Forum 3
Quality in vocational education and training
Germany has been increasingly opening up to Europe and the world; this in turn has led to an intensification of competition on the labour market for some time now. The growing pressure on companies to boost their efficiency and cost savings - not only in their operations but also in respect of their workforce - is therefore dictating to an ever greater degree the agenda of both initial and continuing vocational education and training taking place upstream to the labour markets. This has been a major factor in the paradigm shifts seen in vocational education and training in recent years, namely in the direction of learner-orientedness and outcome-orientedness.
In light of this, the Forum "Quality in vocational education and training" will focus on current issues relating to quality assurance and quality development and will investigate how quality assurance can be integrated into vocational education and training. In this connection, the question of who will set the standards for quality development and how they are to be defined remains an open issue and will ultimately also depend on the particular field and the players concerned.
The question of how these issues are being discussed against the backdrop of the conflicting priorities existing between the learner-orientedness and the knowledge of experts will be the focus of the opening event on the first day of the Congress, a plenary session on the question of "Who determines the quality of vocational education and training?".
On the second day, the working groups will discuss in detail the legal foundations, economic and statistical aspects, the role of instruction personnel in general and knowledge management in particular, the strategies of providers and public-sector players and, not least of all, European and European-policy aspects and perspectives of vocational education and training.
