In France, the so-called “portfolio of competences” has finally come into being. It is a new instrument able to describe better one person’s experiences and qualifications, especially in the social and voluntary sectors. Such a portfolio is the result of the work of a group attached to the French Ministry of Education, Youth and Social Life, which gathers several associations, a sociologist and a centre for work.
The document proposed by the Ministry includes 18 papers with detailed questions volunteers have to answer in order to provide a complete framework of the competences acquired within the different domains of voluntary work (project management and organisation, fund-raising activities, etc.). French Minister of Education Luc Chatel has been very active this year in the promotion of voluntary work, especially among young people. It is no coincidence that last October the Ministry created the Senior Council for social life. The important of such a subject in France is also underlined by the recent appointment of Jeannette Bougrab as State Secretary for youth and voluntary work.
This initiative is in line with the recommendations expressed by the European Union during the European Year of Volunteering. In a Communication presented last September, indeed, the EU announced the creation of a “European Skills Passport” able to certify the different skills acquired through volunteering and social commitment. The Commission is working on a proposal for a Council Recommendation on the validation of non-formal and informal learning that includes the volunteering dimension.
On a practical level, voluntary work experience and skills acquired through volunteering can be displayed in the Europass documents [20] and will be integrated into the future “European Skills Passport”. Compared with the idea of “portfolio”, the concept of “passport” probably better reflects the need to create a European document transferable to every EU country.
This month a new project has been launched, its name is “Soocle Commun pour les pratiques pedagogiques dans l’education formelle et non formelle” and it is promoted by the Associazione italiana Idee per l’Educazione and an associative network involving France, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Germany and Spain. This project aims at promoting in Europe a common platform for giving value to informal learning in people’s global learning processes. It will contribute to changing learning practices, which too often seem to be bounded to a theoretical and sciolistic training. Furthermore, such a project ensures learning practices are shared on a European level, both within and outside school, improving educators’ mobility throughout the continent.
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