About | Project description| Partners
Project description

At present, 20 % of a group of pupils leaves the system with no qualifications and/or are dropping out of the system. To remedy this serious problem, the European Council of Lisbon decided to halve the number of people aged between 18 and 24 who have only completed the first cycle of secondary schooling, by the year 2010.

The project “A new transparent system of certification for young people with no qualifications” is part of this challenge. For the past three years, the project has gathered teachers and researchers from Luxembourg, France, Germany, Bulgaria and Portugal. Together they have developed a list of skills and an assessment methodology, which make it possible to validate basic skills and competencies acquired formally, or informally by young people who are having problems with social and vocational integration.

These young people have problems at school, in their social life and with money. They suffer from a low self-image and have great difficulty describing their competencies. That is why it is particularly important to help them put into words what they know and how they can go about carrying out a task or finding the answer to an exercise. This work on explaining is part and parcel of the assessment method that we propose. It is essential to strengthen feelings of competency in these young people and their motivation to learn and act.

The list constitutes a common-core syllabus to be acquired before any vocational learning and makes it possible to assess the following 6 areas of competency:

- Communication in the language of the country
- Basic mathematical skills
- Numeracy
- Learning to learn
- Personal and social skills
- Adapting to life in a company

To facilitate the work of the assessors, each item is matched to an exercise which illustrates the expected competency. The assessment list can be matched to a set of on-line teaching tools for the teacher. These tools exist in French, German, Bulgarian and English. They offer teaching programmes, individualised if necessary, based on many varied exercises set in everyday life situations. They can be used directly in any teaching situation for people with learning or integration difficulties.