Skillman believes that Cedefop’s VET toolkit for tackling early leaving and its 200+ resources of best practices, interventions, publications, tools, statistics and quick wins is a valuable source of support to policy makers and VET practitioners in Europe.
In particular, Cedefop’s Reflection tools for policy makers and VET providers offer an analytical framework for tackling early leaving in a comprehensive approach. The tools promote reflection and dialogue among policymakers and practitioners on current strategies to tackle early leaving from VET, allowing them to identify the strengths and weaknesses in their country (region or local community) and develop an action plan to counteract this phenomenon.
Cedefop’s toolkit aims to develop a European culture of policy evaluation supporting the design of evidenced-based policies. The two evaluation plans for policy makers and learning providers for the monitoring and evaluation of specific measures and practices are helpful instruments to policy-makers, practitioners and other stakeholders who are not experts in the field of evaluation.
The toolkit has an important limitation though and this is the language. As it is only available in English, users with no good command of English language may not benefit from its rich resources.
Skillman believes that the translation of the toolkit in all European languages is indispensable for ensuring the wide use of the toolkit and its equal access for all; especially if the toolkit is to support learning providers, regional and local policy makers.