The Agency for VET and Adult Education participated as a partner in the project “BequalApp: Benchmarking for Quality Assurance in Apprenticeships and Work Based Learning” under the Erasmus+ program, Key Action 2 – Cooperation for Innovation and Exchange of Good Practices: Collaboration among institutions through the activities of Strategic Partnerships for Vocational Education and Training. The total project value is EUR 256,220.00, and the implementation period is from October 1, 2018, to September 30, 2020.

Main project goal:

The project is based on recognized values of apprenticeship and other forms of WBL highlighted in the priority education policies of the European Commission and EU member countries. The main goal of the project is to raise awareness of the value of apprenticeship and other work-based learning forms such as internships and traineeships through the development of a platform and online tools for benchmarking quality assurance in apprenticeships and work-based learning.

In addition to general objectives, the project has defined specific objectives:

• to develop a quality assurance framework for work-based learning addressing educational institutions and companies.
• to develop two self-assessment questionnaires for quality assurance in work-based learning for educational institutions and companies respectively.
• to develop an online platform on quality assurance in work-based learning with various resources, documents, links, articles, videos.
• to develop two online benchmarking tools for quality assurance in work-based learning, one addressed to educational institutions and one addressed to companies.
• to establish the Bequal.app badge for educational institutions and companies, recognising their engagement to develop quality assurance in work-based learning in their country as well as in Europe.

Target groups:

The target groups are VET institutions (secondary schools and other institutions providing regular and continuous vocational education and training programs) and companies facilitating work-based learning. The project coordinator was the Kaunas Chamber of Commerce, Industry, and Crafts from Lithuania, with other partners from Belgium, Greece, Croatia, Italy, Germany, and Slovenia, including regulatory bodies in the field of vocational education, employer representatives, consulting and educational institutions, and institutions in the field of higher education. In addition to the Agency, the national partner in the project was the Croatian Chamber of Trades and Crafts.

The multilingual platform Bequal.app can be found at: https://www.bequalapp.eu.