Development and Assessment of Transversal Key Competences in Vocational Education and Training. Practices and Experiences of Six European Eountries
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Abstract
Transversal key competences (TKCs) occupy a prominent place in European skills policy, yet how vocational education and training systems describe, develop and assess them remains under researched. The article compares six systems in which vocational qualifications are awarded on the basis of state-regulated examinations: Austria, France, Latvia, Norway, Poland and Slovakia. It draws on national programme and assessment documents, a corpus of 725 learning-outcome statements, 136 interviews, and written responses from the partner teams of the Erasmus+ project TRACK-VET (2017–2020). TKCs appear in the strategic documents and framework acts of all six countries, though unevenly in curricula. Stakeholders rank learning to learn highest, but its core outcomes are among the least represented in the programme documents examined. Schools offer opportunities to develop TKCs, from projects to competitions and mobility, but these depend on the commitment of individual teachers and schools and on voluntary participation, which may limit access for some learners. Assessment arrangements differ in whether certification covers the general education component of vocational programmes, in who designs and judges the examinations, and in the methods employed. TKCs are rarely assessed explicitly for certification, and stakeholders, employers included, expressed reservations about scoring them. We interpret this gap as means–ends decoupling rather than solely as implementation failure. Outside certification, the development of TKCs rests on the practice of individual schools and on channels supplied by employers and social partners, above all workplace learning. The costs of this exclusion are therefore likely to be greatest where employer involvement in skill formation is weakest.
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