Project NQF- SQF

Although learning outcomes should be basically describable for all qualifications by using the EQF descriptors knowledge, skills, and competence in the same way regardless of their origin in terms of country or organisation responsible for maintaining and monitoring structures in which they are embedded, a mere description in EQF terms cannot dispel any doubts about the real value of this qualification: the EQF as such does not deliver enough criteria for assessment and comparison of qualifications.

It is therefore important how qualification frameworks are referenced to the EQF. In a situation where qualification frameworks are not available in every European country, every educational area, and occupational sector at the same level of development, it does not surprise that a common understanding of appropriate referencing these frameworks to the EQF does not exist. But as the EQF is not intended to serve as a regulation of European education, institutional aspects do not play a primary role, and organisations responsible for frameworks of any kind are encouraged to reference them to the EQF. Due to not existing general referencing criteria, this should cause problems especially where qualification systems/frameworks compete or at least exist separately from each other: This is the case for national qualifications frameworks ministered by public bodies and sectoral qualification frameworks supervised by (private) sectoral organisations.

The overall aim of the project NQF-SQF is to create common grounds for referencing national qualifications frameworks and sectoral qualifications/competence frameworks to the EQF, thereby providing for  comparability of qualifications on the basis of learning outcomes defined in terms of abilities required by work processes. This shall be enabled by the use of an instrument to be developed within the project: the employability grid. This grid shall be applicable for the assessment of qualifications as well as for the evaluation of frameworks qualifications refer to. It shall test how far descriptions of frameworks and qualifications make visible what  the learning outcomes of qualification processes are in terms of work process requirements, thus supporting employment at the European labour market.

The instrument shall be used in order to draft typologies of national and sectoral frameworks, leading to recommendations for enhancing referenceability of frameworks, encompassing also a work process relationship criterion which can be added to the catalogue of referencing criteria already defined by the EQF Advisory Group. On the basis of this work, a model of future collaboration between private/public stakeholders at European level shall be drafted. The structure of collaboration shall be arranged around a nucleus of already collaborating stakeholders: the EQF Advisory Group and EQF national contact points.