EICON Press Release No 2

People with disabilities continue to be disproportionately excluded from the labour market Europe-wide. Vocational education and training (VET) plays a crucial role, as it acts as the joint between school education and the working world. How information and communication technologies (ICT) can be helpful in making VET more inclusive and therefore in better preparing learners for the labour market is the content of the ERASMUS+ project EICON. Project partners just met in Germany for the first of a series of several meetings to exchange good practice and to develop effective solutions.

All of the meetings will focus on specific topics and discuss how ICT can be supportive to raise an organisation’s inclusive capacity. This first meeting dealt with the pedagogy in VET organisations and with different teaching and learning approaches. Participants from six organisations from Finland, Sweden, Portugal, Greece and Germany exchanged effective practice and discussed first recommendations for teachers and managers of VET organisations.

Draft results will soon be shared publicly so that educators around Europe can add their experiences and successful examples. Through this consultation process the results will be consolidated and more likely to fit to the different settings of VET organisations across Europe.

The second project meeting is scheduled for 10 – 12 April 2019 in Gothenburg, Sweden. The focus of this meeting will be on technology and infrastructure.

About the Project

EICON’s main objective is to support organisations / institutions providing Vocational Education and Training (VET) to become more inclusive. In particular, the aim is to put the organisations as a whole in the focus, and not just education and training practice. Managers of these organisations / institutions are particularly in need for guidance on how to further develop their organizations, as they often have to work towards multiple aims simultaneously, i.e. inclusion usually is one among other aims. For different organizational areas der project will elaborate, if and how information and communication technology (ICT) can be used as a lever / amplifier to increase the overall organization’s inclusiveness. EICON is the acronym for ‘Enhancing inclusion capacity of educational organisations / institutions providing VET with information and communication technologies (ICT)’. The project runs from 1 November 2018 until 31 October 2020.

The Partners

Six partners from Germany, Portugal, Greece, Sweden and Finland have joined forces to elaborate practice-oriented recommendations. Partners come from organisations that provide VET (Ammattiopisto Live (FI) and Cooperativa para a Educação e Reabilitação de Cidadãos Inadaptados de Cascais – CERCICA (PT)), that support organisations / institutions that provide VET (Specialpedagogiska skolmyndigheten – SPSM (SE) and the National Ministry of Education, Research and Religious Affairs (EL)), that provide technology for VET organisations and individuals (EPISTIMI GIA SENA ASTIKI MI KERDOSKOPIKI ETAIRIA (EL)) and that support organisations in complex change processes (Institut für Technologie und Arbeit – ITA (DE); project coordinator). Further information can be found online:
www.eicon-project.eu

EICON is a Strategic Partnership in Vocational Education and Training, co-funded by the ERASMUS+ Program of the European Union under grant no 2018-1-DE02-KA202-005110. The European Commission support does not constitute an endorsement of the contents which reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.