National qualifications frameworks in England, Ireland, Scotland - Design, uses, effect
Meeting in Lisbon in 2000, EU heads of state and government formulated common goals for the successive development of Europe's education systems and set 2010 as the deadline for their implementation. In keeping with this, the Bruges initiative to open Europe's vocational education and training systems and the Copenhagen Declaration on enhanced cooperation (2002) stepped up the integration process in the area of vocational education and training.
Consequently, the Maastricht Communiqué issued in December 2004 by the ministers responsible for vocational education and training, the social partners and the European Commission advocated developing and implementing a European qualifications framework (EQF). The Communiqué also links this undertaking with the goals of ensuring and enhancing the quality of vocational education and training and promoting its parity with academic training. At the same time, the EU is also targeting a strong link between the development of an EQF and a European credit point system (ECVET).
Consultations on the first draft of the EQF (Commission of the European Communities 2005) were held during the second half of 2005. This draft was reworked by a technical working group. The revised draft then entered the decision-making process in mid-2006 and was adopted by the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers in spring of 2007 under the German Presidency.
Several countries - namely, England, Ireland and Scotland - have had their own national qualifications frameworks for some years now. The design of the new European Qualification Framework is partly based on these frameworks. For this reason, these national qualifications frameworks should also be examined - how they originated and are designed as well as what their impact has been and what problems have arisen - as part of the work being done to develop a national qualifications framework for Germany.
The qualifications framework proposed by the European Commission was designed as a tool for portraying and making comparable qualifications from different education sectors and occupational experience by expressing them in a common 'language' as learning outcomes, for crediting learning outcomes within individual levels and between different levels, for categorizing learning outcomes achieved in other countries and for enabling transfers between (sub)systems. This European initiative generates impetus for national qualifications frameworks.
