At the May meeting of the Education, Youth, Culture and Sport Council, EU ministers approved two documents aiming to further advance the European Education Area (EEA) and to make automatic mutual recognition in education and training a reality.

The Council’s resolution on the European Education Area: Looking to 2025 and beyond responds to the progress report published by the European Commission in November 2022 (for more details, see ACA Newsletter – Education Europe, November 2022). The ministers agreed that the midterm review process and the full report on the EEA to be published by the European Commission in 2025 should focus on five strategic priorities, including a more in-depth analysis of several specific areas.

One such area is related to removing the remaining obstacles to learning and teaching mobility while encouraging inclusive, sustainable and balanced mobility in the EU, including by achieving automatic mutual recognition in education and training. Earlier this month, ACA submitted its policy input to the European Commission’s call for evidence for the revised European learning mobility framework (for more details, see ACA Newsletter  - Education Europe, February and May 2023).

The Council also approved conclusions on further steps to make automatic mutual recognition in education and training a reality. The conclusions evaluate the findings of the Commission’s report and propose a number of steps to help make automatic mutual recognition in education and training a reality based on mutual trust and transparency. Some of these steps include:

• Consolidating and reinforcing related efforts in line with the 2018 Council Recommendation.
• Differentiating between automatic recognition for eligibility for access to higher at the same level in another member state and the right of a higher education institution to set specific admission criteria for specific programmes.
• Supporting higher education institutions in applying automatic mutual recognition, including by providing clear guidance and relevant training.
• Ensuring that external quality assurance in higher education is carried out by independent quality assurance agencies registered with EQAR and in line with the European Standards and Guidelines (ESG).
• Fostering synergies within the EHEA and the EEA, while taking full advantage of the Bologna Process and EU tools (ECTS, ESG, DEQAR, EQF, Q-Entry database, European Digital Credentials for Learning, European Learning Model, Europass, Diploma Supplement, Erasmus Charter for Higher Education), Europass Mobility Supplement, Europass Certificate Supplement, European Student Card Initiative, etc.).
• Exchanging best practices and supporting peer learning to bolster automatic mutual recognition in higher education, including through the European Universities alliances.
• Supporting the promotion and dissemination of relevant information about automatic mutual recognition procedures to all relevant actors and stakeholders.
• Further supporting the NARICs and exploring appropriate ways to better monitor and evaluate recognition systems.

ACA members continuously promote the exchange of good practice and peer learning in the field. Earlier this spring, the Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills (HK-dir) and the Swedish Council for Higher Education (UHR) contributed to a joint Swedish-Norwegian seminar on automatic mutual recognition in higher education, in Brussels, featuring Nordic processes and long-standing cooperation in this field (for more details, see ACA Newsletter – Education Europe, April 2023).