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This paper analyses the purposes of cooperation as they challenge the European governance of higher education. Using Brexit to analyse meanings of cooperation and conveying secondary data analysis of ten case studies undertaken in the framework of the exploratory research project titled Brexit and higher education in the UK and Europe: Towards a cross‐country investigation, this study identifies a plurality of meanings of cooperation. These meanings resonate within the scenarios of Europe 2025 traced by the European Commission. In the scenarios (1) nothing but the single market, (2) doing less more efficiently, (3) those who want more do more, the different meanings of cooperation put at risk the future of cooperation driven by academic values and beliefs at the core of the Europeanisation of knowledge policies. Ultimately, the paper underlines that cooperation as a driver of the internationalisation of higher education questions the role of national openness and/or closure in framing shared European interests and the value of international cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The implementation within Europe of a credit system for vocational education and training known as ECVET is a European Commission priority. The potential for permeability between the ECVET and European Credit Transfer and accumulation System (ECTS) was foreseen in the Recommendation to establish ECVET in 2009, while the Bruges Communique of 2010 called for the promotion of flexible links between vocational and higher education and increased coherence between ECVET and ECTS. To this end a significant number of EU‐funded projects were undertaken to explore compatibility between ECVET and ECTS. This article reviews the findings of these projects and reflects on their success in terms of achieving this policy goal. These bridging projects identified several points of compatibility between the two credit systems and produced valuable tools and frameworks to facilitate such permeability. Achieving credit equivalency between ECVET and ECTS does not appear feasible, rather the evidence points to using a learning outcomes‐based equivalency framework. However, this article calls into question the sustainability of these project results with regard to the lack of success in translating these findings into practice and the lack of co‐ordinated efforts to implement these findings at a national or pan European level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What do we expect from Vocational Education and Training (VET) systems? Is it different from 25 years ago? This article argues that the focus has increasingly been placed on strategies for lifelong and life‐wide learning that seek to reinforce continuity among the subsystems of learning, but that VET systems are, nevertheless, still expected to address many and sometimes conflicting agendas, needs and priorities. The last 25 years or so have been critical for the development of VET in Europe. Making VET more attractive and increasing its parity of esteem in relation to general secondary education have been major, recurring themes in European countries, as part of, at least conceptually, more comprehensive approaches to lifelong and life‐wide learning. From 1989 to 2003, the European Journal of Education (EJE) published a special issue on ‘Trends in Vocational Education and Training’ every two years and has continued to publish on VETrelated topics. This article revisits the major themes and challenges as they were observed and discussed by the authors who wrote in those special issues and in later articles. Many were directly involved in advisory positions to governments; held key decision‐making responsibilities; undertook studies and consultancy and brought technical assistance across several countries. Their articles are moments of reflection nourished by experience on the ground. This article explores how the European Journal of Education has contributed to European reflection on VET systems, policies and preoccupations in recent decades – what can we learn that is useful for shaping and formulating our present ideas about new policy from our colleagues writing about the same or similar issues 20 years ago? A key theme concerns the role of the Europe Community (and subsequently EU) as a change agent supporting bottom‐up exchange and top‐down stimulus for reform through an increasing integration of education and training in the socio‐economic strategy of the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the concept of learning outcomes has been defined in Europe so that it can pervade and unify a wide range of policies relating to education and, in particular, to vocational education and training. It seeks to explain why learning outcomes are multi‐dimensional and to clarify how policy, theoretical and operational dimensions can be distinguished and related to one another. In the light of this, it will propose a theoretical model that helps to clarify what the progressive implementation of an outcomes approach looks like and which one can be used to compare the progress of different countries. Furthermore, the article argues that, when it comes to implementation, there are problems in identifying the use and the impact of learning outcomes. There is a diversity of practice in their design and application as ‘tools’ in the construction of curricula and the influence of these curricula upon teaching and learning is by no means straightforward. There has been remarkable progress in the establishment and referencing of national qualifications frameworks and the use of tools such as level descriptors in Europe, but this cannot be taken as evidence that ‘learning outcomes’ approaches are well established or that they have the intended impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of the European Union’s Commission in weaving together the Bologna Process and the Lisbon research strategy with its existing educational initiatives to define and disseminate an influential vision of European higher education. The article begins by outlining the Commission’s activities in relation to EU education programmes, the Lisbon research agenda and the Bologna Process. It goes on to examine, in a variety of policy texts, the discourse of European higher education that is supported by, and supporting, these large-scale policy developments. Whilst the overall coherence and cohesiveness of this emerging discourse can be queried, the article argues that the Commission is drawing effectively on both Bologna and Lisbon to firmly constitute — and reconstitute — higher education as a European policy domain. The article concludes with an analysis of how different educational stakeholders are supported and restricted by the Commission’s views of higher education, as articulated through its ‘hybrid’ Bologna/Lisbon agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]