Cedefop’s new VET knowledge centre

 
Vocational Education and Training (VET) is crucial to social inclusion. It helps integrate individuals into society by engaging them in education and training and providing them with work-related skills necessary for their labour market integration.
All-inclusive VET puts the individual at the centre and goes beyond training. It is part of a comprehensive approach including outreach, guidance, validation of non-formal and informal learning, and other financial and non-financial support.
The European Pillar of Social Rights, adopted in April 2017, presents the EU principles and related actions to strengthen the rights of EU citizens and deepen EU activities to support further convergence in the social area. The right to quality and inclusive education, training and lifelong learning is one of the 20 principles of the social pillar. 

A lot of Cedefop work in the past years focused on the excellence and quality dimension of VET (anticipating future skills needs, improving quality of qualifications and curricula, strengthening apprenticeships to improve labour market outcomes for VET graduates, etc.).
There has also been an important social inclusion dimension in Cedefop work although this was not always explicitly identified as the main purpose. In addition to studies with an explicit  focus on social inclusion such as Cedefop’s research papers on Leaving education early: putting vocational education and training centre stage, and Cedefop’s practical tools, such as the VET toolkit for tackling early leaving and VET toolkit for empowering NEETs, Cedefop has been leading research and analysis on topics that are linked with this objective. Cedefop’s work on validation of non-formal and informal learning as well as on lifelong guidance is also expected to have a positive impact on the social inclusion through VET. Similarly, Cedefop has been conducting studies with a strong social inclusion component focusing on VET pedagogies and learning outcomes based curricula or on the field of adult learning. 
Cedefop has now built a new online VET knowledge centre as a single entry point at the EU level with a view to showcasing the importance of VET in promoting inclusive excellence for all and especially for those at risk of social or labour market exclusion, such as early leavers from education and training and young people not in employment, education or training (NEETs). 
This new online VET knowledge centre is organised around four thematic areas: 
    VET for youth - Teachers and Trainers
    Apprenticeships
    VET for adults
    VET support policies - financing, guidance, validation 

Cedefop’s new online VET knowledge centre will be constantly enriched with new data, publications, forthcoming events and other resources.
Stay tuned and visit our VET knowledge centre!