followed where the main common challenges and obstacles to mobility were highlighted, together with projects that organisations put in place towards quality, innovation and also to overcome challenges. In particular these were visas, accessibility (also but not inly in terms of costs), recognition of learning, inclusiveness of programmes, inequalities.
On the day focused on recognition of non-formal education, EFIL shared its practice in assessing intercultural competences, in particular based on the outcomes of the Forum on Intercultural Learning and Exchange and the Seminar on Transversal competences for global employment held in Antwerp in October.
The Education week has been a great opportunity to build links among youth organisations interested in education and with other stakeholders, in particular from the fields of Vocational education and training, Higher education, employment.
For further information, please contact elisa.briga@afs.org