Member states aiming to make the grade on educational convergence

Date: 25/10/01

By Simon Coss

AS ANY EU studies graduate will tell you, getting your degree is one thing; making sure it is recognised when you go to work in another Union country is often quite a different story.

The problem of mutual recognition of qualifications is still one of the biggest problems holding up the development of the EU's internal market.More than 50 years after the signing of the Treaty of Rome, which laid the foundations for today's EU, Union graduates can still find their hard-earned degrees are almost worthless when they try to work or study in a member state other than their own.

At the heart of this problem is the fact that the EU has no standardised education system. The Union's 15 member states have all developed their own national systems of schools, colleges and universities independently of each other. This means that it is often very difficult to make useful comparisons between qualifications earned in different EU member states.

For example, how does a degree in a given subject earned at the end of two-years of studies compare with one that was based on a four-year course?

One suggested solution to the problem would be to create an EU-wide curriculum that sets out clearly how a student's academic career should progress from pre-school to university. But, in reality, no one seriously believes that such an approach would be either possible or even desirable.

Differing national education systems reflect part of the cultural diversity of the Union's different member states, a fact that many experts argue actually has a large number of advantages. But the problem of mutual recognition nevertheless remains and, in a bid to try to rectify the problem, the EU's 15 education ministers signed what was known as the Bologna Declaration in 1999.

Bologna was essentially a pledge by EU governments not to harmonise teaching methods across Europe but to work towards what they called greater "convergence" between national education systems. Under the agreement, the EU's 15 member states - along with a number of the central and eastern European countries currently lining up to join the Union - have pledged to create a 'European space for higher education' by 2010 at the latest.

By this deadline the EU should have in place a "common framework for readable and comparable degrees", the declaration says. Since 1999 progress towards the Bologna goals has been significant but most experts agree there is still a great deal of work to be done.

In an extensive follow-up report to the Bologna declaration, which was published earlier this year, leading academic experts Guy Haug and Christian Tauch welcomed the fact that the question of convergence was now "on all agendas". But they added that students still faced too many problems when trying to work outside their own member states. "Students in Europe have a need and a right to study for degrees that can effectively be used in Europe, not just in the country or region where they were earned," the two said.

The issue of mutual recognition of qualifications is still one of the biggest problems holding up the development of the EU's internal market. Article forms part of a supplement on European studies.