Get information on Youthpass!
You might already know from the welcome page that Youthpass is a Certificate. On this page you can find more information about issues that are important to get more familiar with Youthpass and its role in the recognition of non-formal education. Furthermore, you will find here more information about issues which are important to understand the Youthpass process and its principles.
Youthpass in Youth Initiatives
You might ask yourself what you get from Youthpass. We can answer your question right away - before providing you with more background information. Maybe some of these reasons motivate you to read on:
- Youthpass provides better quality of learning – you plan it, reflect upon it and collect outcomes!
- You have the right to receive a Youthpass Certificate with information about your project and your learning outcomes.
- Youthpass is the opportunity to certify your participation in an activity funded by the Youth in Action programme.
- During the Youthpass process you as a learner decide what you want to learn, how, with whom and the way you want to formulate it in your document. The whole process, the same as the Youth Initiative project itself, depends on your ideas, motivation and creativity
Read even more arguments here.
Non-formal learning/education
You have been to school, which offers so called formal education. The Youth in Action programme is a programme for non-formal education and informal learning and Youthpass is it’s Certificate to make visible what you have learned in your project. Of course this learning is different to what you experienced in school or in university – because it is up to you!
"The Youth in Action programme is the European programme dealing with non formal education" – but what does this mean?
The definition of non-formal education contains interesting aspects of activities like your project:
- Participation in all activities is voluntary.
- The main focus is set on (young) people as learners.
- Activities and methods are always designed for a particular target group.
- Learning in non formal setting is planned, structured and evaluated.
- It’s intentional and monitored.
- Experiencing, often called as ‘learning by doing’, is the main working method.
By the way: we use the term ‘non-formal learning’ when we are looking at what happens on the level of the individual, which means you and me. And we use this term, when we are looking at the youth work field as a system or a context which includes theories and educational approaches.
If you want to read more about how we – the people developing Youthpass – use the definition and how we define as well formal education and informal learning, please click here.
Recognition of non-formal learning
The background of the Youthpass development is the aim to make the activities people in the youth work field much more known – here initiatives of young people are the important element. Making it more known means as well to take care for making it valuable for you. This is called “recognition”. We identify this recognition on different levels:
- On the individual level Read more here
- On the common/social level Read more here
- On the political level Read more here
Key competences
We invited you to look on your Youth Initiative as an activity in context of non formal education. As such it contains a lot of learning and development opportunities for you. It provides benefits not only for your local community but also for your Youth Initiative and to you personally. A lot of things which you will learn are going to be very useful in your future private and professional life. We invited you to start to reflect upon learning, to name it and to prove it finally by some official document.
For example dealing with the management of the Youth Initiative or an event organisation as a special project – you will gain a lot out of it, like
- planning skills,
- time management,
- team communication and coordination
- conflict management etc.
The learning outcomes will have a strong impact on your personal and professional competences. Therefore, they should be recognised as such by your personal and professional environment according to the principle – ‘it’s not important where you learnt it, it’s important what you can do’!
But therefore you need a transfer instrument and here we choose the Key competences for Lifelong Learning as the bridge to all other ways of learning and education. But they are as well a great source for each citizen in Europe to reflect on the question “what do I want and need to develop in my life?”
The Key Competences are:
1) Communication in the mother tongue
2) Communication in foreign languages
3) Mathematical competence and basic competences in science and technology
6) Social and civic competences
7) Sense of initiative and entrepreneurship and
8) Cultural awareness and expression
Of course we needed to transfer these general competences to the context of Youthpass and Youth Initiatives. So please find behind each Key competence
- the transfer to Youth Initiatives
- questions for you to think about and of course to start
- the original explanation of the Key competences (as in the political document)
Read more about the political background of the Key competences here.
Back to page: Experience and learn
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