Youth of quality

It’s by now a recurrent theme, a widespread conviction, in the headquarters of the EU institutions: to create jobs and look with confidence to the overcoming of the economic crisis, we need to aim at the vocational training of youth and adults. The “knowledge economy”, that formed the connecting thread of the failed Lisbon Strategy, remains – rightly – one of the pillars of the new Europe 2020 Strategy for growth and employment. The Commission is moving in this direction with some determination. Recently two parallel initiatives have placed in the spotlight education, training, mobility and insertion in the workforce for the under30s and for adults. Qualified youth. In September the EU Executive “baptized” Youth on the Move, a new initiative “destined to help the young to acquire the knowledge, skills and experiences they need to find their first job”. Inserted in the Europe 2020 programme, Youth on the Move proposes “28 key actions aimed at making education and training more responsive to young people’s needs and encourage a greater number of them to apply for EU scholarships to study or receive training in another country”. Promoting access to the labour market is therefore the first objective of an ambitious project that takes into account the 5 million unemployed youth now living in the EU27. Androulla Vassiliou, Commissioner for Education and Youth, declares: “These measures are aimed at increasing the quality of training in Europe so as to equip our youth with the necessary qualifications for work today. We wish to reduce the phenomenon of early school leavers and increase the number of youth in the sector of tertiary education”, so as to “enable them to develop to the full their personal potential”. Vassiliou adds: “The EU has ever greater need of highly qualified, conscientious and innovative youth to be able to prosper in future”.Courses and loans. In presenting the initiative, the Commission explains: “From some studies carried out it emerges that by 2020, 35% of new jobs will require high level qualifications, while 50% will require medium level qualifications”. To this finding, which is plausible, the Commission intends to respond (perhaps with some exaggerated optimism) with various practical proposals, some already realized, others in the process of being set up. For example: a special website dedicated to Youth on the Move (http://europa.eu/youthonthemove), “which will represent a single portal to obtain information about the opportunities for studying or gaining work experiences abroad”; the pilot project Your First Eures Job, which is the EU instrument to match demand and supply of work) and which will “provide advice, help in searching for a job and financial aid for youth who intend to work abroad and for firms” interested in hiring them; the creation of a European fund for loans to students; and a programme of micro-finance for young entrepreneurs (Progress). Further schemes include the definition of league table of universities, “with the aim of furnishing a more complete and realistic picture of the results of higher education than the existing classifications”; and a European skills passport, based on Europass (the European online curriculum vitae), “to enable skills to be registered in a transparent and comparable way”. “which will represent a single portal to obtain information about the opportunities for studying or gaining work experiences abroad”; the pilot project Your First Eures Job, which is the EU instrument to match demand and supply of work) and which will “provide advice, help in searching for a job and financial aid for youth who intend to work abroad and for firms” interested in hiring them; the creation of a European fund for loans to students; and a programme of micro-finance for young entrepreneurs (Progress). Further schemes include the definition of league table of universities, “with the aim of furnishing a more complete and realistic picture of the results of higher education than the existing classifications”; and a European skills passport, based on Europass (the European online curriculum vitae), “to enable skills to be registered in a transparent and comparable way”.The ten years of Grundtvig. But the Commission also has its sights on other age groups. It is thus re-launching Grundtvig, an EU educational programme for those over the age of 40-50, which is now celebrating its tenth anniversary. As Commissioner Vassiliou herself explains, Grundtvig “helps adults”, and in particular disadvantaged persons, “to reinforce the skills they have, and their capacity for professional insertion, by helping to fund training courses and learning mobility”. In this decade the programme has invested 370 million euro in courses for adults, furnishing – according to the data of the Executive – 17,000 financial subsidies to various organizations that have involved over 500,000 persons. The overall budget of the 2007-13 programme amounts to 415 million euro. Grundtvig holds out a helping hand to adults who have left school without any qualifications or only with primary school certificates, and “supports teachers, instructors and other personnel belonging to adult education centres and associations, advisory bodies, information services, NGOs, firms, voluntary service groups and research centres”. The specific objectives of the programme are: improving the quality of training courses; increasing the mobility of pupils and teachers; guaranteeing that those on the margins of society have access to adult education, especially if they are elderly and without basic qualifications; and supporting educational programmes, services and practices based on the new information and communication technologies.