‘Europe's future depends on its Youth'. Yet, opportunities are limited while youth unemployment, marginalization and social exclusion are threatening Europe's greater asset for the future: young people’s human and social capital. There is still great need for MS “to continue to work together to improve their employability, their integration in the labour market, their social inclusion and participation". (Junker Speech, EC 2015). Equipping young Europeans with the right skills has been reaffirmed by the 2016 Council Resolution on ‘A New Skills Agenda for an Inclusive and Competitive’ Europe which stated that skills are a pathway to employability and prosperity. However, skills gaps and mismatches are striking, 40% of employers cannot find people with the skills they need, whereas students leave E&T without being sufficiently prepared to enter the labour market. VET is valued for fostering job-specific and transversal skills, facilitating the transition into employment and maintaining and updating the skills of the workforce according to sectoral, regional and local needs. Although over 13 million learners are engaged in VET each year, forecasts in several M.S. indicate that there will be a shortage of people with VET qualifications in the future. Yet, for many young people and their parents VET remains a second choice. VET needs to increase its attractiveness through quality provision and flexible organisation, allowing progression to higher vocational or academic learning, and closer links with the world of work. Introducing coding and robotic skills to VET students, while strengthening the profiles of VET teachers are among the aims of the consortium. 'Everyone should learn how to program, as it teaches you how to think'. (Steve Jobs) Promoting coding and robotics will help enrich VET provision of curricula while promoting better skills matching thus bridging the gap between Education and Training and the world of work. The direct target group of the project is VET students with fewer opportunities and the indirect target group is VET teachers whose profiles will be enriched after the professional development training to be offered. Also, the VET schools will gain as strong partnerships will be created with local enterprises and companies that will share their expertise and support with the VET teachers and students. The consortium comprises of 7 partners representing both geographical balance as well as expertise and competences. Based on the above the project promotes the following priorities of the Erasmus+ Programme: - To promote the acquisition and achievement of skills and competences, such as basic, soft, digital and language skills through effective and innovative teaching and assessment. (Hor) - To promote social inclusion through innovative integrated approaches -inclusion, diversity, equality, gender-balance and non-discrimination in VET also combating discrimination, segregation, racism, bullying and violence (Hor) - To enhance the access, participation and learning performance of disadvantaged learners, reducing disparities in learning outcomes (Hor) - To further strengthen key competences in VET, including common methodologies for introducing those competences in curricula, as well as for acquiring, delivering and assessing the learning outcomes of those curricula.(Spec) - Introducing systematic approaches to, and opportunities for, the continuous professional development of VET teachers by developing effective open and innovative education through the use of ICT. (Spec). - Developing VET business partnerships aimed at promoting work-based learning in all its forms, by involving social partners, companies and VET providers (Spec) - To strengthen the profile(s) of the teaching professions, including teachers, school leaders and teacher educators, through supporting teachers in adopting collaborative and innovative practices and in dealing with diversity in the classroom through the development of a targeted. (hor) - To promote open and innovative methods and pedagogies, participatory governance where appropriate, develop learning materials and tools as well as actions that support the effective use of ICTs in VET. (Hor) - To promote recognition as well as transparency and comparability of learning outcomes ant to promote innovative solutions for the recognition and supporting the validation. (Hor)
The development of an innovative strategy for the implementation of modules on robotics and programming at vocational schools is to be regarded as the main goal of Robot4All. Essential features of this strategy are the use of modern but inexpensive software and hardware components and the premise that the modules must be usable without extensive previous knowledge of the teachers and students. In this sense, the strategy guarantees a preferably barrier-free access to the topic of robotics and programming even at vocational schools which do not have the technical equipment in the field of robotics so far. Another important aspect of the strategy is the orientation of the learning objectives with regard to the requirements of the modern labour market. The strategy was designed to focus on the promotion of key qualifications. In the context of Robot4All, these included digital skills in programming and robotics as well as the promotion of STEM and soft skills. In order to investigate the educational policy situation of vocational training in connection with information and communication technology and robotics in the participating countries of the project (UK, Germany, Luxembourg, Cyprus, Spain, Romania and Greece) and on a European level. an extensive survey was conducted by all partner organizations at the beginning of the project. Subsequently, the project developed a set of teaching materials, which were then compiled in the form of a toolkit containing all the teaching materials, as well as additional helpful documents for implementing the strategy in vocational schools. The toolkit was tested and evaluated in staff training and in two pilot phases at the vocational schools participating in the project. This resulted in the intended improvement of the digital key competences of the participating school classes as well as valuable feedback for the project consortium regarding improvements of the teaching material. In parallel, numerous dissemination activities were carried out to make the project known to the primary target group, consisting of teachers and students of vocational education, and to the secondary target group, consisting of stakeholders from politics and education. The strategy for the sustainable use of the project materials, which was developed in the context of the last Intellectual Output, ensures a long-term benefit of the project results by publishing the teaching material and by offering the possibility to use the online platform of the project free of charge in the future.