Systemic reform of vocational education, social advancement education and professional training

This Thursday, 26 September, the Walloon Government and the Government of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation met jointly, at the initiative of Minister-Presidents Degryse and Dolimont and Ministers Glatigny and Jeholet, to address the systemic reform of vocational education, social advancement education and professional training.

Wallonia and the Wallonia-Brussels Federation face three major challenges linked to vocational education, social advancement education and professional training.

• Employment: too low a rate of - and quality of - job integration, both after professional training and after vocational education;


• Qualification level: a significant proportion of the population still lacks a professional qualification sufficiently aligned with labour market needs;


• Skills shortage: a growing number of employers and sectors report facing recruitment difficulties, particularly for technical positions.

Faced with these challenges, as early as 2022, at the initiative of Pierre-Yves Jeholet, then Minister-President of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, the Walloon Government, the Government of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, the Government of the Brussels-Capital Region and the College of the French Community Commission (Cocof) decided to launch large-scale work to initiate a systemic reform of vocational education, social advancement education and professional training.

A mission was subsequently entrusted to the non-profit organisation Agir Pour l'Enseignement (APE).

This mission was carried out in two stages:

• Based on broad mobilisation and consultation with stakeholders through numerous interviews, discussion groups, reports, etc., a cross-cutting assessment of vocational education and professional training (particularly work-study programmes) was carried out, establishing a shared factual understanding of the system's strengths and areas for improvement, which was widely disseminated among stakeholders;


• Based on proposals from the stakeholders themselves, reform scenarios were identified for a systemic improvement of vocational education, social advancement education and professional training, particularly work-study programmes, which were handed to the negotiators for the drafting of the DPC and DPR.

Building on this work, the Minister-President of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, Elisabeth Degryse, the Minister of Education, Valérie Glatigny, and the Minister of Economy, Employment and Training, Pierre-Yves Jeholet, decided to begin implementing this systemic reform, structured around 13 areas of work, namely: .

1. The centralisation of coordination within a single French-speaking overarching body;


2. Ensuring training programmes are kept up to date with the evolution of professions;


3. Strengthened collaboration with the world of work and job placement support;


4. Standardised mechanisms for certifying and recognising learning outcomes;


5. Tackling early school leaving through better coordination between education and alternative regional training offers;


6. Shared and/or centralised use of data on learners' pathways;


7. Providing quality infrastructure and equipment through closer cooperation between operators from different institutions;


8. Increasing work-study education among young people;


9. Increasing work-study training among adults;


10. Better organisation of professional training through a new coaching-oriented support approach, a training register, etc.;


11. Better support for people far removed from the labour market (NEETs);


12. Reforming the funding of training providers and introducing more success criteria;


13. Reorganising the entire ecosystem by clarifying the scope of action of the various operators.

On this basis, the Governments have already agreed on the implementation method and on the first priorities for the current legislature. In this context, the Walloon Government and the Government of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation have mandated OFFA - the inter-French-speaking overarching body (a single body) - to develop a roadmap enabling both Governments to implement the first reforms swiftly.

Both Governments wish to work together with the Governments of the Brussels-Capital Region and the COCOF as soon as they are formed, and the negotiators will already be informed from now on and, as far as possible, involved in the work that is about to begin.