VIC: Validating Integration Competences of refugees

 

Vic will be implemented by a consortium of six partners from Europe’s two main refugee entry countries (Italy, Greece), from two main refugees host countries (Germany, Austria) and from a country with huge, decade-long experience in integrating non- European immigrants (France).

1. Deutscher Volkshochschul-Verband (DVV) and DVV International (DE)
2. BUPNET GmbH/ Education and Training Network Ltd. (DE)
3. ENAIP NET (IT)
4. die Berater (AT)
5. EUROCIRCLE (FR)
6. ARISTOTELIO PANEPISTIMIO THESSALONIKIS (GR)

After the arrival of hundreds of thousands refugees in the past two years, Europe is now faced with the task to integrate those refugee immigrants with a legal title to stay.

In main entry countries (Greece, Italy) and major host countries (Germany, Austria, France) there are a number of different educational offers in place which aim at easing immigrants’ pathways to integration into the labour market and society in large: vocational qualification assessment programmes, language courses, European value and integration courses, general labour market qualification, orientation and insertion programmes, informal counselling and support centres, refugee volunteering schemes. They all aim at increasing the competence of refugee immigrants to integrate into the European host societies. But there is no common, precise and operationalized definition of this “integration competence”. Not are the effectiveness of the integration programmes measured or their impact on the individual integration competence assessed.

This is the starting point of VIC, which aims to:

• Collect the varying objectives of integration programmes across Europe and distil from them an operational working definition of “integration competence”
• Provide adult educators working with refugee immigrants with tools to promote, plan, actively develop and validate integration competences among the target group
• Implement these tools in various different types of educational programmes as listed above
• Carefully evaluate their feasibility, adequacy and impact

Target groups:

• Adult education professionals – trainers, programme developers, counsellors, institution managers – working with refugee immigrants
• Professionals in NGOs and public bodies doing educational work with refugee immigrants
• Refugee immigrants as final beneficiaries whose integration competence is to be enhanced by the VIC approach.

The core outputs to be produced by the VIC project are:

• A research report, collecting and comparing the objectives, structure and content of existing integration measures for refugees in the participating countries and best practice in competence validation
• A competence framework, defining “integration competence and tailoring the LEVEL5 system to the promotion and validation of that competence
• A blended learning course for adult educators on the VIC approach
• A feasibility and impact report, highlighting the experiences gained in implementing VIC in different integration measures

 

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