VET for youth - Teachers and trainers

In our team, composed of Irene Psifidou, team facilitator, Michail Papazoglou and Stefanie Ledermaier, experts, and Maria Toskidou, trainee, we work on inclusive excellence for young people. We aim to promote initial vocational education and training (IVET) systems and programmes that not only meet labour market needs enabling young people’s employability, but also ensure equal access to lifelong learning opportunities for all learners to build or change their life paths towards a better future.

Supporting inclusion, we conduct research to tackle early leaving from VET. We develop innovative toolkits for policy makers and practitioners to support learners at risk of dropping out, early leavers from education and training and young people not in employment, education or training (NEETs).

Promoting excellence, we explore the provision of digital skills in IVET. Using innovative approaches, including Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, we map and analyse digital skills in IVET curricula. Our aim is to match the education and training provision with the labour market demand and explore potential skill mismatches.

Teachers and trainers are the key to achieving inclusive excellence in VET. By supporting their continuing professional development (CPD), especially in the context of rapidly changing labour markets and increasing demands of inclusive, digital and green societies, we ensure they are equipped to meet the evolving needs of all learners while maintaining high standards of education. Aiming to support the design of EU and national policies that can ensure high-quality and accessible CPD for VET teachers, we provide new evidence about VET teachers and trainers’ professional development, and create tools to support them. Our novel “European Vocational Teacher Survey (EVTS)” to be launched in October 2025, will provide new robust data on the opportunities, challenges and effectiveness of teachers’ professional development in Europe.