Recognition back on top of the mobility agenda in the EU

The 1997 Lisbon Recognition Convention defines recognition as “a formal acknowledgement by a competent authority of the value of a foreign education qualification”. In plain English, recognition is the process whereby an education taken in one country is given value in another country, usually by granting access to further studies or work.

Without recognition, academic and professional mobility becomes a long and often impossible journey.

On 25 May, education ministers from the 48 countries that make up the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) renewed their commitment to the continuing harmonisation of European higher education by signing the Paris communiqué.

Although the EHEA has paved the way for large-scale student mobility in Europe, the recent Bologna Process Implementation Report clearly shows that the implementation of reforms has been uneven.

The EHEA’s answer is to focus more strongly on three ‘key Bologna commitments’ that are seen as crucial to continued cooperation:

• • A three-cycle degree system (bachelor-masters-PhD) scaled by the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System,
  
  
• • External quality assurance in compliance with the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area, and
  
  
• • Compliance with the Lisbon Recognition Convention.

The Lisbon Recognition Convention states that countries must recognise foreign qualifications and periods of study abroad as equal to national qualifications, unless substantial differences can be proved. This is a pivotal prerequisite for large-scale academic mobility.

However, in order to ensure full implementation across the EHEA, a system of structured peer-based support will be set up to strengthen cross border recognition procedures in countries that are lagging behind.

In many ways, the Paris communiqué signals a partial retreat from the ambitions of the previous ministerial meetings in 2012 and 2015 that higher education qualifications should be automatically recognised across the EHEA by 2020.

For automatic recognition to work, the degree systems in higher education must be comparable across the EHEA and all the countries must have transparent quality assurance processes to help outsiders trust their qualifications. If these basics are not in place, automatic recognition becomes difficult to put into practice.

Automatic recognition

Partly because of impatience that the EHEA is developing too slowly, the European Commission proposed its own Council Recommendation on the Automatic Mutual Recognition of Diplomas and Learning Periods Abroad just two days before the Paris ministerial meeting. This brings automatic recognition back to the top of the agenda by creating a separate process in the European Union that can “act as an inspiration for progress” in the EHEA.

Pointing to the many examples of “complicated, expensive, time-consuming recognition procedures” preventing the free movement of learners, the EU aims to develop a process to introduce mutual automatic recognition in higher education and upper secondary schools by 2025.

This means that holders of qualifications will not have to go through a separate recognition procedure to access studies in another European Union country and that learning periods spent in another country will be automatically recognised as part of the learner’s education without loss of time.

With a lot going on in Europe, there are other important developments on the global stage as well. The Asia-Pacific recognition convention which came into force in February will regulate the right to recognition across the Asia-Pacific region, following similar principles as the Lisbon Recognition Convention.

Towards global recognition

In November last year, UNESCO adopted the timeline for the first recognition agreement with a global scope, with the aim of formally adopting a new convention in 2019. A global convention will give the 2.5 million students who study outside their home region each year a legal right to have their qualifications assessed for admission to further study or employment across the world.

Against the current backdrop of rapid technological development, it is vitally important that political and organisational processes keep pace. The national recognition bodies that make up the ENIC-NARIC network will play an important role in the follow-through.

The annual meeting of the network in June had a strong focus on the responsibility of the network to implement automatic recognition. We are glad to see that recognition is back at the top of the agenda as a key function for enabling mobility. We will do our job to make it work.

Stig Arne Skjerven is director of foreign education at the Norwegian Agency for Quality Assurance in Education or NOKUT (Norwegian ENIC-NARIC) and president of the ENIC Network – European Network of Information Centres. He was a member of UNESCO’s drafting committee of the Global Convention on the Recognition of Higher Education Qualifications. Einar Meier is senior adviser, strategy, at NOKUT (Norwegian ENIC-NARIC).