Saturday, 13^th November 2010

Non-formal education: the added value we've got!

In my nine years of youth work involvement I've been regularly confronted with the question why am I spending my spare time involved in youth organisations and their activities. Bottom line was that most people thought that I was wasting my time trying to save the world instead of focusing on finishing my studies and getting a real job. My usual answer was that I'm actually gaining a lot of valuable experience by being involved in youth organisations and that thanks to the non-formal education - of which youth organisations are the main providers - I've managed to gain competences and skills I didn't get in my formal education.

Let us first have a quick look back in history to see when it all started and  the categorisation of education that emerged. Non-formal education became part of the international discourse on education policy in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There was concern about unsuitable curricula; a realization that educational growth and economic growth were not necessarily in step, and that jobs did not emerge directly as a result of educational inputs. Some forty years later some of these challenges still persist.

At around the same time there were moves in UNESCO toward lifelong education and notions of 'the learning society' which culminated in Learning to Be ('The Faure Report', UNESCO 1972). What emerged from these debates was the following definition of and distinction between the three different types of education:

• Formal education: the hierarchically structured, chronologically graded 'education system', running from primary school through the university and including, in addition to general academic studies, a variety of specialised programmes and institutions for full-time technical and professional training.
• Informal education: the truly lifelong process whereby every individual acquires attitudes, values, skills and knowledge from daily experience and the educative influences and resources in his or her environment - from family and neighbours, from work and play, from the market place, the library and the mass media.
• Non-formal education: any organised educational activity outside the established formal system - whether operating separately or as an important feature of some broader activity - that is intended to serve identifiable learning clienteles and learning objectives.

Non-Formal Education (NFE), and the increase in its recognition, has been a top priority for the European Youth Forum (YFJ). It should continue to be so in the coming years until we achieve our aim: full recognition of NFE and ensuring sufficient financial support to youth organisations as the main providers of NFE activities.

The YFJ has already developed an extensive policy documentation and studies on the topic, most notably the study entitled Building Bridges for Learning – the Recognition and Value of Non-Formal Education from 1999, the policy paper on Youth organisations as non-formal educators – recognising our role [0618-03], the policy paper on Recognition of non-formal education: Confirming the real competencies of young people in the knowledge society [0716-05] and the policy paper on Non-Formal Education: A framework for indicating and assuring quality [0009-08].

It is important to remind ourselves that as youth organisations we are the prime providers of NFE and as such also responsible to ensure the quality of learning in the activities we provide. In the past two years the YFJ has been advocating for a quality assurance framework and defined a set of quality indicators as well as an objective of establishing a European Quality Assurance framework for NFE by 2015. An important YFJ activity linked to this process has been the annual Dialogue on NFE event, taking place for the fifth time this December. The aim of the 5h Dialogue on the recognition of NFE is to jointly explore, reflect and deepen the recognition process of NFE, focusing on the contribution of youth organisations towards well being and health of young people. This is especially important because we need to show that NFE is not only a goal in itself (except when fighting for its full recognition) but first and foremost a tool we use to tackle youth issues, such as health of young people.

To come back to what my family and friends have been wondering about in terms of  the added value of my involvement in youth organisations I can proudly show  the personal results achieved thanks to non-formal education as well as informal learning. It was mainly thanks to NFE that I've vastly improved my language skills, that I got confident in speaking in public, that I gained project management and financial management skills and many other things that represent an added value for me. And it is this added value that youth organisations can and should provide. And the YFJ as the largest platform of organised youth should help ensure that NFE becomes truly recognised and that its member organisations receive the necessary financial support to continue implementing numerous NFE activities that help change the life of millions of young people in Europe and beyond.